Essay On Impact Of Aviation

Whenever there is a major jump in technology, a strategic revolution often matches it. The industrial revolution and steam power completely swung the strategic advantage from the offensive to the defensive, evidenced through the Civil War. In the context of the Navy, one of the latest technological innovations is aviation; it was being integrated into the Navy before World War I, but wasn’t advanced enough to be of any major strategic use until World War II. For this reason, the strategic and tactical impact of aviation is most visible through the scope of World War II. With the advent of aviation and its integration into the Navy came a shift in naval strategy and tactics; this presented much strategic merit as well as logistic complications. …show more content…
One example resulted from the rate at which aircraft technology was developing versus the rate at which aviation weapons systems were developing. This became a problem when the actual aircraft were very advanced but the weapons systems were sub-par and weren’t using aviation for what it was capable of – at least until bombers were developed. However, during the time period where aircraft were still using machine guns as their weapons system, aircraft could only be effective against other planes and were essentially useless to naval warfare . After that, it took time, experience, and failures to teach strategists how to effectively use aviation. The main problem with that, however, was that because technology was advancing at a very rapid rate during World War II, the most effective strategies for aviation were in constant flux and were difficult to pin down. In fact, some advantages to aviation were completely ignored at times, such as aerial reconnaissance during the Norwegian campaign