The US homeland stands unguarded
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In the early 20th century, as air power advocates worked to understand the emerging role of aircraft in conflict, Brigadier Gen. William Mitchell conducted a series of tests.
The purpose was to demonstrate the airplane’s superior capabilities for coastal defense, at that time a Navy mission. Mitchell believed the airplane—and the Army Air Corps—were better suited to the task. In July 1921, Mitchell led the First Provisional Air Brigade from Virginia’s Langley Field in bombing tests against captured German ships and submarines.
Mitchell’s tests culminated in the sinking of the battleship Ostfriesland, which the Navy had believed invulnerable to air attack. Despite this demonstration of air power’s efficacy, a fight between the services for primacy against attack from the sea continued for decades. The Navy and Army Air Corps conducted competing exercises to prove it could better defend the nation.
A hundred years later, the U.S. faces greater threats than those the 1920s War Department could have imagined. They contemplated attacks only from the sea and sea-based aircraft.
Today the U.S. faces threats from all domains. Russia and China can target American cities and infrastructure with nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as ultra long-range, conventionally armed, land, air, sea and submarine-launched stealthy cruise missiles.
Beijing and Moscow have deployed weapons that can circumvent current threat warning and defensive systems. In a move some call a “sputnik moment," China recently tested a hypersonic missile that nearly orbited the globe before returning to hit a target. An additional menace are the cyber attacks that state and non-state actors regularly
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