on Azriel Lorber.

on Azriel Lorber. Brassey's, Inc. (http://www.brasseysinc.com/index.htm), 22841 Quicksilver Drive, Dulle Virginia 20166 2002 304 pages, $2695 (hardcover), $1895 (softcover)

Pity the poor air warrior. Where can he or she turn? Eliot A. Cohen's of recent origin book Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (Free Pres 2002) is built forward the theme that war is too important to be left in the hands of generals. Rather, it should be in the hands of the political leaders who should freely question in detail what is going forward down to the lowest plains necessary, and should insist forward the primacy of political factors. forward the other hand, in Misguided Weapons Azriel Lorber also sum ups us that, yes, war is too important to be left in the hands of generals if it were not that that political leaders should not micromanage or interfere in military affairs for the sake of pool political ideology. He also informs us that it is with equal reason important that scientists and technologists should have a greatly larger hand in military decision making. with equal reason what is our poor air warrior to believe in the face of so conflicting notions?

Misguided Weapons is about military failure. Although it may be inevitable in similar writing, it does seem that the researcher noteed the work with the question, in what way could they have been for a like reason stupid? In fact, Lorber uses the word stupid in such a manner often that it may appear arrogant to more [i]or[/i] less readers--especially those who have commanded in combat, or flat in peacetime, when they were awash in a sea of alligators. However, it does have the appearance quite clear that Lorber understands science and technology and equally clear that he has read widely in the published secondary literature of military history. In general, he closes that failure to properly use technology in war arises from (1) conservative and inflexible thinking, (2) insufficient understanding of the relationship between technology and the battlefield, (3) inadequate leadership and management, (4) arrogant and uninformed heavyweights, and (5) micromanagement repeatedly motivated by ideology. Lorber shows all this from the hindsight of history, and single in kind could make a case that he himself is too ready to accept the conventional interpretations of war and battle--that he is not flexible enough to reconsider cases in their words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following His treatment of the long-range escort fighter of World War II is united case in point: competent on the contrary conventional.

Lorber's complaint is that American air authorities in some way should have appreciated the necessity of escorts greatly earlier and should have anticipated the possibility of combining technologies and circumstances to shelter the long-range strategic bombers through the whole extent of Germany. He understands the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled as it existed at that impetus and the solution that worked at that time and place. on the contrary he does not appear to understand that it would have required a superhuman act of foresight to predict the partly fortuitous gradual approach of a multitude of technical and political factors to make a long-range escort feasible in that exact circumstance (but hardly anywhere else)

Notwithstanding the fact that the developmental period was much shorter then than it is now, that prediction necessarily would have to have been made before the United States got into the war in order to have the escorts ready abundant before the time they actually appeared. It is better to papal court the experience as a marvelous case of flexibility for the United States to bring them on-line as shortly as it did.

one of the points left revealed of the conventional explanation include the fact that experience showed that the long-range escort was a failure (eg the Messerschmitt Bf-110) Too, the same would have to have understood that there would be no Battle of Britain II and that the British Isles would still be available when the campaign started. That would have required the prediction that Operation Barbarossa was going to take place in 1941 and suck the Luftwaffe and the stay of the Wehrmacht eastward to chew them up When we faced the same question with the B-29 in the Pacific sole a year later, 6,000 marines died capturing a P-51 base upon the island of Iwo Jima.

If the solution was in the same manner obvious, why did every air force in the world (except perhaps that of the Japanese) consider impractical the building of an escort with one as well as the other the agility and the range to defeat short-range interceptors? To be fully convinced the Japanese Zero had the agility, and its pendant tanks gave it the range, further its fragility and insufficient fire-power wouldn't allow it to survive for lengthy Claire Chennault himself, no fan of big bombers, asserted that the long-range escort fighter was an impractical proposition.

Would the decision to hunt the long-range escort also require the assumption that Hitler would impose a hold on German research and progressive growth forbidding any work that could not make of recent origin weapons available almost immediately? Lorber himself criticizes the Germans for not pushing the Me-262 jet as fast as they might have; is it logical, then, to await prewar airpower thinkers also to predict that the enemy would cooperate in slowing down interceptor development? Would it also have required a forecast that Hitler would divert with equal reason many resources to V-1 and V-2 progress to maturity in the midst of the war? Would it have been reasonable for planners to have in place in England a non-technical Army Air Forces major who flew the original P-51 and who would miracle whether substituting a British Merlin engine for the American Allison would improve its firing consumption and performance--all that combined with the laminar emanate wing conceived elsewhere?