Air warfare began with man-carrying kites in ancient China
Long before engines, Chinese armies lifted people aloft on kites to look over the battlefield. Balloons, zeppelins and fixed-wing aircraft followed, the last entering war only in 1911. Within a century the sky had become a contested space of dogfights, paratroopers, missiles and drones, and control of it could decide a campaign.
The earliest military flying came from man-carrying kites in ancient China, with balloon warfare following around the third century. Airships, most famously zeppelins, served in the early 1900s. Heavier-than-air planes first went to war in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, initially to scout and soon to shoot down the other side's scouts. During World War I aircraft and zeppelins began bombing strategic targets, fighter duels made commanders value air superiority, and pilots started working directly alongside troops on the ground.
World War II expanded strategic bombing and introduced airborne troops, missiles and early precision-guided weapons, while aircraft carriers let navies project air power across oceans. In the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union stockpiled nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to deter one another. In the 21st century cheap unmanned drones spread rapidly.
Each role has its own logic. Reconnaissance aircraft gather imagery, watch enemy movements and spot for artillery. Dogfighting, formally air combat manoeuvring, is the art of turning and positioning a fighter to get a firing solution on another. Airborne forces, usually light infantry dropped by parachute, can appear behind enemy lines within minutes, a manoeuvre called vertical envelopment, but they lack supplies for long fights and are vulnerable to bad weather; helicopters have largely replaced mass parachute drops and nearly ended glider assaults. Strategic bombing aims at an enemy's morale or industrial capacity rather than its troops. Forces on the surface typically answer air attack with anti-aircraft measures, which NATO defines as anything that nullifies or blunts hostile air action, from missiles to barrage balloons.
Language shifted along the way. In older British usage a missile was simply anything thrown, such as objects hurled by rowdy sports crowds; today it means a self-propelled guided munition, distinct from an unguided rocket. Unmanned aircraft have gone from surveillance to combat, flown by operators on the far side of the world, and their growing capabilities now raise doubts about the future of piloted fighter jets.
Source: Aerial warfare
