VII., et seq.) the question of aircraft fighting—i.e., aeroplane versus aeroplane—has been considered, and matters such as armament have been fully discussed. We shall now deal with the employment of the armed machine in its fighting capacity, not as a single unit, but as part of a force whose function is the destruction of the armed air fleet of the enemy, and the crippling of his reconnaissance service. It is evidently necessary to assume that the enemy in his turn has prepared an armed air fleet, and that the problem to be studied is the handling and bringing to battle of the two air fleets in their struggle for supremacy.
The various factors that enter into the problem, apart from the personnel are those of speed, climbing power, armament, and last, but not least, numerical strength. These, together with that all-important item—the tactical scheme—are the more weighty of the material factors on which the question of victory or defeat will turn. The relative importance of the different items is not by any means always the same. It may, for example, usually be assumed that one or the other of the combatant forces is seeking, and the other endeavouring to avoid, battle, or at least is only willing to accept battle under conditions deemed favourable; thus it may be that the enemy can be only brought to battle by virtue of superior speed. In other cases it will be possible to force the enemy to give battle by attack upon some vulnerable point connected with his land forces; all this is strictly analogous to the similar problems of naval warfare. Given the main conditions, all that can be accomplished by a tactical scheme is to ensure engaging the enemy in the most favourable manner possible, and, as in the problems studied in Chapters V. and VI., bringing the greatest weight of numbers possible to bear on lesser numbers of the enemy, in order to reap
132
