ABSTRACT
Actually, even though its potential has yet to be fully exploited, America’s airpower plays an increasingly important role in counterinsurgency operations. Although the much-vaunted Field Manual, Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24), confined airpower to a five-page annex,3 in practice the use of airpower has skyrocketed in both Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years. Anthony Cordesman, while acknowledging that press reports of both wars focus “on the ground dimension,” asserts that the conflicts are “air wars as well, and wars where airpower has also played a critical role in combat.”4
