Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Piercing the Fog
Events in the war and visions of future aviation developments convinced
some airmen that air power had a role beyond immediate support for ground
forces. If so, air intelligence had to include a much wider scope and had to be
the responsibility of individuals and agencies able to understand and best use
it.
In the years between the world wars, issues of air intelligence in the United
States were closely linked with the more fundamental questions of the role of
air power and its place in the military establishment. The air intelligence
struggles of this period centered on two axes, organizational and functional.
Organizational disputes involved questions of the importance of air intelligence
and the determination of which offices within the War Department should be
responsible for the relevant information. Initially addressed within the context
of the War Department General Staff (WDGS) structure, enactment of the Air
Corps Act of 1926 initiated debates among elements of the Air Corps as well.
Functional arguments involved more conceptual questions of what
constituted air intelligence. In the 1920s airmen agreed that the collection and
evaluation of data necessary to compile the air order of battle (OB) and the
gathering of other data relevant to foreign air forces were the main tasks of air
intelligence. By the mid- 1930s, airmen were developing the concept of strategic
air warfare; they argued it was no longer sufficient to know the enemy’s
immediate military capability either in the air or on the ground. Despite their
efforts to promote the doctrine of strategic bombardment, even they failed to
fully grasp the true extent of the collection and analysis tasks such a doctrine
implied.
The revolutionary nature of the strategic bombing doctrine developed at the
Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) at Maxwell Field, Alabama, required a
comprehensive understanding of an enemy’s economic system, with special
emphasis on war production and its underlying support factors. No American
air war theorist fully understood this, although some like Muir S. Fairchild
developed an early appreciation for the task. The failure, perhaps inevitable, to
resolve basic issues regarding American air power before World War I1 made
the development of an adequate air intelligence capability almost impossible.
Moreover, the neglect the Army and the Army Air Corps as institutions
demonstrated toward intelligence compounded these inherent problems. When
Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and Clark Field, the U.S. Amy and its
AAF still lacked a complete grasp of what air intelligence entailed, what it was
supposed to accomplish, and how it should be organized.
American Air Intelligence in World War I
When the United States declared war on the Central Powers in April 1917,
military intelligence reflected the general state of unpreparedness in which the
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