ABSTRACT
When reflecting on air power history, it is difficult to discern marked watersheds, with the exception, perhaps, of the introduction of the aircraft carrier and the jet engine. But, equally, it would be wrong to view the development of air power as a steady evolutionary process. Its growth was episodic, spurred on, as one would expect, by war, and often retarded during peacetime when there was budgetary constraint on research and development. One of the values of reflecting on air power history is that it offers insight into what can happen if we fail to nurture military capability during periods of peace, at the very least in a doctrinal sense, and it also highlights the dangers of forgetting the important lessons of the last war. For these reasons, one of the most interesting periods is that of the First World War and the decades that followed. Many important lessons were learned about the nature of military aviation between 1914 and 1918, but most of those lessons were neatly filed away and forgotten during the inter-war years, only to be painfully relearned by the next generation of airmen. There were many reasons for this, including the appearance of a doctrine of air power which was more of an article of faith than any real reflection of military capability. 1 The consequences were extremely serious. In this business, reinventing the wheel means lives lost unnecessarily and certainly much wasted treasure.
