ng
and Night Fighting. The Machine and Engine. Tactics
and the Strategic Air Offensive. Organization.

CHAPTER III. PEACE 96

The Future of Aerial Defence. Civil Aviation: as a
Factor in National Security; as an Instrument of
Imperial Progress; Financial and Economic Problems;
Weather Conditions and Night Flying; Organization; the
Machine and Engine. Air Services: British, Continental
and Imperial.

CONCLUSION 131

INTRODUCTION

Since the earliest communities of human beings first struggled for
supremacy and protection, the principles of warfare have remained
unchanged. New methods have been evolved and adopted with the progress
of science, but no discovery, save perhaps that of gunpowder, has done
so much in so short a time to revolutionize the conduct of war as
aviation, the youngest, yet destined perhaps to be the most effective
fighting-arm. Yet to-day we are only on the threshold of our knowledge,
and, striking as was the impetus given to every branch of aeronautics
during the four years of war, its future power can only dimly be seen.

We may indeed feel anxious about this great addition of aviation to the
destructive power of modern scientific warfare. Bearing its terrors in
mind, we may even impotently seek to check its advance, but the appeal
of flying is too deep, its elimination is now impossible, and granted
that war is inevitable, it must be accepted for good or ill.
Fortunately, although with the other great scientific additions,
chemical warfare and the submarine, its potentialities for destruction
are very great, yet aircraft, unlike the submarine, can be utilized not
only in the conduct of war but in the interests of peace, and it is
here that we can guide and strengthen it for good. Just as the naval
supremacy of Britain was won because commercially we were the greatest
seafaring people in the world, so will air supremacy be achieved by that
country which, making aviation a part of its everyday life, becomes an
airfaring community.

Our nation as a whole has been educated, owing to its geographical
situation and by tradition, to interest itself in the broader aspects of
marine policy and development. It requires to take the same interest in
aviation, a comparatively new subject, unhampered to a great extent by
preconceived notions and therefore offering greater s