The Yom Kippur War and the Shaping of the United States Air Force

This study assesses the influence of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 on the development of the United States Air Force. The author demonstrates how vicarious lessons based on Israeli combat experience interacted with American lessons from Vietnam. The study concludes that the Yom Kippur War reinforced a conventional paradigm of “war as battle” and also encouraged a long-term trend of American-Israeli parallelism.