Wednesday, November 16, 2022

The NYT's election face plant reflects a long standing problem

Michael Cieply writing in 2016. [Emphasis added.]

Having left the Times on July 25, after almost 12 years as an editor and correspondent, I missed the main heat of the presidential campaign; so I can’t add a word to those self-assessments of the recent political coverage. But these recent mornings-after leave me with some hard-earned thoughts about the Times’ drift from its moorings in the nation at-large.

For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”

It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.” 


Not only is the New York Times far more committed to its narratives than are its peers, the narratives it embraces are almost uniformly the worst possible kind: simplistic; hackneyed; and static. Truths are obvious. Characters tend to fall neatly into the four basic categories: hero, victim, villain, fool. A story of scientific standards and incentives becomes a tired Scarlet Pimpernel tale of revolutionary zealots persecuting a young woman who overcame great hardship to learn how to dance again. A serious debate over the best educational approaches degenerates into a black hat / white hat fight between those who care about children and those who simply want to pursue their own selfish ends. The enormously complex problem of housing is reduced to a handful of trivial old money versus new money fights about tiny pieces of land.

Add to this arrogance, provincialism, enormous resistance to criticism, and a tendency toward the self-serving, and you get a dangerously toxic mix.

For the press in general, and the New York Times in particular, there is no narrative as safe and as reassuring as Dems in disarray.The basic plot had dust on the script back when Shirley Temple was the biggest thing in Hollywood, it plays to comfortable notions and stereotypes, and best of all, it hits that sweet spot for nominally center-left publications terrified of accusations of liberal bias. (Something that conservatives have found extraordinarily easy to take advantage of.) It appeases critics from the right while framing the story as concerned rather than dismissive.

"Dems in disarray" and the New York Times' other narratives and literary tics have become so predictable that the satirical New York Times Pitchbot's parody headlines often show up in the paper a few days later almost verbatim.


Given the paper's self-importance, the satire is deeply amusing, but given its actual importance, this kind of lazy writing and even lazier journalism isn't acceptable in the paper of record.


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Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Tuesday Schadenfreude Tweets -- an embarrassment of embarrassments

I love this quote.

We'll make this first part fairly brief, partly because Joseph has already given us a good overview of last week in crypto and partly because Matt Levine (in his essential newsletter) warns us we don't want to spend too much time staring into this abyss.

If a troubled company has a few days to beg potential investors for a bailout before it files for bankruptcy, and it sends those investors its balance sheet so they can consider investing, and they all pass, and then the company files for bankruptcy, of course the balance sheet was bad. That is not a state of affairs that is consistent with a pristine fortress balance sheet.
But there is a range of possible badness, even in bankruptcy, and the balance sheet that Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto exchange FTX.com sent to potential investors last week before filing for bankruptcy on Friday is very bad. It’s an Excel file full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls. If you look too long at that spreadsheet, you will go insane.






 

Now moving on to Twitter. (You'd think that Sam Bankman-Fried would have had a lock on most embarrassing business news, but no.)




 

This last one applies to all of Musk's businesses.




Of all of the tweets from fake accounts, this shout out to the age of banana republics is my favorite.




You know what this story needs? A TED connection.

And some questionable ethics.

Interesting thread on the wave of non-parody frauds hitting Twitter.


 

General Muskiness.



Joseph already mentioned this but it bears repeating.

 

 

Musk was betting heavily on the red wave, which segues neatly into our next topic.


And saving the best schadenfreude for last...












And finally, a break from the snark.

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Monday, November 14, 2022

Follow-up to Friday's post on FTX

This is Joseph.

Perhaps it was a mistake to post on a fast-changing event but the FTX saga definitely has taken some rather unexpected twists:


So it really is looking like this company was a straight up Ponzi scheme. Which probably shouldn't be a surprise given the interview with Sam Bankman-Fried where Matt Levine characterized his business model as:
I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would've described farming. You're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good.
So perhaps there we warning signs about cryptocurrency as an investment? Insofar as a currency is a financial instrument, there is rarely a more dangerous market than currency speculation. Insofar as it is an investment, the fundamental value of zero really needs to be engaged more. I am hoping Mark comes back to this as cryptocurrency is really his wheelhouse and he has been proven right. 

What I found more fascinating is how an educated person could have ended up describing (and agreeing they were describing) a Ponzi scheme as their business model. Then I read this:



Then it made sense. If the world is about six-paragraph blog posts (not that I, clearly, object to the medium) then it is hard to get depth on any subject. When you are running a financial services company based on a physics undergraduate education, it is easy to become arrogant. 

Speaking of arrogant, Twitter laid off too many employees and now needs to rehire some because they are suddenly short of critical skills. One point is that this is not a promising sign of a solid business plan. But there is a second point about how it is revealing about other cultural cracks. A twitter manager posted this on his internal slack:



William Pietri is right about the immediate diagnosis:


But I think that there is another level to all of this change. Part of what made the "tech industry" so appealing was a knowledge based approach that was intended to change the world. Now money was a big part too, people need to feed themselves. But there are lots of ways to make money. One thing that tech really had going for it was the ability to intrinsically motivate people, via humane treatment and a sense of mission (Tesla saves the environment, crypto is a new future free of government meddling, Uber will rethink transportation). But now that the big items are looking hollow, how is this work environment any better than a blue collar labor one? This is precisely the sort of managerial arrogance that poisoned industry in the past. It is a shame to see it emerging in tech, as well. 

In any case, these may prove to be rather extreme cases, especially Twitter as it was acquired with a leveraged buy-out and many viable companies cannot survive a massive debt load. But it is a warning sign for ungrounded optimism and we need to remember that fast-growth can cover a multitude of sins (think of railways-- a clearly historically important business but there was definitely a lot of shaking out). 

How this all ends remains to be seen. 
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Friday, November 11, 2022

The day the bills came due

This is Joseph.

Over the years, I have followed how Mark follows the hype that many industries engage in, with ideas like the Ponzi threshold where over-valued companies end up making aggressive decisions to try and catch up with their value.

Consider the case of Sam Bankman-Fried (multi-billionaire at 30) and his new thread:

which ends with:

The comment "FTX US users are fine" looks very scary to put out in the midst of a liquidity crisis and reports of founder bankruptcy. Would you really want to have investors make decisions based on this disclosure in the midst of a rapidly changing market situation? It's also challenging when tweets only 2 days ago were assuring people that everything is fine. 

 Still, real people are going to be hurt:



The teachers will be fine but it is warning about how unregulated banking can play havoc with people's assets and retirement funds. There is a reason that regulations exist, and it is neither that the government hates bankers becoming rich (all evidence is to the contrary) or that they want control (Libertarians to the contrary). But that the blow back in a major crash is very painful. 

That said, there is an issue with crytocurrency having no underlying assets and the general issue of there being a reason that there are banking regulations. So let us consider an overvalued company, because of a very high acquisition cost. 


It is not the best sign in the world that the CISO of Twitter has left in the first two weeks after the deal was concluded. Maybe not decisive, perhaps they have a different vision for the company, but not the best sign. But then you have things like this:
I have heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.”
The best reply was from Mike Dunford:
As legal arguments go, "Elon puts rockets into space," is creative. Novel. Even unique.

For the non-lawyers: that's not a complement.
To be fair, we are in rather unique legal territory, as Mr Dunford later admitted, so perhaps a creative legal argument is needed because that is all that is left? 

Furthermore, there is a crackdown on working from home:
Starting tomorrow (Thursday), everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week. Obviously, if you are physically unable to travel to an office or have a critical personal obligation, then your absence is understandable.
Now I am neutral on working from home. Sometimes it is a good thing because it can enhance productivity and sometimes it erodes team building or, under weak management, can be used for grift. But forcing people into the office rarely fixes a major problem and doing a major change in terms of employment on short notice is the sort of thing that induces morale problems when productivity is most important.  After all, in the same letter Elon Musk notes:
Frankly, the economic picture ahead is dire, especially for a company like ours that is so dependent on advertising in a challenging economic climate. Moreover, 70% of our advertising is brand, rather than specific performance, which makes us doubly vulnerable!

That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions (huge props to the team!). Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.
Yes, that is correct -- Twitter is redesigning its business model on short notice to change (almost completely) the revenue stream for the company. And the CISO just left. 

Now, Musk may be an engineering genius [though there are other opinions -- MP], but this is no proof of being a successful businessman and the company that had his reputation is named after an authentic genius who died bankrupt. It is clear that Twitter is taking on non-trivial amounts of regulatory risk and needs to get a lot of subscribers fast (both at the same time). I am curious as to Mark's opinion on the likely outcome, as he is the expert in this type of corporate behavior, but it seems high risk to me. 


So hopefully these companies managed to avoid the Ponzi threshold, but I am dubious and I feel sad for their clients and the people who enjoyed their services. 
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Thursday, November 10, 2022

MoviePass was the platonic ideal of a 21st century start-up

From Matt Levine's newsletter (No, I don't have a link. It's a free newsletter. Why haven't you signed up yet?)

Meanwhile they were flailing around in private trying to figure out how they could make money. From the indictment:

On or about October 8, 2017, LOWE wrote FARNSWORTH and a team of MoviePass executives to ask them to brainstorm “ideas” about how to generate revenue: “So now that we have gotten into month 2 of our new pricing model we will need to create a plan on how we get from the usage level now to the desired profitable model in the future.”

From the SEC complaint:

In March 2018, MoviePass hired a Chief Product Officer, whose main focus was to identify a break even business model and then explore how MoviePass could generate additional revenues outside of subscriptions. The Chief Product Officer quit less than six months later, after realizing that MoviePass’s business model would not work. The Chief Product Officer communicated his views to Lowe.

 Keep in mind the new pricing model was basically selling dollar bills for 45 cents (specifically, on average "each customer paid MoviePass $9.95 per month, but cost MoviePass $22 per month in tickets."). You might think that the brainstorming stage might come before betting hundreds of millions on a business plan that sounded like an SNL parody of a bad start-up.

But while MoviePass is an extreme case, it is not extreme in an unrepresentative way. It takes the asset-bubble mindset of the teens to its logical conclusion. What set the company apart was less the absurdity and more the lack of pretense. Unicorns like Uber/Lyft and WeWork at least pretended to have thought about a path to profitability. All of their plans were essentially derived from a South Park episode. MoviePass just didn't bother to change the font.



 

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Wednesday, November 9, 2022

“Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?” [and why Britain did]

 

 For my money, Bret Devereaux might be the most interesting long form blogger working today. His writing is sharp, his arguments are well reasoned and placed into context, and everything is supported by a carefully constructed framework of evidence.

This post starts with the kind of question that too often takes some minor historical fact like Heron inventing a (thoroughly impractical) steam engine and quickly devolves into a bad Turtledove imitation. Instead of going down that tiresome route, Devereaux explores the economic, technological, and social conditions necessary for an industrial revolution and shows how late eighteenth century Britain was both the right time and the right place. 

And now, at last, the pieces in place the revolution in production arrives. There a machine (the spinning jenny) which needs more power in rotational motion and already encourages the machines to be centralized into a single location; the design is such that in theory one could put an infinite number of spools in a line if you had sufficient rotational energy to spin them all. Realizing this, textile manufacturers (we’re talking about factory owners, at this point) first use watermills, but there are only so many places in Great Britain suitable for a watermill and a windmill won’t do – the power needs to be steady and regular, things which the wind is not. But the developments of increasingly efficient steam engines used in the coal mines now collide with the developments in textiles: a sophisticated steam engine like the Watt engine could provide steady, smooth rotational motion in arbitrary, effectively infinite amounts (just keep adding engines!) to run an equally arbitrary, effectively infinite amount of mechanical spinning jennies, managed now by a workforce a fraction of a size of what would have once been necessary.

 ...

But the technology could not jump straight to railroads and steam ships because the first steam engines were nowhere near that powerful or efficient: creating steam engines that could drive trains and ships (and thus could move themselves) requires decades of development where existing technology and economic needs created very valuable niches for the technology at each stage. It is particularly remarkable here how much of these conditions are unique to Britain: it has to be coal, coal has to have massive economic demand (to create the demand for pumping water out of coal mines) and then there needs to be massive demand for spinning (so you need a huge textile export industry fueled both by domestic wool production and the cotton spoils of empire) and a device to manage the conversion of rotational energy into spun thread. I’ve left this bit out for space, but you also need a major incentive for the design of pressure-cylinders (which, in the event, was the demand for better siege cannon) because of how that dovetails with developing better cylinders for steam engines.


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Tuesday, November 8, 2022

When the bomb under the chair is a bomb cyclone [Okay, technically not a bomb cyclone but we all cheat a little in search of the catchy title]

Just to review, we've previously used the metaphor of bombs under everyone's chairs to describe the large number of unprecedented, potentially cataclysmic, and entirely unpredictable events that could very well shape this and the next election. Some of the bombs we've mentioned are Dobbs, the rise of American fascism, election day voter intimidation and violence. Here's one that wasn't on our radar ( pardon the pun).

Of course, we've had major storms on Election Day before, but I don't believe they've ever had the partisan implications they do now. This is, as are so many political developments in 2022, the direct result of conservative disinformation, particularly the 2000 mules conspiracy theory, which is now morphing into feral disinformation. It is all but impossible to predict the consequences of having the majority of one political party convinced that the last election was stolen.


To be clear, I'm not saying that weather conditions out West (we're bracing ourselves for flash floods an mudslides here in California) will have a noticeable effect on turnout. If it does, we don't know if it will disproportionately affect one party. That's the point of this whole thread: we don't know.

To make matters worse, in some cases, we may be talking about real bombs.



Between these unpredictable, potentially big factors, the declining quality of polls, the huge range-of-observed-data problem with likely voter models, and the number of conflicting indicators, the only rational thing to do is ignore the horse race. We need to focus on solving crises, not on unreliable reports of how the battle is going.

 

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Monday, November 7, 2022

Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the church-going, duck-hunting, football-coaching, hog-calling radical left

It's the longest of long shot races (the polls have him around 38%), but preacher/rocket scientist Chris Jones is running one hell of a campaign back in my home state of Arkansas. He's out in every county, shaking hands and talking to reporters in sharp contrast to the reclusive Sanders, and getting a surprising amount of national attention. 

At this point, the campaign is less about winning and more about opening cracks in the foundation. Historically (at least since the early 70s and the election of Dale Bumpers), the state was fairly bipartisan, alternating control from centrist Democrats to conservative Republicans, but in the past decade, conservatives have managed to make Arkansas the definitive deep red state. 

A big part of this is self-fulfilling expectations. Democrats are depressed and largely closeted. Republicans never consider crossing party lines. Churches are a reliable GOP vote. Jones has done a good job undermining that narrative. Check out Jones supporters' reaction to Sanders classifying them as the radical left.

Jones' odds are too low to talk about, but if he's changing the way Arkansans think about state politics, that's worth keeping an eye on.











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Friday, November 4, 2022

What the Democrats could learn from Peter Bogdanovich

Whenever the late director was interviewed (and I suspect whenever he was asked any kind of question at all up to and including the checker at Ralph's saying "paper or plastic?"), he would always start his answer with some variation on "well, as my good friend Orson Welles used to say..."

That relationship was a big part of Bogdanovich's reputation both as a director and as a film historian and while name-dropping may be considered tacky, his was the first name cable news producers thought of when some anniversary involving Welles or Citizen Kane rolled around.

For Republicans in 2022, inflation is their good friend Orson Welles, their answer to every question, followed by crime and borders.

For at least as long as I've been following politics, Republicans have been better at message discipline than Democrats (though that's a low bar). Inflation (an international problem which the GOP has plans for addressing other than possibly letting Putin have Ukraine), crime (actually more prevalent in red states) , and the border (not really a crisis) are not great talking points for the general election, particularly when compared with reproductive rights, social security/Medicare, and the insurrection, but the Republicans have still managed to be far more successful steering the conversation, even while announcing policies that perfectly tee things up for the Democrats.

The lesson of "it's the economy, stupid" wasn't that the economy was the most important thing; it was that you pick the subject you want everyone to talk about and you just keep hammering it until it becomes the topic of conversation. It's a lesson that the Democrats keep forgetting with more and more frightening consequences.

 

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Thursday, November 3, 2022

Thursday Meta-Tweets -- "one of the funniest things that’s ever happened."


Jon Schwarz has an excellent (and highly amusing) overview of this dog-catches-the-car moment.

Matt Levine observed that his Musk/Twitter posts were fun to write because it was a great story with big arcs and plot twists. Elon has gone from wanting so badly to buy Twitter that he was offering way over its market value to desperately wanting not to buy Twitter to pretending he wasn't forced into buying  Twitter. 

The comic effect was greatly enhanced by Musk constantly insisting that every (contradictory) move was motivated by his brilliance and benevolence. (Remember this is a man who actually says things like "At this point I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth" and "Some hate humanity, but I love humanity so much.")




So far accountability doesn't seem to be kicking in.


Why would he do that?

Now that Elon is absolute ruler of Twitter, how are things going?





That's still just a rumor, right?
And there's more.

I have a feeling Marshall might be emphasizing one word in particular.
Wasn't it a Twitter poll that started all this?

 

Fortunately, Musk has ideas for other revenue streams.










 

Even Python isn't happy,





Musk still has defenders but their comment sections are not looking pretty.


Well, at least nothing else can go wrong.

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Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Telehealth as a solution to ER wait times?

This is Joseph.

I was reading this tweet run:


And it made me think of the time this month that there were reports of the 911 number in Toronto asking for call back numbers after a medical emergency. Even if overstated, it really does bring to light the key problem with telehealth -- that call center culture is famously customer-hostile.

A number of years back I had a problem with my cable company. Like many foolish persons, I called the cable company and spent 2 hours on hold. After I was told that nothing could be done, I asked if there was anybody I could speak with that had more authority to deal with the issues. I was then placed on hold again. Several hours later a message played saying that the call center was closing and disconnected me. This was an infuriating experience and there was simply no accountability even possible. So the next day I made the long trek to the customer service center, waited in line for about an hour, and then had the problem actually fixed. No part of this experience made me like the company more, but the call experience was terrible. 

Recently, I have been constantly hearing "call volumes are unexpectedly high" recordings every time I call a place like a bank or the University travel agent. As a person who once worked in customer service telemarketing call volume forecasting, I even tried times and days that are notoriously light for call volume. No luck.

So the central challenge of telehealth is how to break with the cost-cutting culture that values customer wait times at zero (or even seems to see them as a good thing). You can only redirect from the Emergency Room via telehealth triage if it is relatively quick (let us say an hour, maximum). Because you get no triage credit at the ER for having called telehealth, so if the answer is "go to the ER" but you have lost 4 hours on the phone then that is going to quickly teach everyone not to call telehealth lines. 

With pediatric ERs reporting wait times as long as 15 hours, you can see the value of telehealth if it can keep children out of the queue and free up capacity. But that really requires that it be agile (why wait 4 hours as a prelude to waiting 15) and able to do things like prescribe. I know that RSV is an atypically severe phase, but at some point the default needs to be that there are a lot of respiratory viruses running around and we should plan around that.

That gets me to my last pet peeve about telemedicine, which that you need to be able to provide helpful interventions. In a recent covid burst, I had a family member use a telemedicine provider to ask about paxlovid only to be told that it could not be prescribed by phone but that it required an in-person visit. Yes, the plan really was for the infectious person to sit in the waiting room of a walk-in clinic for hours so that the prescription could be written by a person able to see the patient. Now, whether or not treating covid with paxlovid was a good idea is a different question but the issue was that these policies make calling first seem like a bad plan, as you waited hours for an appointment making it much less likely that you can successfully get seen at a walk-in clinic with a time-sensitive health issue. 

Which is the opposite of what you want people to do, frankly.

Without solving these cultural issues of how we treat in-calls and how we treat patients, we are not going to be able to really move the demand side for ERs. 
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Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Continuity

Before digital cameras were widely available, every movie set with any kind of budget at all had a person who went around taking Polaroids of everything, sets, props, actors. This person's job was to play a real life game of spot the difference.

Scenes are often filmed over the course of days, or in the case of reshoots even months, then stitched together in the editing room post-production. It was the job of the continuity person to go through the previous days Polaroids and make sure that the chair was in the same corner of the room and that the actor's tie hadn't changed color.

Some mismatches inevitably slip through, particularly on lower budget pictures. Other times, the discontinuities are noted but unavoidable.( at least before the modern age of digital retouching ) Carol Burnett often told the story of how she had had surgery on her jaw shortly after what she had assumed to be the final shooting for John Huston's screen version of Annie only to be told a few weeks later that the studio had requested reshoots. She immediately reached out to Houston and told him that she now had a much less prominent jaw and the new footage would not match the old. Houston reassured her that everything would be okay with the direction just go out and look determined.

Carol Burnett has one of the best reputations in the entertainment industry for professionalism and could hardly be blamed for not anticipating the studio's last minute decision. For a far more notorious example, the book The Devil's Candy which describes the disastrous production of Brian De Palma's Bonfire of the Vanities tells how Melanie Griffith returned from a break in the filming with much larger breasts, much to the surprise of the director and the producers.

Continuity jumps can be distracting and often unintentionally amusing in a feature film or television show but they are far more troubling in footage that claims to depict real life events. While some may claim the camera doesn't lie, the editing room certainly can.

In the video below, Musk critic Philip E. Mason takes a close look at the debut of Elon Musk's Optimus. I've queued up the relevant section at 20:19. It goes for the next four minutes.




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Monday, October 31, 2022

Historical visionaries often come off better if you don't look too closely at history

Historian Bret Devereaux has a long but well worth reading post on the longstanding debate over the role of airpower in war. 

Before we dive in, we need to define what makes certain uses of airpower strategic because strategic airpower isn’t the only kind. The reason for the definition will emerge pretty quickly when we talk about origins, but let’s get it out of the way here: strategic airpower is the use of attack by air (read: bombing) to achieve ‘strategic effects.’ Now that formal definition is a bit tautological, but it becomes clarifying when we talk about what we mean by strategic effects; these are effects that aim to alter enemy policy or win the war on their own.

Put another way, if you use aircraft to attack enemy units in support of a ground operation (like an invasion), that would be tactical airpower; the airpower is a tactic that aims to win a battle which is still primarily a ground (or naval) battle. We often call this kind of airpower ‘close air support’ but not all tactical airpower is CAS. If you instead use airpower to shape ground operations – for instance by attacking infrastructure (like bridges or railroads) or by bombing enemy units to force them to stay put (often by forcing them to move only at night) – that’s operational airpower. The most common form of this kind of airpower is ‘interdiction’ bombing, which aims to slow down enemy ground movements so that friendly units can out-maneuver them in larger-scale sweeping movements.

By contrast strategic airpower aims to produce effects at the strategic (that is, top-most) level on its own. Sometimes that is quite blunt: strategic airpower aims to win the war on its own without reference to ground forces, or at least advance the ball on winning a conflict or achieving a desired end-state (that is, the airpower may not be the only think producing strategic effects). Of course strategic effects can go beyond ‘winning the war’ – coercing or deterring another power are both strategic effects as well, forcing the enemy to redefine their strategy. That said, as we’ll see, this initially very expansive definition of strategic airpower really narrows quite quickly. Aircraft cannot generally hold ground, administer territory, build trust, establish institutions, or consolidate gains, so using airpower rapidly becomes a question of ‘what to bomb’ because delivering firepower is what those aircraft can do.

As an aside, this sort of cabined definition of airpower and thus strategic airpower has always been frustrating to me. It is how airpower is often discussed, so it’s how I am going to discuss it, but of course aircraft can move more than bombs. Aircraft might move troops – that’s an operational use of airpower – but they can also move goods and supplies. Arguably the most successful example of strategic airpower use anywhere, ever is the Berlin Airlift, which was a pure airpower operation that comprehensively defeated a major Soviet strategic aim, and yet the U.S. Air Force is far more built around strategic bombing than it is around strategic humanitarian airlift (it does the latter, but the Army and the Navy, rather than the Air Force, tend to take the lead in long-distance humanitarian operations). Nevertheless that definition – excessively narrow, I would argue – is a clear product of the history of strategic airpower, so let’s start there.

...

One of those interwar theorists was Giulio Douhet (1869-1930), an Italian who had served during the First World War. Douhet wasn’t the only bomber advocate or even the most influential at the time – in part because Italy was singularly unprepared to actually capitalize on the bomber as a machine, given that it was woefully under-industrialized and bomber-warfare was perhaps the most industrial sort of warfare on offer at the time (short of naval warfare) – but his writings exemplify a lot of the thinking at the time, particularly his The Command of the Air (1921).2 But figures like Hugh Trenchard in Britain or Billy Mitchell in the United States were driving similar arguments, with similar technological and institutional implications. But first, we need to get the ideas. 

...

Now before we move forward, I think we want to unpack that vision just a bit, because there are actually quite a few assumptions there. First, Douhet is assuming that there will be no way to locate or intercept the bombers in the vastness of the sky, that they will be able to accurately navigate to and strike their targets (which are, in the event, major cities) and be able to carry sufficient explosive payloads to destroy those targets. But the largest assumption of all is that the application of explosives to cities would lead to collapsing civilian morale and peace; it was a wholly untested assumption, which was about to become an extremely well-tested assumption. But for Douhet’s theory to work, all of those assumptions in the chain – lack of interception, effective delivery of munitions, sufficient munitions to deliver and bombing triggering morale collapse – needed to be true. In the event, none of them were.


This is not at all how the standard narrative is supposed to go. Advocates for new technology are inevitably visionaries unappreciated in their own time but vindicated by history while those who disagreed with them are revealed to be fools and luddites. Hell, Gary Cooper played Billy Mitchell in the movie.

And before anyone complains that it's unfair to lump Mitchell in with Douhet, let's check in with Wikipedia. [emphasis added.]

In 1922, while in Europe for General Patrick, Mitchell met the Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet and soon afterwards an excerpted translation of Douhet's The Command of the Air began to circulate in the Air Service. In 1924, Gen. Patrick again dispatched him on an inspection tour, this time to Hawaii and Asia, to get him off the front pages. Mitchell came back with a 324-page report that predicted future war with Japan, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. Of note, Mitchell discounted the value of aircraft carriers in an attack on the Hawaiian Islands, believing they were of little practical use because they could not operate effectively on the high seas or deliver "sufficient aircraft in the air at one time to insure a concentrated operation". Instead, Mitchell believed a surprise attack on the Hawaiian Islands would be conducted by land-based aircraft operating from islands in the Pacific. His report, published in 1925 as the book Winged Defense, foretold wider benefits of an investment in air power, believing it to be, at both that time and in the future, "a dominating factor in the world's development", both for national defense and economic benefit. Winged Defense sold only 4,500 copies between August 1925 and January 1926, the months surrounding the publicity of the court martial, and so Mitchell did not reach a wide audience


If you go back and read contemporary accounts, you'll find this sort of thing happens quite a bit. Perhaps the most famous of the visionaries, Nikolai Tesla, unquestionably made tremendous contributions to his field, but when it came to predicting the future of the technology, he was wrong far more often than he was right, most notably with long distance wireless transmission of power.

The problem is that when looking back at these advocates, we tend to lose sight of the specifics and conflate the wisdom of their positions with the overall impact of the technology. We retroactively change the questions being debated, often assigning the skeptics stands that no one at the time believed. "Does the future of military air power lie in long range bombing or close air support?" becomes "will air power change warfare?" To go back even further, "you can't sail from Europe to Asia because the world is much bigger than you think" becomes "you can't sail from Europe to Asia because the world is flat."

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