Building an air force or defending the fleet?
In 1921, Billy Mitchell sank an ‘unsinkable’ battleship with an airplane. The Navy's response? Courtmartial him, and promote the admirals who said he couldn’t do it.
Mitchell commanded a squadron of bombers over the Chesapeake Bay and sank the Ostfriesland—a captured German battleship that the Navy called “unsinkable from the air.” Reporters watched it happen.
The Navy's Joint Board responded by announcing,
"The battleship is still the backbone of the fleet."
But, Mitchell kept pushing. Over seven years, he made 163 recommendations that the military invest in airplanes. In 1925, after a Navy dirigible crashed killing 14 crew members, he publicly accused Army and Navy leadership of "incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of national defense." They court-martialed him. Found him guilty. Stripped his rank and pay.
Billy Mitchell died in 1936.
He never saw what came next.
On December 7, 1941, Japan executed a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor—almost exactly the scenario Mitchell had predicted and spent his career warning against.
His ideas won. He didn't.
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I hate watching this movie play out with AI transformation.
A pilot works. ROI is real. Proof is sitting right there. But nothing moves—not because the tech failed, but because somebody's title, somebody's headcount, somebody's quarterly number or battleship is in the blast radius.
This isn't a technology problem.
It's a prestige problem.
The people most threatened by a new capability are rarely the ones tasked with evaluating it. The people tasked with evaluating it rarely have the authority to say what's being replaced.
A 27,000-ton battleship doesn't just defend a coastline.
It defends a career.
The companies pulling ahead on AI aren't winning on better models or bigger budgets. They're winning because someone in the room had the authority—and the stomach—to retire the fleet.
We're in a Billy Mitchell moment.
The future is in the sky.
But the people who bet their careers on battleships will fight you harder than the enemy will.
Stuck defending the fleet?
DM me. I can get you in the air.