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Washington Post’s Combat Generation

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02.28.2010 at 09:49am

Drone Operators Climb on Winds of Change in the Air Force – Greg Jaffe, Washington Post.

The question, scrawled on a Pentagon whiteboard last fall, captured the strange and difficult moment facing the Air Force. “Why does the country need an independent Air Force?” the senior civilian assistant to Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the service’s chief of staff, had written. For the first time in the 62-year history of the Air Force, the answer isn’t entirely clear.

The Air Force’s identity crisis is one of many ways that a decade of intense and unrelenting combat is reshaping the U.S. military and redefining the American way of war. The battle against insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq has created an insatiable demand for the once-lowly drone, elevating the importance of the officers who fly them. These new earthbound aviators are redefining what it means to be a modern air warrior and forcing an emotional debate within the Air Force over the very meaning of valor in combat…

Much more at The Washington Post.

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