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An inventive study of relations between the National Guard and the Regular Army during World War II, Guard Wars follows the Pennsylvania National Guard's 28th Infantry Division from its peacetime status through training and into combat in Western Europe. The broader story, spanning the years 1939--1945, sheds light on the National Guard, the U.S. Army, and American identities and priorities during the war years. Michael E. Weaver carefully tracks the division's difficult transformation into a combat-ready unit and highlights General Omar Bradley's extraordinary capacity for leadership -- which turned the Pennsylvanians from the least capable to one of the more capable units, a claim dearly tested in the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. This absorbing and informative analysis chronicles the nation's response to the extreme demands of a world war, and the flexibility its leaders and soldiers displayed in the chaos of combat.

Roll rates were similar, so neither could enter a turn faster than the other.3 While it was true that American F-86A and F-86E units scored impressive kill ratios against MiG-15s Chinese, Soviet, and North Korean pilots flew, relying on skill and tactics alone, as the Americans did, to combat an aircraft that was the rough equal of one's own was not the ideal path to gaining air superiority during the Cold War of the 1950s. \"5 This contract was let quickly because the Air Force did not consider the F-100 to be a leap into new, unknown technology; it believed the F-100 was only an evolutionary change in aircraft performance. [...]it trusted North Americans design prowess due to the success of the F-86, an aircraft with almost no vices.6 The Air Research and Development Center, however, predicted at the time that the F-100 design was in fact a leap forward into the unknown.7 Engineers at North American were likewise cautious, and argued that this was a brand new aircraft that featured a large numbers of untested characteristics. In 1954 the company wrote, Recognizing that this airplane is a completely new development and is the first combat aircraft capable of sustained flight and combat maneuverability at supersonic speeds, we have expected that major development would be required.8 Indeed, most testing and development of the F-100 took place after dozens of airframes had been accepted into squadron service. Everest believed the F-100 had good potential as a fighter, but its prototype was not yet acceptable.10 The first operational unit to receive the F-100A was the 479th Day Fighter Wing at George AFB, California on October 1, 1954, just sixteen months after the first prototype flew.11 A training unit, the 3595th Combat Crew Training Wing at Nellis AFB, Nevada, received them after the operational fighter unit, welcoming its first F-100As in August 1955.12 Super Sabres initially had just one mission: finding and shooting down enemy aircraft, either while flying escort missions, operating under the guidance of a ground control intercept radar station, or defending a particular place against enemy strike aircraft.13 Designed as an air superiority fighter, that is how the first squadrons that received the jet employed it.

Diplomacy and military force mutually support each other as instruments of national policy, functioning better in concert rather than as separate entities. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a useful case study of policymakers utilizing force and diplomacy synergistically. State Department efforts prior to the crisis paved the way for a unified front with Latin American neighbors against the emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. With a backdrop of nuclear threats supporting the more usable capabilities of conventional air strikes, invasion forces, and blockading ships, the American threat of force made a negotiated settlement attractive to the leadership of the Soviet Union. The risks and political damage commensurate with the use of force encouraged the Kennedy administration to pursue a diplomatic solution. Military leaders tended to not consider the political effects of the use of force. President Kennedy understood the interrelationships between force and diplomacy, as did State Department leaders.

'\"2 Tactical Air Command (TAC) did not begin to make similar institutional changes until October 1972, when it established its first aggressor squadron, the 64th Fighter Weapons Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.3 This article adds some new discoveries to this story, particularly the successes that Air Defense Command (ADC) had with dissimilar air combat tactics (DACT) training starting in 1966. \"8 The Fighter Weapons School recommended seven one-hour sorties for its fighter weapons instructor course; its 1959 syllabus for the basic F-100 course contained three and a half flight hours for the employment of the new Sidewinder infrared-guided missile, three for intercepts, three more for air-to-air gunnery against a slow target towed behind another aircraft, but no air combat maneuvering training.9 F-100s later struggled, however, during their first encounter with North Vietnamese MiG178 on April 4,1965, and the Air Force immediately pulled them from escort missions in favor of the new F-4C.10 A couple of months later the Fighter Weapons School published an article on aerial gunnery,11 and immediately thereafter the Air Force conducted Project Feather Duster, which tested the air combat capabilities of its F-100, F-104, F-105, and F-4C against the F-86H, which simulated the Mig-17-something that could have been accomplished prior to the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War.12 Within Air Defense Command (ADC), only the two remaining F-104A squadrons practiced air combat maneuvering (ACM) on a regular basis; other interceptors were normally prohibited from doing so.13 Since ADC assets trained to shoot down bombers and had no reason to expect to encounter enemy fighters, their shortcomings in ACM jived with their primary mission.