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Airpower in the War against ISIS chronicles the planning and conduct of Operation Inherent Resolve by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) from August 2014 to mid-2018, with a principal focus on the contributions of U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT).

In response to a surprise incursion by Hezbollah combatants into northern Israel and their abduction of two Israeli soldiers, Israel launched a campaign that included the most complex air offensive to have taken place in the history of the Israeli Air Force (IAF). Many believe that the inconclusive results of this war represent a "failure of air power." The author demonstrates that this conclusion is an oversimplification of a more complex reality. He assesses the main details associated with the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF's) campaign against Hezbollah to correct the record regarding what Israeli air power did and did not accomplish (and promise to accomplish) in the course of contributing to that campaign. He considers IAF operations in the larger context of the numerous premises, constraints, and ultimate errors in both military and civilian leadership strategy choice that drove the Israeli government's decisionmaking throughout the counteroffensive. He also examines the IDF's more successful operation against the terrorist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009, to provide points of comparison and contrast in the IDF's conduct of the latter campaign based on lessons learned and assimilated from its earlier combat experience in Lebanon.--Publisher description

This report documents the exceptional cross-service harmony that the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy have steadily developed in their conduct of integrated strike operations since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. That close harmony contrasts sharply with the situation that prevailed throughout most of the Cold War, when the two services maintained separate and unique operating mindsets and lacked any significant interoperability features. The most influential factor accounting for this gradual trend toward integration was the nation's ten-year experience with Operations Northern and Southern W

For more than two decades, the pursuit of "lessons learned" from major combat encounters has been an area of sustained activity within the defense establishments of the United States and its principal allies around the world. Yet as often as not, such efforts have, at best, yielded lessons merely indicated and identified, since they cannot be said to have been truly learned until their prescriptions have been accepted and assimilated into an armed service's doctrine, force development, and operating procedures. In one notable instance in late December 2008 and early January 2009, however, an exemplar of lessons learned and incorporated was offered by the twenty-three-day campaign conducted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against the radical Islamist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That performance came on the heels of the IDF's less impressive showing more than two years before against the Iranian-sponsored terrorist movement Hezbollah during Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon. By any measure, Israel's comparative success in Gaza was a direct result of teachings gained and duly incorporated into the IDF's combat repertoire by Israeli civilian and military leaders in response to their earlier misadventure in Lebanon.