War in the Air True Accounts of the 20th Century's Most Dramatic Air Battles-By the Men Who Fought Them

From The Last Ace by Stephen CoontsA fighter pilot who scores five victories has been regarded as an ace since World War I. As this is written -- in the summer of 1995, eighty years after the first ace, Roland Garros, scored his fifth victory -- one can legitimately ask if the era of the aces is over. Will the ace fighter pilot prove to be a phenomenon of the twentieth century, as unique to his time and place as the Japanese samurai or the English longbowman?The collapse of communism ended the threat of an all-out conventional or nuclear conflict between the two largest superpowers -- the Soviet Union and the United States -- and their allies. Simultaneously, extraordinary advances in computers, lasers, composite construction, metallurgy, miniaturization, and a host of other fields obsolesced entire weapons systems at an ever-accelerating pace and drove the cost of new, state-of-the-art systems into the realm of pure fantasy.In his 1983 book, Augustine's Laws, Norman Augustine pointed out that in every decade since the Wright brothers, the cost of warplanes has quadrupled. He noted that if that trend continues, by the year 2050 the purchase price of one fighter will consume the entire American defense budget. The trend appears to be continuing: ten years after Augustine's observation the U.S. government's first buy of B-2 bombers was a mere twenty airplanes...for $2.2 billion each!Manned strategic bombers are today artifacts of a bygone age. It is beyond dispute that airplanes costing $2.2 billion each are purchased for political reasons, not military ones. They are too expensive to be flown for training purposes, too expensive to bear the political risks of a training accident, too expensive to be exposed to hostile fire, and too few to be a military factor in future conflicts.As this is written, governments throughout the world are drastically reducing the sizes of their air forces. This course of events is perhaps inevitable, but it has profound implications for future armed conflicts. The 1991 Gulf War proved that a second- or third-rate power cannot hope to contest air superiority today or in the foreseeable future with a superpower, which by definition is a nation that can field well-trained, modern armed forces equipped with state-of-the-art weapons.One suspects that in future conventional wars the inferior air force will be destroyed on the ground or flee to a neutral country. If a nation cannot contest air superiority, one wonders exactly how it could sustain a conventional army on a future battlefield. The answer may well be that it cannot, and if so, conventional wars as we knew them in the twentieth century will not occur again.In any event, one can confidently predict that fighter pilots in the twenty-first century will come in two varieties -- they will either be highly trained specialists flying state-of-the-art superplanes with sophisticated, computerized weapons systems, or they will be undertrained cannon fodder flying obsolete equipment cast off by a superpower or some cheap volksplane with limited capabilities. Whichever, we can predict that since air forces will continue to shrink, there won't be many fighters or fighter pilots. Future conventional wars will be almighty short, with durations measured in hours, not years, and there will be drastically fewer targets aloft for winged warriors to shoot at. The chances of any individual pilot achieving five kills under such circumstances are poor indeed.The Israeli Air Force, which has fought more conflicts in the jet age than any other power, is notoriously closemouthed about the records of its active-duty pilots. Still, Israel is known to have at least two high-scoring aces on active service as this is written; one with seventeen kills, one fifteen.The Vietnam War may prove to be the last war on this planet in which the aerial conflict lastCoonts, Stephen is the author of 'War in the Air True Accounts of the 20th Century's Most Dramatic Air Battles-By the Men Who Fought Them', published 2003 under ISBN 9780743464529 and ISBN 0743464524.