The aeroplane is primarily an offensive weapon. If the aggressor
had no air force there would be no essential reason for the defence to maintain one. It is against air attack that air defence is. needed. The real question is whether it is practical • to ban military aeroplanes when civil aeroplanes are so admirably adapted to the business of bomb-dropping. , If the answer to that is that light fighting-machines, adapted to warding off bombers but not to dropping bombs themselves, might be maintained, that contention is met in turn with the rejoinder that the bombers will in such a case be convoyed by light fighters to engage the defending fighters. But that may not be the last word. It has more than once been suggested that weapons with such tremendous potentialities as bombing aeroplanes ought to be available only for withstanding violations of pledges like the League Covenant or the Kellogg Pact, not for perpetrating them—i.e., that only the League of Nations should possess an air-arm- and the international disarmament committee over which Lord Cecil presided in Paris last week seems to have had that idea in mind when it urged that certain arms of a particularly aggressive character should be excluded altogether, " which in the case of aviation can be realized by the method of internationalization." This raises large issues, but whatever the outcome, it is all to the good that the Government should be con- sidering- them.
