Victory in air war will lie with whichever side first gains the moral objective. If one side is so foolish as to waste time――more the supreme factor than ever before――in searching for the armed forces of the enemy, which are mobile and capable of concealment, then clearly the static civil centres of its own land will be paralysed first――and the issue will be decided long before the side which trusted in the “armed forces” objective has crossed the enemy’s frontiers. If, on the other hand, the decisiveness of the moral objective be admitted, is it not the height of absurdity to base the military forces of a nation on infantry, which would――even if unopposed――take weeks to reach Essen or Berlin, for example, when aircraft could reach and destroy both in a matter of hours? OBJECTIONS TO THE AIR-ATTACK To this use of aircraft to gain the moral objective there are, however, two possible objections, one economic, the other ethical. The economic limitation is that by destroying the enemy factories and communications we may so cripple his commerce and industry as seriously to reduce his post-war value as a potential customer. There is a certain weight in this argument, for if one lesson stands out clearly from the last war it is that the commerce and prosperity of civilized nations are so closely interwoven and interdependent that the destruction of the enemy country’s economic wealth recoils on the head of the victor. The obvious reply, however, is that even the widespread damage of a decisive air attack would inflict less total damage and constitute less of a drain on the defeated country’s recuperative powers than a prolonged war of the existing type. The ethical objection is based on the seeming brutality of an attack on the civilian population, and the harmful results to the aggressor of any outrage of the human feelings of the neutral peoples. The events of the last war have, however, in some measure acclimatised the world to the idea that in a war between nations the damage cannot be restricted merely to the paid gladiators. When, moreover, the truth is realized that a swift and sudden blow of this nature inflicts a total of injury far less than when spread over a number of years, the common sense of mankind will show that the ethical objection to this form of war is at least not greater than to the cannon-fodder wars of the past.