Difference between revisions of "Military"

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(the opinion that the overwhelming destructiveness of air power would necessitate world peace)
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** [[Aircraft Production Board]]
 
** [[Aircraft Production Board]]
 
* Great Britain
 
* Great Britain
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** [[School of Ballooning]]
 
** [[British Air Ministry]]
 
** [[British Air Ministry]]
 
** [[British Navy]] / [[Admiralty Air Department]]
 
** [[British Navy]] / [[Admiralty Air Department]]

Revision as of 20:30, 28 July 2018

Military organizations with aeronautics activity:

Military facilities:

Military projects:

Wars:

Some publications:

Following the first demonstrations of ballooning, Benjamin Franklin speculated in a 1784 letter:

Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may, perhaps, be one effect of it, since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions. Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence, as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?

The exposure of interior territory to aerial attack was foreshadowed by naval bombardments targeting cities, which occurred periodically during the 19th century. This type of attack provoked similar issues in international law and politics, as well as the problems of defence versus deterrence.[2] (Thus, Lloyd George, "We shall bomb Germany with compound interest" — i.e. retaliate against their civilian population because of the impossibility of stopping their attacks on ours.)[3]

Coxwell, 1887 dates military aeronautics to the French Revolutionary era, referring maybe to the Committee of Public Safety (p. 168):

The inventive genius of the French may be traced no less than their intrepidity in their early efforts to apply the balloon to purposes of warfare.
In the year 1793, a scientific committee was formed in Paris with this object, when it was suggested that balloon should be used both for attack and defence, and for ascertaining the movement of armies in the field, and to get at the strength of fortified places.
Here was a clear and comprehensive plan for a new departure in military science which the leading nations of Europe have been slow in imitating.

Coxwell also mentions the use of a reconnaissance balloon by the Compagnie d'aérostiers at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794 (p. 173).

Hallion, 2003, p. 296:

At heart military dominance demands height. With height comes view, with view comes awareness, and with awareness comes the ability to undertake decisive action. Since earliest times, from the days of the scout perched on a horse on top of a hill, military leaders sought means of reaching across intervening terrain to learn about an enemy and his intentions, and if possible, to strike at him. Wellington, victorious over assorted armies at Seringapatam at Assaye in India, over various of Napoleon's marshals in Spain, and finally over Napoléon himself at Waterloo, famously remarked in 1845, "I have been passing my life in guessing what I might meet with beyond the next hill, or round the next corner." Early aviators recognized that the vantage point conveyed by flight offered tremendous possibilities of assuaging the frustration Wellington expressed.

Air power also has a psychological effect, especially on people not familiar with it. According to an Italian report on the 1887 war in Eritrea:

Once the emperor and his army had arrived near the Italian camp, the Italian general caused a balloon to be sent up in order to observe the enemy from above. The effect of the balloon was to alarm the Ethiopian soldiers who, without listening to their commanders, began to turn back towards their homes, saying: 'We can face an army of men, but not an army of God which comes from the sky' ... If a bomb had fallen from the balloon, the entire armies of Begemder and Wollo would never have fired so much as a single rifle shot; only the soldiers of Tigray would have stayed to fight.[4]

An essay in 1902 argued that the very potency of aerial warfare would bring about world peace:

At first though it might seem that war might be transferred to the air overhead and battles be fought between the airships of nations, instead of by their battleships and armies. But the room overhead is limitless for the operation of aerial navigators. While an aerial battle was going on, a detached airship could destroy a nation. In short, the possibilities of destruction in a single airship would destroy destruction itself, by the common consent of all humanity, and the perfection of such an airship would be the signal for the unanimous decision and agreement of the nations to not use such in a war.
But the knowledge of such a means of complete destruction would exist; and, hence, no nation knowing that it was safe, all nations would turn form war as a recourse for the acquisition of territory or commercial advantages, and for the settlement of disputes. This means the end of war, and Mars must trade his sword for a hoe and his shield for a bushel basket.[5]

Quotations on air power in war collected during World War I by Henry Woodhouse and printed at the front of his 1917 Textbook of Naval Aeronautics.
Enclosing categories Simple tech terms
Subcategories Projectile, Bomb
Keywords
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References

  1. ↑ See w:it:Servizio Aeronautico
  2. ↑ Hippler, 2013, 15–19 etc.
  3. ↑ Abbot, 1918, Aircraft and Submarines, p. 210.
  4. ↑ Report by County Pietro Antonelli to Italian Foreign Office, 10 June 1888, cited in A. Lodi, Storia delle origini dell'aeronautica militaire, quoted in Hippler, 2013. p. 5.
  5. ↑ "That Airship", Aeronautical World, August 1902, p. 11. [Is this a quotation from somewhere else?]
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