Air University Recovers from Vietnam and Regains Respect

摘要

This article examines AU's attempt to accomplish this mission and evaluates the impact of the cold war, particularly the lessons learned from the Vietnam conflict, on those efforts. Although the study covers AU in general, it focuses on the AU professional military education (PME) program and the way that AU schools drifted away from their primary missions of education in the profession of arms and assumed an unofficial role of providing instruction in high-level policy and decision making. The result was a decline in the quality and relevance of the AU PME program and the loss of academic prestige among fellow Department of Defense and sister-service PME schools. This article contends that a persistent struggle to regain respect in the PME arena through major curriculum overhauls, innovative faculty acquisition methods, and new student-selection procedures eventually returned AU to its previous status as one of the premier military education institutions in the world.