Fodder for Professional Development. Reference Works for the Air Warrior/Scholar

摘要

One of the purposes of this review article is to weigh the value of three new reference books as candidates for inclusion in your personal professional library. Another is to suggest some ways that you can use reference works to enhance you own participation in the intellectual life of the Air Force. Finally, I offer a list of 10 books I would recommend for the personal reference desk set of the professional student of air war. I limit my discussion to works that are focused on the military art; the officer also will certainly want to acquire a more generic set of reference appropriate to all professions and to thinking citizens. Increasingly, the latter are available in an electronic format that is much more economical in space, time, and money, than the hard copy, but authoritative reference works specializing in air war are still largely confined to the printed page. I have arbitrarily omitted bibliographies. They become dated so rapidly, and the building of electronic databases in libraries, along with their electronic finding aids, has reduced the utility of the old hard-copy bibliographies in searched of airpower literature.