Right after the Air Force decided to “accept risk” by reducing personnel and aircraft to pay for long-overdue modernization, the world went sour. Russian invasions, Chinese island-building, and an urgent air war in the Middle East, on top of the existing action in Afghanistan, created a US Air Force that quickly became too spread out and too burned out to cover all its missions effectively. In an exclusive exit interview with Air Force Magazine, former Air Combat Command chief Gen. Hawk Carlisle explains how USAF got into its present predicaments, and offers his prescriptions for securing air dominance again.
Read the full story by John A. Tirpak, Combat Forces in Peril, which will appear in the July issue of Air Force Magazine.