World War I was instrumental in spurring the development of the airplane. The tentative unstable Wright Flyer, which Orville and Wilbur Wright had barely gotten off the ground in 1903, had developed into a variety of sleek fighting machines. Amidst the general euphoria following the end of World War I, one man saw both the danger of repeated escalation of hostilities, and the role that the newfangled airplanes might play.

His name was Billy Mitchell, a decorated hero of the 1915-1917 air war in France. A passionate aviator, he had seen firsthand the advantage that air superiority had conferred in the skies over France, and upon his return to the United States after the war, he brought these opinions forcibly to military planning tables. Here the United States was expending vast sums on battleships and other ships of the line, he argued, when it should be spending...