Best of times, worst of times for air power.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

* Air warriors have much to celebrate these days. The Pentagon is about to start ramping up production of the nation's most expensive and technologically wondrous tactical aircraft, the F-35 joint strike fighter. The Air Force soon expects to begin designing a new stealth bomber. And the military continues to rack up engineering achievements in unmanned combat drones.

Alas, all this good news is tempered by the realities of today's wars where massive air power has been negated by the absence of reliable target spotters on the ground.

Arguably one of the Air Force's most ardent champions of air power, Gen. Herbert J. "Hawk" Carlisle, acknowledged that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria will never be defeated from the air. That is no reflection of the capability of air power but simply the recognition that the U.S. military has no easy answer to this war.

Since the start of the air war last fall, the United States and its allies have launched more than 4,200 airstrikes against ISIS and dropped 14,000 weapons. "Air power is doing amazing things," said Carlisle, who heads Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. He is responsible for organizing, training, equipping and maintaining combat ready forces.

Like other Air Force leaders who have addressed the question of why the bombing campaign hasn't degraded ISIS as the president predicted it would, Carlisle has to walk something of a rhetorical tightrope.

"Within what we have under our control, we are doing everything we can do and we are being amazingly successful," he said at a recent Air Force Association meeting. "But the question that comes up is 'could we do more?'"

Carlisle suggested that the only way to gain ground on ISIS via airstrikes is to get better intelligence, because the battlefield is so frustratingly confusing. U.S. pilots--in cockpits and in drone command centers--most of the time do not know if the potential targets they are seeing are extremists or friendly tribes and militias. Even more alarming is that ground spotters often don't know either. "What we've discovered is that determining from the ground and the air who is the actual adversary is an incredible challenge," he said.

Air commanders wish they had highly trained U.S. tactical air controllers on the ground to pinpoint their targets, but that is not likely to happen, as the administration is reluctant to risk more American lives. So air warriors are just going to have to manage with what they have. "Is...