Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Early Intelligence Organization
In a strongly worded critique of the W D draft, the ACTS proclaimed that
the regulation was too narrowly predicated on the geographic isolation of the
United States and focused too tightly on ground operations. In reality, the ACTS
paper rejoined, “The principal and all important missions of air power, when its
equipment permits, is the attack of those vital objectives in a nation’s economic
structure [emphasis added] which will tend to paralyze that nation’s ability to
wage war and thus contribute to the attainment of the ultimate objective of war,
namely, the disintegration of the will to resist.” Very little of the thought in the
ACTS critique appeared in the regulation as officially published on October 15,
1935. The regulation recognized “that a phase of air operations would probably
precede the contact of the surface forces and that the outcome of this phase
would exert a potent influence upon subsequent operations. . . . [Tlhe effect
which air forces were capable of producing and the extent to which they would
influence warfare [were] still ~ndetermined.”~’ Despite its limited impact on TR
440-1 5, the ACTS’S critique was of great significance, for it expounded clearly
and forcefully the fundamental differences in soldiers’ and airmen’s concepts
on the employment of air power. While not ignoring the role of air power in
support of the land campaign and continental and hemispheric air defense, the
ACTS developed and taught what can be described most accurately as
revolutionary concepts about the employment of air power in strategic
offensive--concepts that had broad implications for air intelligence, but
implications that were not fully recognized, even by airmen.
Broadly defined, officers at the ACTS argued that strategic air power, as
manifested primarily by the B-17 aircraft, could be decisive by bringing about
the collapse of both the means and the will of an adversary to conduct war. The
ACTS maintained that identification and destruction of so-called vital targets
within an industrial nation’s economic structure would be decisive, i.e., would
win the war. It does not appear that the school’s proponents of this concept for
strategic bombardment fully grasped the significance of the interrelationship
between strategic targeting of an industrial state and the need, let alone the
difficulties, of acquiring and then analyzing vast amounts of economic data.
Indeed, a central figure in all air planning in the 1930s, and for much of World
War 11 as well, Maj. Gen. Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., admitted that to the best of
his knowledge nobody seems to have recognized, as late as 1939, the critical
need to conduct indusrrial analysis if the concept of strategic air attack was to
be translated into pra~tice.~’ This lack of understanding by proponents of
strategic air attack led to conditions wherein civilian analysts assumed
responsibility for key intelligence tasks. In the area of economic analysis and
industrial targeting, civilians eventually took the lead from the uniformed
military in World War 11.
Although the ACTS people recognized that U.S. military policy was
defensive, they reasoned that only offensive actions could win a war. The same
group also rationalized that in a war against a major adversary in Europe, allied
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