clude, "We're eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked." Kennedy had immense nuclear power at his disposal in confronting the Soviet Union over its nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba, but at the time he had few conventional options. His military choices were an invasion of Cuba, with no guarantees of success, or an all-out countervalue thermonuclear war. After the crisis, won through a third alternative, a naval blockade referred to as a "quarantine," Kennedy hastened to adopt the "flexible response" as America's new war-planning doctrine. SIOP-63 introduced the potential for limited nuclear war, while preserving the possibility of an all-out countervalue strike.
Even while the SAC-dominated Air Force eagerly adopted the Eisenhower administration's New Look structure, it also maintained forward-based units in Japan, Korea, Guam, the Philippines, and elsewhere on the Pacific rim. With almost 1,000 aircraft in place, these units came under the command of the Hawaii-headquartered Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), which replaced FEAF as the air component of the Navy-led Pacific Command in 1957.
By 1957 the U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) had built up an even larger forward presence to bolster NATO. With more than 2,000 assigned aircraft of all types (not including SAC bombers also deployed in theater), USAFE's network of 32 primary installations stretched from England to Saudi Arabia. Reflecting NATO's "sword and shield" policy, USAFE focused on nuclear strike and air defense roles. By the time of the Berlin crisis of 1961, the command had shrank in size, but it was quickly reinforced by the largest deployment of tactical aircraft since World War II. After the crisis eased, USAFE began a 20-year effort to improve its conventional capabilities in line with the flexible response strategy, which NATO officially adopted in 1967.
This flexibility increased the Air Force's responsibilities, which now ranged from waging all-out nuclear war to supporting the Army in limited conflicts. Tragically, the lessons of Korea had to be relearned in the skies over Vietnam. During the French Indochina War, as early as 1954, the JCS considered Operation VULTURE, in which the U.S. Air Force would be deployed to save the French army at Điện Biên Phủ. The operation would involve nuclear and conventional bombing around the isolated French garrison. President Eisenhower vetoed this proposal, concerned, like General Omar Bradley during the Korean War, that this was "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." The Geneva Agreement of 1955 left Vietnam divided at the 17th Parallel into the Communist north under Hồ Chí Minh, and the pro-Western south, under Bảo Đại and Ngô Đình Diệm. The desire to contain
