For decades nations have debated how to successfully employ air power. In 1943 the United States and Great Britain launched a massive strategic bombing campaign against Germany. The two sides agreed to a flawed plan due to the fundamental differences on bombing doctrine. As a result, the campaign was fraught with issues that remained largely unresolved in 1943. Without a clearly defined plan, the Allies were unable to determine which commands or targets received priority throughout the offensive. This ultimately led to a confused and unfocused campaign. High losses and inconclusive results derailed the American bombing effort. By November, the two sides agreed that the entire bombing offensive was either behind schedule or had failed entirely.

The conflict in the Far East between 1941 and 1945 is occasionally referred to as the “Forgotten War” in Britain and this description extends to the way the campaign’s air war has been analysed. However, the role of air power in Burma was vitally important to the campaign, in particular the attainment of air superiority in order to facilitate supply and close support operations. The foundation of these operations was dependent on the Allies achieving and maintaining air superiority and latterly air supremacy over the Japanese. This thesis will analyse how the Allies lost air superiority during the initial exchanges, and then how technical and material difficulties were overcome before air superiority was won in 1944 and air supremacy was gained in 1945. It will analyse the importance of the RAF’s tactics, early warning systems, equipment, training and counter-air offensive in the theatre between 1941 and 1945. Furthermore, the thesis will demonstrate how Japanese industry, their war in the Pacific, and their use of air power in Burma ultimately affected the air war’s eventual outcome. The study will examine current historiography to question and corroborate existing views, as well as to reveal new information not previously published.

This paper concerns the subject of air superiority; what it is, and most importantly which factors that contributes to the air superiority. A number of air power theorists and researchers have since the beginning of air warfare been pointing out the importance of air superiority and what this can lead to. It is often stated that air superiority sometimes is a must for success and once achieved victory is almost guaranteed. A number of underlying factors that can lead to air superiority has been listed earlier in previous studies and theoretical frameworks, but no systematic analyzes has ever been conducted before on how air superiority is achieved and to which extent these underlying factors lead to air superiority. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors who contributed to the achievement of air superiority in the cases of Operation Desert Storm and Operation Deliberate Force. The result shows that all of the pre-known factors appeared in both of the two cases to some extent, but it also showed other previously unknown factors which contributed to the air superiority campaign. Out of these the most important is targeting and to neutralize the enemy air defense. Further this studie shows the importance of supporting air roles like surveillance, electronic warfare and air refueling. However, none of this can be conducted without professional and skilled personnel.

John A. Warden III is one the most mentioned air power theoretic of his time.He has written a number of theories concerning air power and the best way to use this to win wars.The author of this paper gives a short resume of what he consider are the central thoughts in John Warden´s theories. These thoughts result in four factors; Enemy as a system, centre of gravity, parallel attack/concentration and finally air superiority. These factors are then being used to inves-tigate if NATO used Wardens theories during the Kosovo war in 1999.The reason for the author to choose the Kosovo war specifically is due to the fact that NATO during the war only used air power as an instrument to get Serbia´s president Milosevic to the negotiation table but also the fact that this would turn out to be quite a challenge for NATO.The conclusion is that out of the four factors only one is traceable throughout the entire operation, and that is air superiority. Regarding the other three factors they can only be found in parts of the operation. / John A. Warden III är en av de mest omskrivna luftmaktsteoretikerna under sin tid. Han har lagt fram ett antal teorier för vad han anser är bästa sättet att använda luftmakt för att vinna krig. I uppsatsen ges en sammanfattning av vad författaren anser vara de centrala tankarna i hans teorier. Dessa utmynnar i fyra begrepp; fienden som ett system, tyngdpunktsbegreppet,parallell attack och kraftsamling samt luftrumskontroll. Dessa begrepp står sedan somutgångspunkt för en fallstudie av NATO:s luftmaktsanvändning under Kosovokriget 1999.Undersökningen syftar till att undersöka om NATO använde sig av John Wardens luftmaktsteorier under kriget.Varför författaren har valt just Kosovokriget beror bland annat på att NATO under kriget enbart använde sig av luftmakt för att få Serbiens president Milosevic till förhandlingsbordet samt att det också visade sig bli en stor prövning för dem.Slutsatsen blev att av de fyra utvalda faktorerna så var det endast en som NATO visade sig foku-sera på under hela operationen, detta var luftrumskontroll. Vad gäller de övriga tre faktorerna finner författaren att NATO använt sig av dessa i stort sett bara under slutskedet av operationen.