This work closes a gap in the historical research with a comprehensive and extremely detailed look at NATO consolidation during the 1950s. Beneath the surface of that project, the reader can find some fascinating and challenging presentations of a very different world which tempts one to wrestle with an of a number of could-have-beens.
Airpower Beyond the Last Red Button
The alternative to a good theory of causality is not the lack of a theory of causality, but a poor or ill-considered theory of causality. Unfortunately, such a theory of causality has made it remarkably difficult for airmen to explain and advance what air, space, and cyberspace do for the joint community and national objectives. We’ve spent the last decade disrupting threat networks from the air, but without the language of causality, we’ve analytically relegated these actions to the realm of support instead of claiming the mantle of airpower. A water-thin theory of causality leaves us all scrambling for the prize real estate on the “tip of the spear,” while a better theories of causality allows us to appreciate how the diversity of airmen’s contributions actually complement each other.
Convergence and Governance
Public-private partnerships are crucial for success in a suppression campaign. Civil society actors can make sense of low-level contextualized problems better than the state, but the state retains more power; in partnership both gain the resource advantages of the state and the contextualization advantages of the low level actor. This partnership is contingent upon public support and upon the efficiency of the suppression regime to absorb that support.
The Three Streams of Leadership
In short: three different streams of leadership — structural, relational, and imaginative — each produce distinctive cultural flavors, and a healthy unit exhibits a mix of all of them. A good leader will use their strengths in one stream to cover down on their weaknesses in the others, in the company of comrades, and in service to the mission and their people. A toxic leader corrupts these streams in pursuit of their own agenda, and each of the three has distinctive flavors of corruption. Therefore, we have three streams and two valences — selfless and selfish.