Air Power and World Strategy

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THERE is an old military axiom that the weapons of war change but the great principles of war remain unchanged. Up to a point that is still true; but it must be supplemented, if we are to think realistically about world strategy today, by recognition of a fact of enormous significance--the fact of the revolution in human affairs which has been brought about by the rise of air power and the development of the atomic and thermonuclear weapon. Hitherto the weapons of war have been used and the principles of war have been applied upon the battlefield. Quite recently--within the lifetime of our children not yet of university age--we have seen the battlefield begin to lose its significance; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we have seen whole countries become a battlefield. We have actually seen in the green fields of England and the industrial cities of Germany and Japan that "ghastly dew from the nations' airy navies battling in the central blue" that Tennyson imagined in Queen Victoria's reign. We have felt the impact of a new portent, the robot pilotless aircraft or guided missile, the V1 and V2 that fell upon England ten years ago. And now we have reached the consummation of the new revolution, in the atomic and the hydrogen bombs...