Air Power Ends Isolation
I
AT the heart of our national defense efforts there is a deep and fateful paradox. Unless it is resolved and resolved quickly, we shall continue to blunder in our military preparations. The first step in eliminating that paradox is to understand it and to follow its implications boldly to the bitter end. Superficial critics, probably, will accuse the writer of ‘attacking the Administration,’ but in attempting to lay bare the central error in our strategic thinking, as it appears to me, I am no more ‘attacking’ those in authority than a physician is attacking his patient in diagnosing what seems to him a malignant disease.
The essence of the paradox is this: that our country’s accredited leaders in this crucial period fight isolationism politically but remain stubbornly isolationist themselves in their military planning.
Under the American isolationist argument there are certain strategic assumptions. Those add up to the illusion that we can make America neatly ‘invulnerable’ behind its ‘ocean ramparts’ and therefore can safely if selfishly let aggressor nations in other parts of the world have their way. Our continent, flanked by the Atlantic and the Pacific, policed by a fine Army on land and patrolled by a matchless Navy at sea, is impregnable and can let the rest of the planet stew in its own juices. Sea Power constitutes our ‘outer defense.’ If only it is strong enough and modernized by the addition of plenty of naval airplanes on ‘floating bases’ of aircraft carriers, it can shield us against the threat of invasion. All the talk of the decline of Sea Power, of destruction from the skies regardless of distance, of total warfare ignoring the textbook precepts of orthodox military science, is simply the raving of visionaries and aviation crackpots.
Such are the premises of the isolationist story. Now our military monitors, while quarreling with the deductions, not only have accepted the isolationist strategic premises, but are building their whole defense structure on them. They are busily constructing a two-ocean Navy with the same smug self-assurance with which the French leaders once built an ‘impregnable’ Maginot Line along their frontiers. Despite the exploits of Air Power even in its present primitive form — let alone the indications for the expanded rôle of Air Power in the immediate future — they still rest back on holy writ out of Captain Mahan. Since Mahan’s analysis was made, in 1890, an element which did not figure in calculations in his day, an element that is neither land nor sea and has its own strategic laws, — the ‘air ocean’ that envelops our earth continuously, whether the surface below is wet or dry, — has become the primary battlefield. Yet our leaders prepare armies and navies for the traditional mile-by-mile struggle for territorial occupation, as though nothing had happened to revolutionize the nature of war making. They are rather like Indians diligently sharpening their arrows and turning up their bows to meet conquistadores armed with rifles and girded with armor.
Unfortunately we cannot have it both ways. There is neither logic nor justice in denying that oceans are insurmountable barriers when arguing with isolationists, and at the same time basing our defense on that very premise. If the principles of warfare implied in our current construction program and our military organization are right, then the isolationist claims are also right. Once we grant that the danger against which we are feverishly preparing is an oldfashioned invasion followed by an oldfashioned fight for mileage from the periphery inward, then we cannot deny that our country can be made inviolable.
It is my contention that the Lindberghs and Wheelers are dismally and dangerously wrong — primarily because the military notions on which they rely are no longer tenable. The word ‘isolation’ has become a political football. People demand to know whether you are for or against it. But, for those entrusted with the physical defense of our country, isolation becomes a geographical and tactical rather than a political problem. The issue, it seems to me, is not whether isolation is desirable for the United States, but whether it is possible.
As a designer and pilot of aircraft who has devoted his mature life to the study of war science, I think of isolation not in terms of national policy but in terms of space relations. With continents and oceans traversed by aircraft in a few hours, it no longer makes sense to measure space in miles — we must measure it in units of time. I believe it to be a physical fact that, with the advent of modern aeronautics, isolation no longer exists outside of demagogic vocabularies; that delusions of defensive invulnerability are fairy tales carried over from an earlier period in our history, in about the same way grownups carry over consoling fairy tales from their sheltered childhood days.
Considered solely from this tactical and geographical viewpoint, our foremost isolationists would seem to be neither Lindbergh nor Wheeler but Secretary of the Navy Knox and Secretary of War Stimson. I am aware, of course, that the news will come as a shock to these gentlemen. Emotionally and verbally they are irreconcilable enemies of the isolationist philosophy, but in their military ideas they are as deeply isolationist as, let us say, Herbert Hoover. Their isolationism, moreover, is a lot more dangerous, because it is being translated every day into equipment and strategic plans fantastically unsuited for the job that may be ahead of us. They remain earthbound, committed to routine two-dimensional types of defense in a time when warfare has been lifted into a third dimension. In the hour of supreme test, should it come, the political isolationists will fall in line like all other good Americans, but the outmoded defense system elaborated by those committed to textbook formulas carried over from an isolationist era cannot fall into line.
Recently, for instance, Secretary Knox published an article in a national magazine defending the traditional conception of Sea Power and castigating those who would meet the new aviation epoch with organization and strategy based on the new weapon and the new sphere of operations which it has opened up. The Secretary of the Navy argues that Germany — having conquered Europe, including the British Isles — will be able to build a colossal fleet for a gigantic invasion of American shores; that our safety therefore lies in a supereolossal Navy equipped to fight off the German expeditionary forces. He even adds the usual trimmings to that fantasy: intermediary ocean bases as steppingstones for the invading hordes and South American areas as jumping-off places for easier assaults on the Panama Canal and North America beyond that. All of this is based on the fact that, ‘from the time of Hannibal onward, ultimate victory and security against invasion have been won by the power or powers which could first win and then hold the sea.’ Never mind the ‘air ocean’ which never entered into calculations from Hannibal to Mahan.
If the picture drawn by Colonel Knox were valid, the only real difference between him and Colonel Lindbergh would be in their judgments as to our ability to frustrate such a German invasion. The Secretary is convinced that the invasion might be successful and that we must therefore prevent the British Isles and their shipbuilding facilities from falling into Hitler’s hands, whereas Lindbergh is convinced that with proper defenses we can stop the invasion on the high seas or, at worst, overcome the invaders on land. But both of them argue as though the picture, in its broad outlines, corresponded to strategic and tactical realities.
On that assumption, it must be admitted, the advantage is overwhelmingly on Lindbergh’s side of the argument. Secretary Knox writes that ‘twenty-five miles of water with superiority on the sea has twice reversed der Führer’s timeclock’ in the matter of invading England. Assuming that to be true, then assuredly there is not the slightest reason for worrying about the safety of the British Isles, since the British Navy remains indubitably superior to Hitler’s sea forces, even if the Italian and French navies were thrown in; that superiority is raised to the level of virtual monopoly of the seas when we add the potential sea strength of our own country. Likewise there should be little if any cause for misgivings in the Mediterranean, where John Bull’s naval might is practically unchallenged by any other surface force.
In those strategic terms, above all, it becomes childish to worry over the fate of the American continent, protected not by twenty-five but by thousands of miles of water. The only ostensible danger points, the narrow waters of the Panama Canal and Bering Strait, being relatively limited zones, could readily be made invulnerable by a vast concentration of defenses against troop landings. Considered essentially as a surface operation, the bogey of South American ‘invasion bases’ becomes meaningless, since the ‘invasion’ would still have to traverse vast oceans except for an easily protected bridge between the continents at Panama.
II
The whole idea tha Hitler in conquering England aims at control of naval facilities for attack on America is ludicrous. If Germany, lacking Sea Power, nevertheless conquers the Old World including the British Isles, it will be due almost exclusively to the superiority of its new weapon, Air Power. Then why, in heaven’s name, should it then revert to the obsolete and vanquished sea weapon? That is more than anyone can answer.
The elementary fact is that the British Navy, for all its magnificent history, had approximately nothing to do with changing Hitler’s time-table on invasion of the British Isles. Had the Royal Air Force yielded control of the skies over the English Channel and over the Islands, the British fleet, though it were many times as strong, could not have stemmed the tide of Nazi invasion. Hitler would then have been able to throw a solid canopy of Air Power across the entire Channel, just as he did between Greece and Crete; under its protection his forces could have crossed as readily as the British troops, in the memorable evacuation from Dunkirk, crossed under the shield of ‘ local air mastery.’ Winston Churchill, the last man to deny credit to the Admiralty, specifically credited that evacuation to British dominance of the sky over the operation.
It is not at all certain, however, that Germany, if it should seize mastery of the air over England, would rush to land huge bodies of infantry. With the RAF eliminated, it is far more likely that the enemy might prefer the easy and inexpensive procedure of selectively bombing vital objectives on the Islands from overhead, wrecking the nation’s machinery of life and its stoical morale — with troop landings merely as a final confirmation of victory already achieved. The Navy would be helpless to interfere — as helpless as it has been in the year-long Battle of Britain, in which it has been only an onlooker.
If Germany has failed to overcome England, it was because Britain fortunately possessed an effective Air Power of its own. Not the twenty-five miles of water but the twenty-five-mile edge in speed of the British pursuit planes over Nazi pursuits frustrated the German attempt to conquer England. Contrary to the popular impression, the Nazi Luftwaffe, while perfectly developed as a coöperative element with surface forces, was badly conceived so far as all-air warfare is concerned. The Nazis’ audacity failed them in visualizing the potentialities of pure air war, so that they plunged into such warfare over England with pathetically unsuitable equipment and took heavy punishment. If, as reported, Hitler now has a ‘mad’ on Göring, he may have ample reason for it. It would be criminal if we in America failed to profit from Hitler’s greatest error and did not proceed to produce aviation for genuine all-air conflict.
For those who insist that the British Navy headed off the invasion, here is a concrete problem to work out: If this is true, then why did not the same Navy prevent invasion of Norway, which was likewise an undertaking across a water barrier? Surely it was not for lack of courage or skill. We all remember how the British fleet rushed to the scene of action when the invasion started — and the Skagerrak is even wider than the Channel.
The answer is one which Mr. Churchill offered formally to Parliament and which is obvious to students of the Norwegian campaign. The RAF lacked the range to contest control of the skies over the Skagerrak as it subsequently did over the Channel. Having obtained mastery of the air over the invasion operation, Hitler forced the British fleet to retreat beyond the range of the Nazi air force. Britain’s carrier-based aircraft proved unequal to Germany’s landbased aircraft and beat a hasty retreat, paying heavy toll in losses. Because of the special design of naval aircraft, involving sacrifice in performance for the sake of operation from limited deck areas, it is doomed to remain inferior to equivalent land-based aviation, and hence suited only for fighting against other naval aircraft in areas beyond the reach of airplanes taking off from land. In that, incidentally, lies the fallacy of dependence on aviation ‘integrated’ with the Navy and carried along by the fleet as a substitute for true Air Power. No matter how good it may be, other factors being equal, naval aviation must remain tactically inferior.
German Air Power accounts for the successful invasion of the Scandinavian peninsula. British Air Power accounts for the failure of invasion of the British Isles. The sooner naval leaders here and in England face such towering realities, the better. After all, there is no ignominy involved for naval men and naval traditions in recognizing that new weapons enforce new tactical relationships, any more than a cavalry man need resent tanks.
The British fleet, conspicuously superior on the surface of the sea, nevertheless has been unable to approach the European continent, because that is ringed with Nazi aviation. Even the bombardment of ‘invasion harbors’ and coastal fortifications, in the past an important function of navies, has been left almost entirely to the air forces; the few assaults by sea, such as those against Genoa and Brest, were made on a hitand-run basis as surprise forays of a guerrilla nature and not as genuine tactical undertakings. Theoretically the British Navy dominates the Mediterranean and on several occasions it demonstrated its superiority against another surface force, the Italian Navy. All the same, it has been unable to prevent Axis troop shipments to Africa and troop landings in Crete. Axis Air Power has been able to ignore the surface impediment of naval opposition and to pick off naval units almost at will when such units ventured beyond the protection of land-based British aviation.
In continuing to rely on naval power (including naval aircraft) to guard America, we are repeating the fatal error of the French in relying on their frontier fortifications and their fine army. We arc in effect assuming that we can ‘isolate’ this continent or this hemisphere at the proper time by a mighty defense. The problem, for our isolationminded interventionists, seems to be to make our ‘ocean ramparts’ stronger and stronger — by enlarging the Navy, by adding naval aviation to the other fleet weapons. What they fail to understand is that surface ramparts, no matter how powerful, are futile once long-ranged aviation capable of ignoring such obstacles is in action. It was not the weakness of the Maginot Line but the bankruptcy of the military principle on which the Line was based which cost France its life. Such ramparts, on land or sea, have lost all validity in the three-dimensional war of today.
The sole difference between the strategic position of the American continent and the British Isles is this: that the Islands are separated from enemy bases by a narrow body of water and America by a wide body of water. Suppose, now, that Air Power could cross oceans as readily as it now crosses rivers and straits and English Channels. Instantly America would be as vulnerable as the British Isles and, by exact analogy, its fate would depend on its own Air Power and its Navy would be as helpless as the British Navy has been under similar circumstances.
Such safety as we still enjoy against attack from the skies is completely unrelated to our naval strength. We enjoy it merely because our potential enemies do not as yet possess air striking power of sufficient range to cross the ocean and return home — a range which has been fully possible technically for years and which is an inevitable development of the immediate future. If we did not possess a single battleship or destroyer, no enemy could carry its Air Power to our shores by ships. It would be doomed to annihilation as soon as it came within striking distance of our own land-based aircraft, which would deal with the intruder precisely as land-based Nazi aviation dealt with British naval units off Norway in the North Sea and in the Sicilian Straits. Despite such obvious facts, our naval minds still dismiss even the defensive value of Air Power. Thus Secretary Knox simply ignores our land-based aviation when he writes that ‘a defeat of our forces at sea by a foreign power or combination of powers would leave our coasts open to invasion.’ He completely overlooks the crucial circumstance that the said powers would still have to annihilate our land-based air forces before our coasts are ‘open to invasion.’
III
The rapid enlargement of the ‘reach’ of aviation is the key fact in the new military reality with which we must deal, however much it disturbs the routine of strategic planning in high places. Every advance in the science of human communication — the railroad, the automobile, radio, aeronautics — has made the world smaller. Each of these things has reduced sharply the scale of continents and oceans. And every such advance has ended somebody’s cherished isolation. The Indians in the Western Hemisphere were fully isolated until white men in their sailboats, equipped with guns, crossed the ocean. Then the Indian isolation was ended, for good or ill. With the emergence of modern aviation, the natural isolation of vast regions was likewise ended. Only small margins of the safety provided by sheer space now remain for America or any other part of the world, and those margins are crumbling at their edges with every extension of aviation range. It is only a matter of time before there will not be a sliver of isolation left anywhere.
Long-range Air Power has been retarded by lack of military imagination rather than aerodynamic obstacles. Britain, which years ago had bridged points in its empire seven thousand miles apart with non-stop flights, failed to apply this aviation knowledge to long-distance fighting craft. Even Germany, whose Condors flew from Berlin to America, failed to build extreme range into its military aircraft. That it is rapidly making up for this failure may be judged from the ever longer radius of its bombing of British ships on the Atlantic; already Nazi sky raiders seek out prey seven or eight hundred and even a thousand miles to the west of Ireland.
A good deal has been written about the new Douglas super-bomber, the B-19, with its range of 7800 miles, carrying eighteen tons of explosive. It has neither the speed, the armor, nor the armament to make it a true dreadnought of the air, capable of fighting through to its target, doing its job, and fighting its way back. It is actually a ’blown-up’ version of the so-called ‘flying fortress,’ embodying all the tactical limitations of that ‘fortress’ on a larger scale. The true super-bomber can and will have a speed of well over 300 miles, superb armor, and heavy firing power.
But as a preview of the great ranges now possible, and the greater ones still to come, the B-19 serves its purpose. It is generally known that other bombers outstripping the B-19 in range, speed, and striking power are being developed, unfortunately on a merely experimental basis. Extraordinary advances are being made in aeronautical materials, more efficient fuels and fuel consumption, and general aerodynamic refinements, all of which will be translated, among other things, into aviation ‘reach.’ I am disclosing no secret in asserting that research is proceeding successfully on airplane engines that develop as much as 8000 horsepower! Imagine a plane like the B-19 equipped with four such engines, as against the present 2000-horsepower engines — a total of 32,000 horsepower instead of the present 8000, plus other vital improvements already available — and you grasp the emerging revolutionary possibility of ranges circling the entire globe (25,000 miles) with ample margins for tactical operations.
To savor the strategic implications of these facts, recall that a 15,000-mile absolute range — representing a 6000-mile striking range — puts the United States within practical bombing distance of the capitals of every great military power, including Russia and Japan. By the same token, 15,000-mile American bombers would be able to reach any of those capitals, drop huge explosive loads on the appointed targets, and return to their home bases. One thousand such bombers, which would cost no more than about ten first-line modern battleships, in the hands of an enemy would put the United States as fully at its mercy as though there were nothing but a ditch between us, if we had no adequate Air Force. And, naturally, the reverse is true: such an armada in our own hands would make any European nation as helpless under our air strength as Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia under the Nazi Luftwaffe.
Moreover, the production of such an aerial fleet would be no more difficult than the manufacture of types now in use. Had the creative planning been undertaken two or three years ago, the new bomber could have been in production by this time. Once this dreadnought of the skies is designed and the facilities for its construction are provided, the process would not differ essentially from the present process of turning out B-17 and B-24 ‘flying fortresses’ — and five hundred of these are expected to be delivered monthly in 1942. The question is not one of American ability to produce such planes — that can be taken for granted. The question will be, rather, to determine how many we need, in relation to strategic tasks involved as well as the aerial strength of potential enemies.
The one certainty in an otherwise confused period of military transition is that the aerial warfare which we have witnessed in the first two years of the Second World War will seem primitive and mild by contrast with the aerial warfare still to come. In actual hitting strength the eighteen tons which the B-19 can carry is equivalent to forty of Germany’s Stuka bombers — and the superbombers of tomorrow will fly from fifty to one hundred tons of explosive, making them the equal of one hundred to two hundred Stukas. In a single flight such a plane will inflict as much damage as several hundred planes now visit in major raids such as those on London or Coventry. A thousand such craft will accomplish as much destruction in a single action as Germany has been able to score in six months of continuous bombing; or, to put it another way, in a single blow at least two hundred Coventries could be destroyed.
Those are the kind of assaults to which the American continent may be exposed, should Hitler succeed in subjugating Europe and Asia. We should then be engulfed in an armament race such as mankind has never before experienced. And it would not be a race for battleships, but a race for long-range striking force equipped to obliterate the enemy. We should be confronted with a true interhemispheric war in total disregard of space, striking directly from the home bases. Oceans and all their ‘ intermediary bases’ would then be a vast No Man’s Land. The ten hours or so of approach to the appointed targets would represent no hardship, since they would be passed under ideal conditions of modern flying comfort; besides, the time of approach is usually the least hazardous element in an aerial action, since the initiative in that stage is with the attacker. We must prepare for such an eventuality, even though we hope to smother the danger long before that on the other side of the ocean, and the time to prepare is now.
Given a circumglobular aviation range, — which, I am fully convinced, will be a reality within five years, — every point on the American map will be subject to direct attack from any point in the outside world. Assuming that we continue to ignore these looming aeronautical facts, remaining stubbornly committed to pure Army and Navy strategy, we shall be helpless when the inter-hemispheric aerial conflict catches up with us. I do not relinquish the hope that we shall be amply prepared long before that happens. But for the sake of emphasis — as a warning rather than a prophecy — I visualize a contingency as melodramatic as this: —
From every point on the compass, across the two oceans and across the two Poles, giant bombers, protected by convoys of deadly fighter planes, converge upon the United States of America. There are thousands of them, each carrying at least fifty tons of streamlined explosives and a hailstorm of light incendiary bombs. Wave after wave they come, openly, in broad daylight, magnificently armored and armed and ready to fight their way through to the selected targets.
With the precision of perfect planning, the invading aerial giants strike at the nerve centres and jugular veins of our nation. Unerringly they pick their objectives: industrial centres and sources of power, government seats and fuel concentrations, particularly the aviation complex of factories and airdromes. The havoc they wreak is beyond description. Washington is wiped out before the government has a chance to rescue its most treasured records. The wrecking of a score of crucial hydroelectric power centres paralyzes huge sectors of American industrial life at one blow. A thousand tons of explosives deposited expertly on a few great railroad knots like those at Chicago dislocate the country’s transportation system. The attacks on Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Moscow, in 1939-1941 seem a mere rehearsal for this massive and cataclysmic attack on America. Our ‘purely defensive’ aviation, chained to the older services, gallantly takes to the air, but proves sadly inadequate because its military characteristics are unsuited to this task.
As the cyclones of aerial devastation sweep through the land, hour after hour, day after day, only one thing proves more shocking and demoralizing than the physical destruction and the incredible loss of life. It is the sudden realization that the immense program of defense to which the country gave its best efforts and billions of dollars in the preceding years is utterly irrelevant to this total war from the skies. The existing American aircraft do take some toll from the enemy; but the foe readily replaces his losses — his industries and airdromes are immune because we lack the transoceanic ‘reach’ to strike at the source of attack. There may be millions of well-equipped soldiers on tap, a ring of superb coastal artillery, a two-ocean Navy without peer. Yet all of these are literally helpless against the aerial attack. Indeed, the Navy and the Army themselves are pathetically exposed and vulnerable to the overhead onslaught.
Moreover, as the concentrated and unceasing air attack proceeds, a panicstricken nation wonders when the muchadvertised invasion by millions of enemy troops will begin. Our mechanized land forces are deployed to meet them headon. Every inch of our coastlines and land frontiers has been elaborately fortified for miles and miles inland in accordance with the new theories of defense in depth. After a while the country begins to wish for the land invasion that it feared — anything seems preferable to the relentless pounding from on high.
Then the stricken people begin to understand that there will be no immediate invasion in the old-fashioned sense of the word. The enemy has no intention of undertaking a slow, costly, mile-by-mile conquest of America on the ground when it can hammer the country into a writhing mass of ruins at leisure from overhead. The invader prefers to bleed America to the point of exhaustion and helplessness, demolishing its cities and its industries, wrecking its machinery of existence and its national morale.
In the past, too, there had been talk of total war. But now it is being demonstrated in pure form for the first time. America is being attacked as a totality rather than piecemeal. There is only one target: the whole country. The idea of a slow movement from the shorelines towards the interior no longer makes sense. Destruction has replaced occupation as the first objective. Given sufficient destruction, occupation can be undertaken or not, as the conqueror desires, to round out the victory.
The picture, I am keenly conscious, will seem fanciful at first blush. Those who dare to visualize it so vividly and to paint it as a genuine possibility lay themselves open to the charge of being alarmists. Even thus General de Gaulle and others were branded as panicmongers when they warned that frontier fortifications and huge armies were not enough in this age of aviation. Yet there is nothing remotely fanciful about the nightmarish picture. Bombers of that striking force are grim immediate realities. The one element lacking, adequate range, is rapidly being achieved.
Civilian, non-military aviation is certain in the near future to bind every nation of the planet in an immense network of aerial transportation. The United States, lying between the two great oceans, is destined to be the crossroads of this gigantic traffic: the ‘four corners’ of air routes not only over the Atlantic and Pacific but over the North and South Poles. We shall find ourselves in the very midst of a planetary air traffic, some of it not even pausing to refuel or reload in America as it makes express jumps between continents.
Our minds accept this coming peacetime aviation without too much resistance. They balk at accepting the same facts in relation to war movements, since those facts cut athwart established military ‘laws’ and patterns of thought. Granite is more yielding than deeply rooted ideas. However, we shall be as completely open for destructive attack as for commerce. In fact, air commerce will be as thoroughly guarded by Air Power as sea traffic has in the past been guarded by Sea Power. Self-consoling isolationist optimism has no place in the modern world. Physical remoteness, with all its attendant comforts and automatic safeguards, has been abolished.
It would be false to assume that those now tagged with the isolationist label have a monopoly on that optimism. On the contrary, it is implicit in our whole defense structure, in so far as that ignores the new facts which have telescoped space and made the skies above, rather than oceans or other surface barriers, the outer ramparts of the nation. Our current defense program evades the new reality that our first lines of defense must now be concentrated in the air, with an over-all strategy specifically designed for total aerial warfare, with a special and independent Command responsible for maintaining freedom of the skies.
Our official thinking and planning unfortunately have carried over into the new element of operations, the air, notions which are perfectly valid on the surface of the earth but are without meaning in the skies. Thus they have artificially divided the skies into airabove-land and air-above-water, and assigned one segment to the Army, another to the Navy. The arbitrary division is no more logical than it would be to split the Navy into sections in accordance with the depth or contours of the ocean floor. The air is an uninterrupted expanse, requiring uninterrupted tactics and uninterrupted authority in order to attain unity of command in this new sphere. Questions of coördination with the surface forces do not affect this fundamental concept. A Supreme Command, on which Army, Navy, and Air Force are equally represented, and which will deploy all three services to solve specific military problems, must be taken for granted, even as we now take cooperation between Army and Navy for granted.
What is involved is not a mere reshuffling of departments. To think that we can meet the new Air Age by rearrangement of bureaus, such as the War Department recently announced for its Air Corps, is frivolous and does not even touch the issue. The problem is infinitely more far-reaching. Nothing less than a new understanding of the physical world we live in — not only a technical but a psychological adjustment to the realities of a contracted world controlled from the third dimension, from the sky — will suffice. Such a readjustment is the first and inescapable condition for survival in the new circumstances presented by the advent of long-distance aviation.
The Roman Empire became dominant in its epoch because in an age of land power it was integrated with the psychology of land power; every Roman was a soldier. The British Empire emerged in the epoch of Sea Power, and every Briton, even if he never went to sea, was a sailor at heart. In this era of Air Power, America must integrate itself with the new force, and every American psychologically must become an aviator if we want to preserve our precious heritage of free institutions.