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 Crews judged the type outdated and called it the “flaming coffin” because its fuel tank caught fire easily.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.