men and women. The war helped cause a decade of inflation and alienated a generation. The Air Force had invested over 1.2 million fixed wing sorties, 6.2 million tons of explosives, 2,118 dead, 599 missing in action, and 2,257 aircraft (at a cost of $3.1 billion).
The Air Force learned the dangers of political and military micromanagement, of gradualism, and of being used to influence the conduct of America's enemies instead of defeating them. Restrictive rules of engagement caused aircrews to die and left little room for initiative. "Route packages," artificial divisions of North Vietnam in which Air Force and Navy aircraft operated separately, guaranteed a dilution of effort. A generation of future air leaders came away convinced that "body counts," sortie rates, and tons of bombs dropped were all poor means for judging air power's effectiveness. They also relearned the importance of air superiority, but with a twist―air superiority now involved not only overcoming an enemy's air force; it involved also overcoming an enemy's air defenses on the surface. Air power had to be focused, united, and coordinated in what was termed "jointness" after the war.
Most of all, the Air Force learned the dangers of strict, uncompromising adherence to doctrine. In the years after Vietnam a new generation of air leaders realized that the Air Force had focused almost exclusively on the strategic bombing of industrial chokepoints without regard for the character of the society to be bombed or the type of war to be fought. Training, technology, and doctrine revolved around the destruction of a developed nation's industrial fabric or the nuclear destruction of a nation's cities. The Air Force had become imprisoned by a doctrine established in the years before and after World War II. Applied against undeveloped states such as North Korea and North Vietnam, each equipped and supplied by other countries, and unable to use nuclear weapons because of the Cold War and moral considerations, strategic bombardment and its related strategies did not prevail.
The Cold War Concluded
President Kennedy's flexible-response nuclear war-fighting doctrine of the early 1960s lacked the technology to match its vision of many options adapted to meet the varieties of Cold War crises. Advances in geodesy and cartography and the integrated circuit developed in the early 1960s for missile and satellite guidance systems, significantly improved missile accuracy. Decreased CEP (circular error probable―the radius of a circle in which at least 50 percent of the targeted missiles would hit)
