Nearly 25 years ago, a distinguished group of military historians assembled at a large midwestern university for a conference on the history of logistics and war. Lamenting the lack of serious scholarship on the subject, conference attendees speculated as to the reason for this relative bareness of the academic cupboard. One participant noted, to general laughter, “No one studies logistics because it’s boring.” Another participant countered, “Logistics in times of plenty can be boring, . . . but logistics in a resource-constrained environment . . . now, that’s interesting!”

Derek Salmi’s award-winning School of Advanced Air and Space Studies thesis...

In the opening months of 1942, forward elements of the Imperial Japanese Army’s 33rd Division advanced through the jungles of lower Burma toward the Sittang River, specifically the 1,650-foot iron railway bridge spanning its otherwise impassable waters. With the bridge’s capture, Japanese forces would secure a direct march route to the capital city of Rangoon and its well-developed ports on the Gulf of Martaban. Opposing their advance was the 17th Indian Infantry Division (ID) that—despite a continual retreat since opening defeats at Kawkareik Pass and Moulmein—now took up entrenched defensive positions on both riverbanks.

Here, in the early...

Air mobility, a force-multiplying capability now widely taken for granted, transformed the modern battlefield. But its many advantages were not always readily recognizable, masked at differing times by technical limitations and prevailing paradigms of strategic thought and operational practice. Correspondingly, the development of aerial transportation followed an evolutionary course marked by both periods of crisis and stretches of remarkable success. This chapter explores the beginnings of air transport from its earliest practices in the nascent days of aviation through the beginning of the Second World War.

Like most airpower missions, US air mobility traces its operational roots to World War...

In Louis Allen’s definitive account of the Burma campaign,The Longest War, the famed military historian notes, “The Japanese say Java was their happiest station in Asia, Burma their worst; and the latter verdict might well be shared by British soldiers who fought there. Farthest away from home, at the end of a long and often rickety supply line, they remained largely unnoticed by a public in the United Kingdom for whom the war was, by its very nature, remote from everyday experience.”¹ The American public shared this sentiment, fueled by the lack of a large, committed US ground force and...

In his 1946 article “Some Aspects of the Campaign in Burma,” Field Marshal Viscount Slim expounds at length on the tenets of airpower and, specifically, the mission of air transport. Slim carefully describes how air mobility was not a completely new phenomenon born to Burma—indeed, he himself was a veteran of air transport operations in Iraq and India in the 1920s and 1930s.¹ Other official histories indicate that the successful maturation of Allied air mobility operations in the New Guinea campaign and similar remote battlefields throughout the Pacific significantly influenced Burma operations.²

Slim argues, however, that the key difference...

The post–Cold War environment of the past two decades has evinced a compelling need for, and corresponding increase in, air mobility employment as an essential contribution to national security. Building from the 1990 Air Force white paper codifying the “global reach, global power” construct, current worldwide operations dictate a mobility mission departure, on average, every 90 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.¹ This singularly US capability underpins its armed forces’ ability to provide quick, tailored responses against a myriad of potential adversaries in the defense of vital national interests.

“Rapid, responsive air mobility,” noted House...

In his “Afterthoughts” to his war memoir Defeat into Victory, Field Marshal William Slim reflects, “A most distinctive aspect of our Burma war was the great use we made of air transport. It was one of our contributions towards a new kind of warfare and I think it is fair to say that, to a large extent, we discovered by trial and error the methods of air supply that later passed into general use.”¹ Fittingly, however, in consonance with the general treatment of the “Forgotten Army,” many of Burma’s instructive lessons remain eclipsed by those derived from other historical air...