The Icarus Syndrome

At the end of the Reagan era, many in the U.S. Air Force began to express their concerns about the health of their institution. They questioned whether the Air Force had lost its sense of direction, its confi dence, its values, even its future. For some, these concerns refl ected nothing more than the maturation of the most youthful of America's military institutions. For others it was a crisis of spirit that threatened the hard-won independence of the Air Force.