Poets may not strike our Operation Epic Fury Navy pilots as aviation visionaries. But in the 1830s, Alfred Tennyson penned an astonishingly accurate portent of events: “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see / Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be . . . / Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew / From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.”
As I wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings 34 years ago, “the English poet laureate could not, of course, have predicted the extent to which the nation’s airy navies would dominate the nature of war in the 20th century. Nor could he have appreciated the paralytic effect the modern extension of his ‘ghastly dew’ would have on a Middle East nation and its million-man military machine.” That was the Desert Storm air campaign.