From Balloons to Drones From Balloons to Drones

In 1972, the USS Kitty Hawk was in the middle of conducting bombing raids against North Vietnam, when violence broke out on the ship itself. Long-building racial tensions exploded into a series of assaults that were quickly labeled a race riot. Marv Truhe was one of the JAG lawyers assigned to defend the African American sailors charged in the incident. He tells the story of a series of racial injustices in his shocking new book, Against All Tides: The Untold Story of the USS Kitty Hawk Race Riot. He joins us on the podcast to discuss the incident and the legacy it leaves for changes in race relations in the Navy and the US military.

Amidst the news of classified intelligence leaks, it's a great time to look back at the US Air Force Security Service - the USAF's own intelligence agency that gathered critical intelligence throughout the Cold War. From using surveillance aircraft to spy on potential threats to helping fighter pilots shoot down MiGs over the skies of Vietnam, Philip Shackelford takes us through the story of this mysterious organization, as he details in his new book: 'Rise of the Mavericks,' from Naval Institute Press.

This episode is all about the F-14 and F-15 fighters, two very popular and historically significant airplanes. We're joined by Tal Tovy, senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and author of 'Tomcats and Eagles: The Development of the F-14 and F-15 in the Cold War' from Naval Institute Press. Tovy gives us an up close look at the motivation behind designing these aircraft, and speaks to how to Israeli Air Force experience had a special influence.

50 years ago this month (January) was the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which ended major U.S. combat operations in the Vietnam War. To look back on the air campaigns that were so crucial to that war, we talk with Michael Weaver, professor at the U.S. Air Force's Air Command and Staff College and author of 'The Air War in Vietnam' from Texas Tech University Press. Join as we look at the use of air power in Southeast Asia and talk about some of the legacies it leaves behind.
Weaver's comments are his alone and do not reflect the policies of Air University, the Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

Join us for a retrospective on our favorite books of the year, with the 'From Balloons to Drones' editor-in-chief, Dr Ross Mahoney! Each of us discusses our top three reads of 2022, and we take a look forward at some topics we'd really like to hear more about in the future.

The books:
'Malayan Emergency and Indonesian Confrontation, 1950-1966' by Mark Lax
'Air Power in the Falklands Conflict: An Operational Level Insight into Air Warfare in the South Atlantic' by John Shields
'Air Power Supremo: A Biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor' by William Pyke
'Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb' by James Scott
'A Long Voyage to the Moon: The Life of Naval Aviator and Apollo 17 Astronaut Ron Evans' by Geoffrey Bowman
'Dark Horse: General Larry O. Spencer and His Journey from the Horseshoe to the Pentagon' by Gen. Larry O. Spencer, USAF (Ret.)
'Wings of Gold: The Story of the First Women Naval Aviators' by Beverly Weintraub
'Tomcats and Eagles: The Development of the F-14 and F-15 in the Cold War' by Tal Tovy
'Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today' by Craig McNamara

How did the U.S. get from the first flight of an airplane in 1903, to full-fledged military-capable airplanes in only short few years? Dr. Larry Burke, the aviation curator at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, takes us through the people that made that journey happen. He explores the different approaches to the airplane made by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marines Corps, and why each of them went about exploring military aviation in a unique way. Larry is also the author of At the Dawn of Airpower: The U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps’ Approach to the Airplane, 1907–1917, from Naval Institute Press.