Before the heavy transport aeroplane can be safely used its mechanics must be insured against attack from fighting aeroplanes in the hands of highly skilled men. And this brings us to the essential objection to any panic creation of air forces. In the air quality is of supreme importance, and quality is rare. Given equal machines a good man can almost always put down a mediocre man; a man of exceptional gifts can keep on putting down ordinary men. The star air fighters in the war were men who had accounted for scores of enemy machines. Given a few exceptional men and the best machines, an air force of a few score units is capable of accounting for hundreds of inferior squadrons. God, we are told, is on the side of the biggest battalions, but this arithmetical preference, if it continues at all at the present time, is certainly restricted only to land fighting. In the air God is now manifestly on the side of intelligence, quickness, and courage. For a mastery of the air over and around one’s country there is needed therefore, before all other things, a War Office capable of finding and using first-class men, aviators, mechanics and inventors. Inventors and innovators most of all. After that, it must have money for the best material. But the money and the bulk of the product is a secondary matter. It is only after the air war is won that the big omnibuses full of bombs can come into play for more than incidental raids. Now it is doubtful if any War Office exists or can exist capable of carrying on a skilled air warfare. There is something subtly stupid and unscientific about this war business, and you will never find first-class imaginations giving themselves freely and continuously to war organisation. Great men like Cromwell or Mr. Trotsky may do miracles of war organisation under necessity, but it is only puerile types like Mr. Amery who can go on planning war in peace time. The soldier is, has been, and always will be a rather limited and usually a rather thickheaded person. It follows therefore that if ever there should be a real, fully-prepared-for war in the world again--a thing which, as the unrepentant author of the phrase “The War to End War,” I am naturally disposed to doubt--then probably the air warfare which will dominate it will be a warfare conducted with machines far below the quality of the best contemporary knowledge, and by men below the highest attainable standard. It may be, therefore, a clumsy war, as needlessly destructive as the great war; and the lumbering big aeroplane, with its tons of explosive, in search for targets of military significance, will incidentally smash up all sorts of precious things. But the less clumsy air-warfare is the less it will do that. It is a paradoxical-looking but quite valid proposition that the less we develop special skill and invention in air-warfare the more prolonged and destructive air-warfare is likely to be. A brilliantly