Beginning in the late 1920s, MGM usurped Paramount’s position as the most profitable and prestigious studio, largely as a result of the oversight of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. Thalberg helped develop the corporate personality of MGM – the MGM “Idea” – comprising a glamorous and slick house style, the prioritization of stars, and a system of scriptwriting that involved assigning multiple writers to work on the same project yet often unbeknownst to each other. It is in response to this last phenomenon that authors of very disparate sensibilities – F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon [1941]), Aldous Huxley (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939]), and William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) – crafted narratives in a form I call “MGM Modernism”: an aestheticized and self-conscious naturalism developed in part from contact with and subordination to a corporate author.

An epilogue explores several topics regarding the future of modern air warfare. The first section offers recommendations for how the United States can better prepare for modern air warfare. The second considers air power in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. The third anticipates the role of air power in extending deterrence to allies. The fourth demonstrates how TAP theory can assess the potential effectiveness of air power by analyzing the Russian Air Force in the Battle of Kyiv. The final section considers additional challenges facing the United States during an emerging era of great power competition.

Chapter 2 confronts the gender, race, and class composition of state violence in the American Revolution. General Washington attempted to exclude women and non-White men from the military - moves that foreshadowed similar exclusions from military work and political participation in the United States. At the same time, the work, at times violent work, of marginalized individuals in and around American military establishments was essential. The army also needed money - and the interdependence of state finance, state violence, and military discipline was key. Failed finances led to deplorable army condition. Thirty percent of Continental Army soldiers rebelled in January 1781. Washington was infuriated by the protest, but he was even more upset when political leaders negotiated with the men. Disobedient soldiers, he believed, responded best to physical chastisement. Much like recent work that highlights how American nationalism was forged in violent acts against Loyalists, so too this chapter shows how it was forged in military discipline: violent acts against Continental Army soldiers.

The centrality of slavery in the North and South, Black resistance, and the greatest shift in the domestic use and formation of federal force form the foundation of Chapter 7. Here, the likes of Robert Smalls, an enslaved boat pilot in South Carolina, the hundreds of thousands of Civil War slave fugitives, Union and Confederate military leaders, President Abraham Lincoln, President Jefferson Davis, and others address the consequences of one question: should the United States deploy its forces, its violence, in support of slaveholders or freed slaves?

The introduction outlines the systemic violence that supports liberal society in early America. Focused on the Boston Massacre, it uses the courtroom representations of John Adams in defense of British soldiers to understand how hostile racial difference organized society and how such differences opened the way for the empowerment of White individuals. Here Whiteness and racial hierarchy become key markers in the formation of how violence is deployed in America.

Chapter 1 introduces tactical air power (TAP) theory to explain why, how and when modern air power works. After World War II, two technologies changed the character of air warfare. In the Cold War the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons and the exorbitant costs anticipated from nuclear war deterred the United States and the Soviet Union. The second technology was the proliferation of radar- and infra-guided air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, which increased the lethality of the air domain and with it the United States shifted from the bomber to tactical aircraft (tacair) as its primary combat platform. This book examines modern US air power in the Vietnam War. In Vietnam and the modern air wars that followed, US air power has been more effective in directly attacking enemy fielded forces, rather than by independent strategic bombing and air interdiction. Joint air–ground operations place the enemy on the horns of a dilemma: to mass and maneuver only to be susceptible to air attack or disperse and hide and be vulnerable to an opposed army’s attack. With the right combination of air superiority, air-to-ground capability, and a capable ground force, under the right environmental conditions, air power can disrupt an enemy’s strategy.

Chapter 7 examines the Easter Offensive and the Linebacker I & II air campaigns. When the NVA launched the offensive, the question remained whether the ARVN could incorporate air–ground coordination lessons from Lam Son 719. The ARVN held on two of three fronts but faltered along the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Effective US air power and resolute ARVN forces, coordinated by US military advisors and air liaison officers, held off further NVA advances as the ARVN regrouped to launch a counteroffensive to retake Quang Tri. In May, the United States launched Linebacker I to interdict enemy lines of communication, which failed to weaken the NVA as it fought through the summer. Instead, in September the ARVN and US air forces combined arms offensive retook Quang Tri. The decisive defeat of the NVA convinced Hanoi to accept a peace treaty. However, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Thieu, excluded from the secret talks, balked at any deal that allowed NVA troops to remain in the country. After the November 1972 election, President Nixon ordered Linebacker II, the bombing of Hanoi, which compelled the North Vietnamese to return to Paris, but only to sign an agreement they had accepted in October following their defeat in the Easter Offensive.

Chapter 2 provides a historical account of the development of tactical air power during the interwar period and World War II in Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. Air and ground force coordination has largely been ignored in peacetime, and only in combat has a sense of urgency arisen for developing and refining joint doctrine. Even then, the focus has been on defining air and ground command relationships and improving the coordination between an air force’s tactical air control systems (TACS) and the army’s air–ground systems (AAGS). These doctrinal efforts increased the efficiency of allocating and controlling air power to support ground operations. However, largely left unspoken and unwritten has been an understanding of why, how, and when tactical air power works. TAP theory answers these questions by asserting that air power’s asymmetric advantage is its ability to locate and attack massed and maneuvering armies. With air superiority secured, lethal air-to-ground forces threaten armies, causing them to disperse and hide. The enemy’s reaction, in turn, provides friendly ground forces an advantage in conducting both offensive and defensive operations. Unfortunately, a theory explaining the primary impact of air power in modern warfare has been absent until now.

Chapter 8 investigates several aspects of low-road market capitalism across regions of the United States. It tackles Black soldier protest and military discipline, the post-Civil War sale of guns and munitions, and the development of railroads as a physical and economic vehicle for the dispersal of violence in the United States. Labor strikes, the Panic of 1873, and the centrality of the federal governmment to the interests of industrial capitalism are prominent features of this chapter.

Chapter 10 engages the global and historical attributes of lynching and situates the practice within a North American environment of anti-Black terror. This chapter links national lawmakers who advocated for White supremacy to the increase and severity of violence against Black individuals (and others), surveying how violence and the construction of race served to create and uphold relationships of power and economy in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. It centers on Congressional discussions in the Reconstruction era and the brutal death of Lee Walker, a Black man, at the hands of a White mob in 1893. The creation of a new racial order, one that harkened to earlier forms of racial intimidation, was intricately connected to work. Violence ensured that the linkages between low-status labor, poverty, and skin color remained unbroken.