Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 139

BOOK REVIEWS

a military revolution by creating new exercises with
extraordinary realism outside combat. Laslie carefully
builds the case that Red Flag and other major training
events increasingly gave TAC fighter units unique advantages over their adversaries. He cautions that today
even our allies are no longer able to keep pace with
these American airpower capabilities. Joint officers
that want to understand the true strength of our air
operations should study The Air Force Way of War.
Laslie is candid about the shortcomings of the Air
Force during the Vietnam War, such as “poor organization, weak command and control, and lack of unity of
command.” Soviet-era anti-aircraft technology was very
capable of downing tactical U.S. aircraft in alarming
numbers. Soviet aircraft with higher maneuverability
were many ways technologically equal with U.S. peers.
Tactical pilots were stretched with many different missions and a limited proficiency in any of them, especially
in basic fighter maneuvering concepts. This resulted in
part because the needs of the bombers of the Strategic
Air Command (SAC) in the 1950s and 1960s had been
given a higher priority than TAC.
After Vietnam, Richard “Moody” Suter, a major on
the Air Staff, developed a new concept of progressively
more difficult training against Soviet-style aggressors in
a mature environment. New command structures were
stressed with a single air component command controlling the fight. New aircraft, such as the F-16, A-10,
and the low observable F-117, were given realistic
scenarios to increase their survival during the first ten
missions. In addition, a young John Jumper from the
Fighter Weapons School advocated new tactics, training, and evaluation. Pilots practiced the destruction of
integrated air defense systems followed by deep attack.
The skills thus developed would be validated against
the Libyans during the benchmark 1986 El Dorado
Canyon Operation.
Other airpower theorists of this era, such as John
Boyd and John Warden, provided important contributions as air campaigns were developed. Laslie makes
the case that by the 1990s, the terms “tactical” and
“strategic” were no longer useful in describing airpower.
Warden and the Checkmate cell’s “In stant Thunder”
brought tactical aviation to the forefront against Iraq
in a strategic role. Therefore, the targeting emphasis
shifted away from fielded forces since the ground forces
were not considered the critical center of gravity. The
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016

success of these modern master air attack plans ultimately exposed SAC as having “the wrong equipment,
the wrong mentality, and the wrong grasp of aerial
warfare.” TAC and SAC subsequently consolidated into
a more sensible Air Combat Command. Can the Air
Force now adjust and develop better strategies to fully
use the capabilities of remotely piloted aircraft?

James Cricks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

ISLAM AND NAZI GERMANY’S WAR
David Motadel, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014, 512 pages

I

slam and Nazi Germany’s War is a well-written
survey of Nazi attempts to compensate for military
manpower shortages in World War II by seeking to
mobilize support among Muslims from North Africa
to Eurasia. In bringing order to this complex enterprise,
the author wrestles
effectively with some
of the exquisite paradoxes of Nazi thinking.
After all, how was it
that the leaders of a
regime whose founding doctrine stressed
extreme racial and
cultural intolerance
could seek support
from populations that
did not neatly fit Aryan
stereotypes? Even
though the Nazis focused their recruitment on lighter skinned populations
of the former Ottoman Empire, the North Caucasus,
and fringes of Central Asia, the convoluted logic of the
quest was inescapable.
Author David Motadel’s nuanced analysis reveals
the efforts of Nazi policymakers to market their cause
to populations with which they had little historical
connection. Of course, some Nazi ideologists had
noted in passing before the war that the Islamic world
shared a list of enemies—from Jews to British imperialists to Slavs—with the Third Reich. With this in
mind, strategic communications in the Arab world
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