Within a decade of the Wright Brothers' historic flight at Kitty Hawk, pilots were dropping the first crude bombs out of airplanes in combat while visionaries were predicting that the crushing power of an aerial assault would end warfare as we knew it. Yet for much of the first century of flight the myth of the airplane's unstoppable power often surged far ahead of technological reality. It would take both brilliant new inventions and bold new thinking for air power to triumph at last, as it did with such devastating effect in the two Gulf wars.