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Chapter 2 analyzes the ideas of the airpower theorist William (Billy) Mitchell. It describes his life and his "America," which in the words of period novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was "careless and confused." Mitchell, like his America, pursued his goals aggressively regardless of the consequences. This chapter also discusses how Jominian first principles – concentration, offensive action, and decision by battle – figured in Mitchell’s thinking. It ends by explaining how Mitchell’s model of war’s nature was essentially the same as Mahan’s, the traditional model.

Antulio J. Echevarria II reveals how successive generations of American strategic theorists have thought about war. Analyzing the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, Bernard Brodie, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Henry Eccles, Joseph Wiley, Harry Summers, John Boyd, William Lind, and John Warden, he uncovers the logic that underpinned each theorist's critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions about the nature and character of war. In so doing, he identifies four paradigms of war's nature - traditional, modern, political, and materialist - that have shaped American strategic thought. If war's logic is political, as Carl von Clausewitz said, then so too is thinking about war.

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2 - Billy Mitchell and Air Power

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War's Logic

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2 - Billy Mitchell and Air Power

Summary

War's Logic