Editor’s Note: As the Air and Space Power Team enters its next chapter, Dr. Kerry Chávez and Dr. Rick Newton will be stepping aside from their leadership roles and passing responsibilities to Dr. Michael Kreuzer. While this marks a leadership transition, the team’s commitment to advancing air and space perspectives in irregular warfare will continue unabated.
From Rick and Kerry: Three years ago, IWI’s leadership team took a chance on our unsolicited proposal to develop a Focus Area that would explore the air and space dimensions of irregular warfare. Designed to examine the changing character of conflict in the third dimension and how asymmetric advantages conferred by air and space power were diffusing to non-traditional groups like insurgents, cartels, and weaker nations, the project has explored the complexity and multi-domain consequences of modern warfare. It has pushed past outdated patterns and waning notions that irregular warfare is ensconced in the terrestrial domain.
Our mission statement has been our north star, “Explore the totality of air, aviation, and space opportunities for air-minded approaches to irregular, hybrid, and gray-zone threats to security and stability.” To organize the analytical efforts, we developed a collection of “Vectors” – lines of research that included the democratization of airpower, gray zone air and space power, and trust and capacity building, among others. There is still plenty to do, but after three years of articles, podcasts, presentations, and events the team is on a solid core vector to influence knowledge and policy into the future.
It has been our privilege to be part of this team. Here is a small cross-section of some of the efforts we are most proud of:
What has been most rewarding is seeing the maturation from a niche proposition into an established part of the broader irregular warfare discourse. Scholars, practitioners, military professionals, and emerging voices alike helped demonstrate that air and space power are increasingly central to understanding modern competition and conflict.
Now is the time to pass the guidon.
Change, even when it is good change for all the right reasons, can be difficult. But in this case it should be celebrated. Michael Kreuzer will join IWI as the new Air and Space Power Focus Area Director. He brings an outstanding leadership style and intellectual breadth that will take the team to new heights, bring new vectors for exploration, and offer new opportunities. We wish him spectacular success and we look forward to supporting as advisors, excited to see what stellar things will come next for IWI and its Air & Space Power team.
Main Image: A U.S. Air Force munitions specialist supervises a Nationalist Chinese technician mounting an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile on an F-86F jet during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, 1958. This marked history’s first combat use of guided air-to-air missiles, the culmination of a years-long U.S. Air Force and Navy training and advisory effort. (Courtesy of the National Archives).
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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