The Pentagon Has Learned From 1928. What Can It Learn From 1917?

In "Learning to Fly Again," I described how the United States entered World War One three years behind in the air, and how it caught up. On October 19, 2026, the Pentagon issued a memo and Owen West, who leads Project Agincourt, subsequently laid out how the department will build an Autonomous Warfare Command. His memo deserves a close reading against the record of 1917.

The Pentagon Remembers 1928

West opens by recalling 1928 when Secretary of War Dwight Davis ordered the Army to test a unified mechanized force of tanks, armored trucks and motorized infantry. The Army soon disbanded that unified force and split mechanization among the existing branches as add-ons. It took the German blitzkrieg of 1940 to force the creation of the US Armored Force.

Agincourt aims to avoid repeating 1928. It will stand up a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM) by 1 October 2027. The command's commander will have the authority to "drive the largest institutional change since the interwar years." West states the goal plainly: "The goal is not a particular drone. It is a system built to adapt at scale."

Where The Memo Echoes 1917

On four points, the memo reads as if its authors had studied the American air effort of 1917–18.

Asking for evidence. In 1917, planners promised to darken the skies over Germany, and the causes of that ultimately failed promise ended up being the subject of the Hughes investigation. West writes that new systems "will not be declared ready on paper." Competitions, exercises and combat performance will decide which systems scale. Every auditable dollar must lower the cost per kill or the risk to the force. The memo will measure success by how long a fielded solution takes to solve an operational problem.

Learning at the edge. In 1917, the Bolling Mission went to the front and asked the people who flew and maintained the aircraft which types to build. Agincourt pairs companies directly with operational units and calls those units "incubators."

Valuing the operator. American pilots were trained in French and British schools and learned from the American veterans of the Lafayette Escadrille. West highlights "an unmatched NCO corps" as one of two American strengths.

Building an institution. NACA, founded in 1915, mattered more than any single aircraft of 1918. AUTOWARCOM aims to make adaptation itself the main product of a permanent command.

1917 Asks Three More Questions

Who will build at scale? The Liberty engine succeeded because Detroit could build a stable, standardized component by the thousands, and because Allied orders had already built American capacity.
The Agincourt memo says nothing about industrial capacity: A command that cuts systems quickly after each competition protects the taxpayer, but will suppliers build factories for a demand that can disappear the next quarter?

Where is the front? In 1917, the United States learned at the front of a war it had not yet joined. The Agincourt memo relies on competitions, exercises and combat performance, yet never mentions Ukraine, where combat performance is measured every day.

Whose designs will American forces use? Most aircraft the American Expeditionary Forces received in 1918 were superior French designs and necessity had overcome national pride. Will American forces adopt Ukrainian designs where those designs outperform domestic programs?

The Clock Is Running

West quotes the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Caine: "If not us, who? If not now, when?" 

For investors, the questions are of  a different nature. In 1917, Detroit built the Liberty engine, and the front left the DH-4 behind. In today’s context, the questions would be “Which companies build what every winner will need in this conflict and the next? And who pays to scale them while they wait for a buyer?”

In my next post, I will turn to what these questions mean for early-stage investors in defense, intelligence and aerospace.

Learning to Fly Again: Arming for a War You Are Not Fighting

Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, 1,707 days ago at the time of writing. This war has already lasted 140 days longer than World War One.

The United States is not a combatant in Ukraine. It also did not fight in World War One until April 1917, almost three years into the war. Until then, US banks lent the Allies billions of dollars and American factories filled their orders. A nation that watches a war from outside finds it hard to know where to invest, because the combatants change their weapons faster than an outsider can follow. The United States had to learn this in 1917, and its armed forces face the same challenge today.

America started three years behind

Since 1914, Europe's air forces had moved through several generations of fighters and had split air power into pursuit, reconnaissance, bombing and ground attack. When Congress declared war on 6 April 1917, the Army's air arm was a section of the Signal Corps. It owned fewer than 300 aircraft, none fit to fight over the Western Front, and a few dozen qualified pilots. It had no combat-tested design, no military engine in volume production, and no doctrine.

The United States did have assets Europe lacked: a vast automotive industry, money, and young men eager to fly. Allied orders had already expanded its munitions, steel and machine-tool capacity. Congress had also laid institutional groundwork: It created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1915, and the National Research Council followed in 1916. Both shaped American aviation for decades.

Rapid innovation outpaced America's late start In July 1917 Congress appropriated $640 million for aviation, then the largest single appropriation in American history. Planners promised more than 20,000 aircraft.

To reach that volume, the Army chose the British DH-4 two-seater,  an airplane that had first flown a year back in August 1916, fitted it with the American Liberty engine, and tooled up.
The front moved on while the factories retooled and the first American-built DH-4s reached France only in mid-1918. Crews judged the type outdated and called it the “flaming coffin” because its fuel tank caught fire easily. Only about 1,200 had crossed the Atlantic when Germany collapsed. Most of the American-built aircraft never left the United States.

America caught up by learning, borrowing and building

The United States still closed the gap within 18 months.

• It learned from the front. In June 1917 the Bolling Mission went to France, Britain and Italy and asked the people who flew and maintained aircraft which types to build. In the end, most of the roughly 6,000 aircraft the American Expeditionary Forces received were French, among them the SPAD XIII and the Nieuport 28. National pride gave way to necessity and effectiveness.

• It mass-produced what industry did best. Engineers designed the Liberty L-12 engine in about a week in May 1917. Detroit knew how to make a standardized, high-volume component, and Packard, Ford, Lincoln and others built more than 13,000 by the armistice. 

• It trained with the allies. American pilots learned at French and British schools and at the American center at Issoudun. Veterans of the Lafayette Escadrille, Americans who had flown for France since 1916, formed an experienced cadre.
  
  

Ukraine innovates in weeks

In Ukraine, measure and countermeasure follow each other within weeks. Cheap first-person-view drones made armor vulnerable. Electronic jamming answered them, and fiber-optic guided drones answered the jamming. Interceptor drones now hunt long-range attack drones. 

Both sides now build millions of drones a year, by their own accounts, mostly from commercial parts. Software, radio links, seekers and operator skill decide the outcome, and all of them change faster than an airframe.

US acquisition runs on a slower clock. A major program takes years to move from requirement to fielding. The Pentagon's Replicator initiative, launched in 2023, aimed to field thousands of attritable systems within two years, a pace the department considered fast. In Ukraine, two years span many generations of drone design.


Learnings are easy to state but difficult to act on

The lessons for today’s forces are well known and will not be repeated here. Many of them threaten the interests of the established defense industry, which explains why they are easier to state than to act on.  In my next posts, I will take a look at Project Agincourt and then turn to what this means for early stage investors in defense, intelligence and aerospace.