AIR POWER CONSIDERED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 August 1939, Page 4

AIR POWER CONSIDERED

revolutionary changes IN WARFARE. In his book, “Bombs Bursting in Air,” Major George Fielding Eliot, described as the American Liddell Hart, discusses the development of air power as a factor in world affairs. He regards the development of air power as one of three revolutionary changes in the entire history of warfare, the other two being discipline and gunpowder. By means of discipline, he says, "the prowess of the individual I warrior was crystallised into the ac-1 tion of the co-ordinated group.” Gunpowder made the peasant foot soldier i superior to the armoured knight, thus “providing the military lever for upsetting the feudal system, and made possible the regular armies and citizen militias which were the hammers which forged out the national entities of modern Europe.” It remained for the airplane, Major Eliot argues, to change the basic conditions of warfare by modifying the necessity of overcoming the enemy’s armed forces before political objects could be reached. The Munich agreement seemed to many an illustration of this point. It is possible to threaten a nation from a distance if one commands sufficient air power. “It is this power of direct action which constitutes the revolutionary element in air power.” Major Eliot has also pointed out the limitations which attach to the airplane as a factor in war: for example, that the airplane cannot, as an army or a battle fleet can, hold a military position. It can attack, but it cannot occupy.