Aerial Armament and Disarmament

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THE conflicts of armies have left their mark across history from the plains of Marathon to the woods of the Argonne. Sea power has guided the course of nations, often dominant over all other factors, from Salamis to Jutland. To war by land and sea we have added combat in a third element, more dreadful in its potentialities than either of the older forms, warfare in the air. The late European war offered but a foretaste of what may come when things that were the imaginings of fictionists a decade and a half ago are realized in grim truth and great forces soar aloft to batter each other in the skies, raining death and destruction on the earth below. The picture is not one to contemplate with calmness, and men react to it according to their various habits of thought. Some seek to develop defense against aircraft, others seek defense against war.

To analyze the activities of the first group would be to risk becoming a partisan in the dispute long and bitterly waged between the believers in the supremacy of the capital ship and those who uphold the merits of its foes below and above the surface of the water.

No one, strong though his belief in the capital ship or in the infantryman may be, denies to aircraft a place of first-rate importance in the warfare of the future, whether conducted primarily on land or at sea. The place may or may not be one of supremacy so clear as to render other factors relatively unimportant; but all are agreed that, as between two armies or navies even approximately of the same class at the surface, clear control of the air would decide the issue. It is in the air that the military rivalries of the Powers are now developing most rapidly and most dangerously...