The Air Force We Need

‘It has become necessary for every American to restudy present defense against the possibilities of present offense against us.’ — FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, January 12, 1939

I

THE evolution of the airplane from the shaky, secondary weapon of the last war to the grim question-mark in current European affairs is a factor of overwhelming significance to every independent nation. No matter how the war develops, it is already apparent from the case histories of Barcelona and Warsaw that, without power in the air, no country will ever again be able to survive aggression. Henceforth a disciplined and modern air force becomes a bulwark, an integral part of every national defense.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to find our own government embarked on a huge expansion of our air defense, for which the sum of about $500,000,000 has recently been appropriated. The puzzling feature about this program is not its size, but the lack of public understanding concerning it — the fact that the man in the street is displaying such slight comprehension of a measure that is vitally related to the safety of himself and of his family.

This is a dangerous and costly attitude. It is dangerous and costly because this same taxpayer, the man who is going to pay for our new air expansion program and for its astronomical upkeep, is the unsuspecting victim of a grave, if popular, delusion. He is taking it for granted that in exchange for these huge expenditures he is getting the finest and most powerful air protection available. Unfortunately, this is by no means a matter of course.

Money by itself is not the synonym of air power. If we look back at the six years that preceded Munich, we see that during that time the British and the French together appropriated $2,500,000,000 for air defense, only to reveal at that historic showdown an embarrassing inferiority to the German forces. They are still trying to catch up. Nor can we take size to be a true index of strength. The mere weight of numbers, while impressive to the eye, is not essentially protective. At one time the French, with a staggering total of aircraft, had hardly any defense at all. With so much at stake, let us consider first of all precisely what we mean when we speak of a national air defense.

Air power is net an absolute term. It is a variable, infinitely adaptable, capable of infinite interpretation, and one must therefore understand at the outset that there is no such thing as ‘ a standard air force.’ Unfortunately airplanes have always been publicized with the maximum of glamour and the minimum of hard fact. The public is easily thrilled — by speed, by size, and particularly by numbers. However, to be effective, each air force must have its genesis in the needs of the country it must defend. The geopolitical situation must decide the structure and design of an air force if it is to be counted as a vital weapon and not merely as an impotent agglomeration of aircraft.

Air power can be of great benefit to the United States. In spite of its cost, it can be adapted wonderfully to our geography. It has mobility; it can strike within a few hours in any direction — in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Caribbean — and strike so far and strike so hard that attack can be intercepted far from the homeland. Unlike the Navy, it can operate in widely separated spheres, simultaneously or in swift succession. It can defend one entire coast in case the Navy is defending the other, or in case the Panama Canal is blocked; or it can coöperate with the Navy far at sea. It is instantly available, and can exert such vast power that it can bring victory at less cost in men and money than by any other means, provided that it is designed to execute the actual tasks that confront it on the day of battle.

The pressing question, therefore, that arises out of our new expansion program is this: Are we, in exchange for our $500,000,000 and subsequent upkeep costs, going to get an air force designed for us, something that will assure us fullest freedom from attack, maximum efficiency in defense?

This article is written in the belief that we are not so assured, and that the government, feverishly touched off by the rise of air power abroad, is allowing itself to be altogether too much influenced by patterns of air defense that are fundamentally European instead of being fundamentally American.

II

Combat airplanes fall into two main classes, both reënforced by scouting and observation planes. Since neither class is adapted to perform satisfactorily the work of the other, these should not be confused. They are (1) bombers, whose function is to drop bombs, to destroy objects on the ground or on the sea; (2) pursuit ships, whose function is to attack bombers, to fight hostile aircraft, and to scout.

Our own air defense brings all its weight to bear on the second group, the pursuit planes, which would be of considerable use if our nearest potential attacker were 300 instead of 3000 miles away. We have multitudes of these small pursuit jobs, and it is planned to have thousands more, as against a negligible number of heavy bombers. It is the writer’s opinion that this ratio is fundamentally opposed to our requirements and that it suggests a theory of air attack nowhere supported by the facts.

It implies that the government anticipates the possibility of a massed attack by air, the sort of attack to which England, France, and Germany are essentially vulnerable. This conception is nullified by the geographic difference between the United States and Europe. While it is true that commercial aircraft are making single crossings of our oceans with routine regularity, this fact is not of military consequence. There are no military planes in existence or in serious contemplation capable of crossing either ocean in the necessary numbers, with a load of bombs, and of effecting a return. The range necessary for round-trip transoceanic flights could be obtained only by such sacrifices of speed, manœuvrability, and bomb load as to make them quite impractical. The planes would have to be transported here by carrier ships, and the defense against this method of attack is to sink the carrier ships before their planes can reach our shores.

Now, as regards an attack from land: to accomplish this an enemy would first have to establish vast bases in this hemisphere, and it is not credible that we should allow him to do so. Any attempt at such construction would be frustrated forthwith either by the exercise of our sea power or by heavy bombing.

If our Air Corps is not intended for overseas fighting in a foreign war, and if the theory of attack by air is untenable, this would seem to exclude all but the following premise: that the expanded air defense is to function against naval attack. This brings up another paradox. In naval warfare, pursuit ships are of small destructive value. They have small range, and cannot carry the great weight of explosives necessary to sink warships. To produce a decisive weight would require so many planes that our pilot losses would be tremendous.

In point of fact, our military policy is obscure to a disquieting degree. The breakdown of the present Army Air Corps procurement objective, as given by Major George Fielding Eliot in his book Bombs Bursting in Air (Reynal and Hitchcock), resolves as follows: —

Significantly, the author calls attention to the fact that only 178 long-range bombers are included in the above program.

By this ratio — 178 to 3337 — the program ignores what is potentially one of the most deadly and important weapons of defense ever conceived. Further, it ignores the fact that the vital defense of the United States is control of the sea, that it is in the prevention of sea attack against this country that air power has become a decisive factor. It cannot be overemphasized that, as a matter of practice, attack upon us can come only by sea from ships, or from airplanes borne in ships, and that to handle this situation we arc enfeebling ourselves by building the wrong type of aircraft. We are building pursuit planes instead of long-range bombers, which are the only planes able to sink such ships.

Public uncertainty notwithstanding, the function of a bomber is not primarily the destruction of defenseless women and children. Neither is the bomber essentially an ‘offensive’ weapon. No more ridiculous delusion about air power could exist than this recurrent idea of ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ aircraft. Such phrases have no meaning. Every United States armament is for defense. The thought behind every ship in the Navy is not the invasion of someone else’s shores, but the defense of our own. If hostile ships attempt to approach our coast lines, obviously our battleships and cruisers must go out and try to sink them before they can reach us. That is defense. It is not any the less defense to sink an advancing enemy with heavy bombs, nor does such action automatically transform the long-range bomber into an ‘offensive’ weapon. Surely no country is going to wait for enemy planes to reach its cities, or for priceless bases to be constructed, because it is not etiquette to try to intercept such dangers before they can do active harm?

The truth is that every death-dealing weapon is defensive when used to resist an invasion and to destroy an aggressor’s bases, and all weapons, including pursuit ships, are offensive when used for invasion. I have stressed this point because it is the pivot upon which turns the whole question of our air defense, with all its potential importance to our lives and to our homes.

III

Next let us consider what we can count on at present when it comes to repelling a formidable sea power, or a seaborne air power. First we have the Navy. The United States Navy is amply able to cope with any other single navy afloat, but no one can yet say what combinations of foreign naval power may result, from the European war, or what the possible strength of such combinations may be. It is conceivable that simultaneous attack may come from both oceans, and it is necessary for the Navy to preserve concentration upon one or the other. The cost of a two-ocean Navy would involve over $4,000,000,000 for construction alone.

Next we have air power — first in the form of the aircraft of the Navy, flying boats, torpedo planes, observation and fighting craft. These planes, however, do not constitute air power in the sense of our discussion. They are specifically designed to operate as part of the Navy, to work hand-in-glove with the fleet itself. This is a vital arrangement; the British did irreparable harm to their sea power by making the Royal Navy depend upon an entirely separate organization for aircraft. Our Navy cannot have its air force cut down and be made to depend upon some land organization, nor can it have its aircraft detached for some other service.

Finally, we have the Army Air Corps. This possesses all the military planes which really constitute our air power. As we have emphasized, they include an overwhelming majority of little pursuit planes, which would be more useful if our oceans could be shrunk to lakes. The long-range bombers include many so large that their cost, manufacturing time, engine demand, crew requirement, and vulnerability to a single lucky hit loom out of all proportion to the military value.

The United States Army pilots are second to none, but unfortunately their training does not include constant, routine operations far at sea. For this reason they are largely unfamiliar with aerial operations against armed ships in the open ocean. They lack the years of practical experience, the years of working in intimate conjunction with surface warships, so necessary to win a war.

Potentially, the Army Air Corps is a formidable defender. Properly equipped and trained to work with and against sea power, it could deny our shores to any enemy in the world. However, it is not apparent from the evidence we have just considered that the Army Air Corps is so equipped, or that the government’s huge expansion program comprehends the requirements peculiar to our country.

It is submitted that what we require is an Air Striking Force of at least 3000, and preferably 4000, high-speed, longrange bombers, manned by crews trained in long-distance operations over the open sea. It would be of primary importance for them to strike accurately at a small, moving objective, in sufficient numbers to offset initial losses from undamaged ships, and for them to be able to effect a return by day or night, in any weather, without running out of fuel or getting lost.

For such an Air Striking Force, it is important to produce a new basic bomber, specifically suited to our needs. It must be a radical type of long-distance bomber capable of flying far out to sea at speed altitude, above the weather, before it descends to bomb the enemy. Such an airplane is by no means visionary. Bearing in mind that the vital requirements for the defense of the United States by air involve the transport of the maximum weight at the maximum speed with the maximum, climb, we are brought to the following conclusions: —

First, the new bomber must be of the right size. If it is too small, it will take too many pilots to drop each thousand tons of bombs on an attacker. If it is too large, the loss in crew, engines, and equipment in the case of each hit becomes prohibitive.

Second, the new bomber must be simple. That means cutting down the mass of gadgets and special requirements that inevitably clog military planes in time of peace. If it is simple it can quickly be replaced on assembly-line principles. It is a significant fact that all our manufacturing plants combined could not at present replace in six months our probable losses of the first few weeks. The House of Representatives Committee Report on the present Appropriation Bill remarked: ‘The [proposed] total becomes 1690 planes for delivery during the eighteen-month period December 31 to June 30, 1940. Past performance suggests that to be an exceedingly ambitious program.’ Ninety-four planes a month! Capacity has already been greatly increased, but it is a significant fact that so many of our important plants — Boeing, Douglas, Pratt and Whitney, Martin, Sikorsky, Lockheed — are situated on or close to our coast lines, where they are most vulnerable.

Third, this airplane must be fast, so that it can intercept an enemy as far away as possible. The farther away, the longer it takes to get there. The longer it takes, the fewer bombs can be carried in proportion to fuel, and the more planes must be built and risked to deliver a decisive blow. To gain the vital advantage of high speed without high fuel consumption, it is necessary to fly moderately high, where the air is thinner and offers less resistance to the airplane.

It should be possible to achieve the following standard performance: —

(1) True speed, 350 miles per hour at operat-

ing height of 20,000 feet

(2) Landing speed, not more than 75 miles

per hour

(3) Radius and load, 3000 miles with 1-l½

tons of bombs, 2000 miles with 2 tons

of bombs

(4) Power, 2 engines

(5) Crew, 3

This is a more radical performance than our military planes now give, but there are planes in existence, in airline use, which might well serve as a basic design for the proposed type.

IV

Success in this scheme of air defense, the margin of safety, is largely governed by time. Conditions, favorable or otherwise, play their part; but, generally speaking, more ships can be sunk in three days than in one, and therefore the farther out interception can take place, the greater must be the margin of safety.

The maximum economical speed of a great fleet is about 1000 miles in three days. The speed of the proposed bomber would be 1000 miles in three hours. The inference is obvious.

The point of detection depends upon the range of the scouting aircraft, but the detection itself is a matter of routine training. We already have reconnaissance planes of ample range. A hundred scouts, flying ten miles apart, can form a line 1000 miles wide. The diameter of a great battle fleet is far greater than the gap between the scouts.

So long as we could keep high-speed bombers coming in successive waves, the enemy numbers would be continuously diminishing. A single heavy bomb dropped on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier ends her usefulness. Her planes, with nowhere to land, must crash into the sea. Thereafter the fleet is blind. Similarly, sufficient bombs dropped on a battleship deck can cripple or disable her; dropped close alongside, they can open up steel seams and sink or slow down the ship.

Capital ships, manned by disciplined men, are not easily overcome. Publicity has been given to the precision of highaltitude bombing — of peacetime targets. The destruction of undefended, static objects, and the views of theorists who sink a ship with every bomb, have little to do with the realities of war. It is the stark truth that in the stress of battle brave men must come down through anti-aircraft fire and gamble their lives to place bombs directly on the decks of ships. Nevertheless, if a score or more of planes have to be sacrificed to destroy one big ship, it means that a handful of men have accounted for 1500 enemy lives, that two or three million dollars’ worth of equipment has been sacrificed to demolish a thirty-milliondollar floating fortress, capable of killing thousands of men in surface action. In continuous, concentrated attack by dive bombing there can be little doubt of the issue. A crippled battle fleet, thousands of miles from its bases, without speed to escape, must incur certain defeat.

The practical aspects that enter into such a scheme of defense — inexpedience of bombing by night, fog that can shield an enemy for hundreds of miles, toll from anti-aircraft fire, and so forth —these contingencies require utmost organization and point to the necessity for elements of preparedness which are not apparent in our present policy. They underline the importance of ample margins in time and strength, as well as in facilities for refueling, rebombing, remanning, and replacing aircraft of the Striking Force. Above all, excess hitting power is absolutely essential; without continuous hitting by big bombs, aircraft are not much more than a nuisance to armored ships.

V

The work of setting up machinery that can repel a great naval attack in the Atlantic — perhaps simultaneously with one in the Pacific — is enormous. There is no short-cut route to the creation and maintenance of air defense, even in time of peace, and even for a country with the resources of the United States. It is a huge job to develop an Air Striking Force of 3000 planes with corresponding land equipment. That is why we cannot afford to waste time and money on unsuitable programs.

Personnel is a leading problem. To build the Striking Force planes is a tough assignment, but it is an even tougher one to train enough pilots and mechanics to handle them efficiently. We have only to look at the organization of our commercial airlines which lead the world in efficiency. Flying year in, year out, over the same routes, on lighted and radioequipped airways, they require nevertheless for every airplane in service approximately four pilots and twenty-three skilled ground technicians.

In the Army Air Corps we have a body of men of first-class ability, but in addition we need large reserves of welltrained pilots and mechanics. Excellent steps are being taken by the Civil Aeronautics Authority to initiate widespread elementary training; but navigating complicated, multimotored aircraft at speed and altitude, attacking steel ships manned by disciplined crews — these are not things that can be learned in spare time or by flying around a country airport on a Saturday afternoon. War is a violent strain, and the qualifications for survival come extremely high.

The best handling of this great task and the control of the many problems of air defense which will always be with us suggests the establishment of a National Board of Air Defense, including, but not controlled by, representatives of the Navy, the Army, and the Civil Aeronautics Authority. It suggests a master policy to originate and correlate the elements of research, production, and training, and to keep these things in harmony with the manufacturing facilities and labor conditions of the country.

Such a Board would be able to view all our air needs as a whole, not from the angle of a single department. It could energize the work of a Central Research and Development Plant, for the development and test of radical improvements; this work would, of course, be in addition to coöperating with and encouraging the commercial plants from whose research and experiment so many great achievements have come. It could even set up a Central Government Unit for test construction of all planes on mass-production principles, before release of contracts to private enterprise. It could be empowered to subsidize assembly-line units in the aircraft industry, adapted to very large emergency production. It could require that such plants be kept retooled to all improvements in the basic type, so that their existence would make possible enormous replacements in time of war, and obviate the need for excessive numbers of planes in actual service.

The Board would have available a wealth of productive power in American industry and in engineering brains. Our aircraft plants, while dispersed and of relatively low individual capacity, have produced aircraft which are copied and bought throughout the world. In Detroit we have another industry which has performed fabulous feats in simplifying, cheapening, and mass-producing transportation. Much of this technique could well be borrowed if the aircraft industry went into real mass production.

The Board, with a central policy, could control the influence of research upon production. Improvements coming from the drafting table and the development plant could be incorporated into existing production just as they are in the automotive industry.

The Board would have power to create the necessary training bases and all the resources they require. It could secure the coöperation of the Mercantile Marine in connection with training pilots to locate vessels far at sea and under all conditions. It could arrange coöperation with units of the Navy. It could obtain from the Maritime Commission old ships now laid up, which, fitted with automatic steering gears to vary course and abandoned at sea, would provide admirable moving targets for dive bombing.

VI

Sober reflection must always suggest the improbability of an invasion of the United States. However, the possibility of attack must be conceded, and in any event, whether or not we believe in this possibility, the decision has been taken and the expansion program is under way. We are working up to $2,000,000,000 a year for national defense, and it has been stated that next year’s Army and Navy expenditures will reach $3,000,000,000 — almost as much as our total federal expenditures as recently as 1927!

The cost of construction, great as it is, is less than half the story. In the $250,000,000 aircraft expenditure reported on June 12, 1939, for instance, $120,000,000 was for airplanes, and the balance of $130,000,000 was for land, equipment, maintenance facilities, and so forth. An airplane, as a unit, is a cheap weapon of defense; but the upkeep is exceedingly high and the obsolescence endless. It is significant that the Act of April 3, 1939 covering aircraft expenditures authorized $300,000,000 ‘together with such annual appropriations as may be necessary to maintain such air force.’

There must be a limit. The deeper in we get, the greater must be the taxes, the broader must be the tax base. However we look at it, the fact remains that we all have to pay for the protection of our homes.

If our great expansion of air power is to warrant its cost, it must conform to our American needs. It will be a sorry upshot if we squander man power and money on air policies that are outdated at their very inception.