Air Force offers Distance Master's degree from Air Command and Staff College

http://www.au.af.mil/au/dlmasters.asp

The Air Command and Staff College On-Line program can now lead to a Master's degree from Air University.

Only Active, Reserve, and NG are eligible now. But:

"As program capacity permits, beginning January 2008, the aperture will open further to include Air Force civilians in major-equivalent positions, sister-service majors and major-selects, and DoD and other eligible Federal Agency civilians in major-equivalent positions."

It has been stated that Civil Air Patrol officers will be able to enroll at that time.

"The Online Master’s Degree is a voluntary program. It is a separate program from ACSC’s traditional Distance Learning, non-Master’s Degree PME course, not an addendum to it. Nor does the Online Master’s Degree replace the Distance Learning non-Master’s course. Eligible officers may elect to take whichever program meets their particular needs best."

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On a personal note, I was enrolled in the Distance-Learning Air Command and Staff College program. I found it to be intellectually very shallow, more like propaganda than serious education. Since there's no provision for discussion, the shallowness and one-sidedness of the material was all the more frustrating.

For example, no one in military policy-making seriously believes that the NATO air war had a decisive effect on forcing Serbian President Milosevic to permit UN-NATO peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, despite the 38,000 combat missions flown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War

Unless ground forces are on the move, or at least warming their tank and truck engines, it's virtually impossible to destroy them with air strikes. Unless they face a ground enemy, opposition forces can simply lie low and be undetected.

What really caused Milosevic to give it up was that the Russians withdrew support and, most importantly, Hungary entered NATO. Hungary provide an easy land invasion route to Kosovo that was formerly lacking.

The Distance ACSC course claims that Kosovo was an example of how land-forces could be defeated by air-power alone. This nonsensically view is not unrelated to our current problems in Iraq and Afganistan.

 

Yay! Maybe this means there's something in the works for enlisted folk too! I'm specifically refering to a USAF DL Bachelor's degree program. Yeah, I already know about the "ABC" program but it's not DL-oriented. That program is mainly concerned with continuity and maximizing transfer credits for Airmen who have earned a CCAF degree.

Not holding the breath tho...