Comments by "r baxter" (@rbaxter286) on "Drachinifel"
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Always amazed how people read what they want to into Mahan, as in what will justify their budgets, personal and governmental. Just a bunch of people who wouldn't or won't think for themselves, without applying the need to PROVE he was or is still relevant to a situation.
Mitchell was right in the emerging power of aviation, but grotesquely wrong about the actual technical aspects that only really sorta came to fruition in WW2, although I doubt carriers would have ever overcome a surface action group by themselves especially early in WW2 (HMS Glorious and Leyte sorta shine here).
Question is, were there any other actually effective leaders who did not really need Mitchell's acts of bravado to make things happen. After all, Mitchell was very much USN vs. USA in the US defense pig sty for funding and preeminence, especially when the 'Once and Future Lamestream Media' to a hold of that 'huge' story ..., a story meant to prod the ever-present Local Barbershop/YouTube Experts ..., you know like FLERFs and other History Channel Amateur Historians ...
MItchell seems to have been a 'Prophetic' Guderian for airpower instead of a post facto 'Genius' Guderian for his (self-asserted) prowess in armor warfare ..., and why Allies should not jail him and NATO should hire him ...
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“War is progressive because all instruments of war are progressive.” US Grant
I remember getting involved with this when first finding Sumida's book on RN pioneering fire control and the Pollen myth of superiority (funny, it was a pre-'clickbait' scholarly book that started and fueled a controversy suitably answered in return salvos like similar controversies surrounding things I remember like variable geometry fighter, fighter bomber, and bomber airfoils, the Phoenix missile system, the F-100 engine that 'doomed' the F-15 and later F-16 (allegedly), the the new-release turbine power unit for the Abrams tank, cruise missiles in strategic and then tactical roles, the M-16 gun, etc).
Went back to WWI era USN gunnery manuals and inter-war enlisted 'ratings' manuals as well as the various reference works on interior and exterior ballistics; hoovered up followup books to Sumida along with Jutland histories (from both sides of the battle line), and into the various sensationalist tripe on the Iowa turret blast and the rebuttals by actual technical experts. Also, found the INRO/Warship International volumes and back issues crammed full of things like actual salvo spread diagrams for US and 'other' ships along with the subsequent Fighting Instructions to US captains (boy, were they gonna be surprised when they closed into the EXTREMELY vulnerable zone for the IJN 20" gun instead of moving to a much-more invulnerable zone based on the wrong assumptions, like 16" guns on the Yamato series). Really wish I'd paid more attention to the appropriate calculus physics in my 1st semester Mechanics classes.
In the end, it was GLARINGLY obvious to me why big guns got the bums rush they did once military tech emerged from the Dark Ages of mechanical tech and into the electrical and electronics ages. Fortunately, things like the US government investing in aviation in general helped spur the development of tech that made the big gun battle line obsolete for both sides at about the same time, without the USN ending up a generation behind.
That need to never be behind has fueled so much USN research, and outright theft of ideas like angel-deck carriers, since that day; some wasted money, some tacitly wasted but still supported (e.g., early Aegis house of cards), and some well invested.
The passing of the big gun was a paradigm shift for the navies as big as relativity and 'billions and billions of galaxies!!' was to astrophysics. It just never has had a Thomas Kuhn treatment of it, as far as I remember reading (but, that's not much of a reach, nowadays).
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