I shall go through the catalogue, as is my habit. Eurofighters are present from Wings 11, 14 and 46, and F-18s from Wings 12 and 15: these are the fighting part, with men aboard. Present too are the Predator B drones of Wing 23, which fly with no pilot. The loads are carried by the A400Ms of Wing 31, the C-295s of Wing 35, the CN-235s of Wings 48 and 49, and Sikorsky S-76 helicopters of that same Wing 48. Eight types of aircraft in all. About thirty a day are to be sent aloft, with between thirty and fifty sorties flown, and a total of 374 sorties reached, according to sources in the force, as the same gazette reports. Moreover, the Atlantic alliance has added a Boeing E-3 AWACS, a flying watchtower that sees the enemy from far off.

This airborne column is directed from the ESP JFAC, a headquarters of the Air Combat Command (MACOM) located at the base of Torrejón, together with the control stations GRUCEMAC and GRUNOMAC. Part of that headquarters has been moved to the military airfield of Pollensa on Majorca, which serves as a forward base. Add to these the EZAPAC, a company of sappers who leap from the heights; the EADA and SEADA, which lead the wings into new ground; and besides them the men who search for the shipwrecked and the lost, and save them.

Now behold the marvel. Nature, whether parent to us or stepmother, denied wings to naked man and gave them to the eagle; man made himself wings and has beaten the eagle. They say Archytas of Tarentum made a wooden dove that flew, and Hero of Alexandria automata that moved of themselves; those men displayed a toy, these display a war. And how apt the very name! They call it Predator, this drone that with no eyes of flesh surveys the lands from the top of the sky, and neither fears nor hungers nor tires. We have a raptor without a nest, without an egg, without death. What is more to be wondered at than a bird that feels nothing and sees everything?

Yet in this affair it is not the wings I most admire, but the order. Nature drives birds into flocks without a commander; here a single mind at Torrejón steers thirty machines across so many provinces as if they were one body, and carries its own headquarters over to an island to learn whether it can command even when divided. Agrippa, before he attacked Sextus Pompeius, joined the Lucrine lake to Avernus and made the Julian harbour, so that his rowers might train in safety the whole winter long; he prepared his victory on the lake before he won it at sea. The same thing is being done here. An exercise is a battle without blood, and the man who sweats in peace spills less gore in war. I myself, as prefect of the fleet at Misenum, did nothing more often than drill my rowers.

Two things, however, trouble me, who count everything. First: the price is kept silent. The sorties are counted, the wings are counted, the expense is not; and the same gazette reported a little earlier that the Spanish treasury is now in its third year of being run without a new budget approved by the senate. He who builds wings and boasts their number ought to declare the sum as well. Second: we are not told what enemy they imagine. A few days before, King Felipe had visited Ceuta across the strait, as Die Welt reported; whether this exercise looks that way no source affirms, and neither do I. But I ask what a magistrate would ask: against whom are we preparing?

But I do not hide my verdict. The Spaniards do right to test their wings in peace; for it is more shameful to be ignorant of one's own sky than of the enemy. The remedy is an old one: let the price be known, let the men who fly be honoured, and let no drone ever be sent up without a man commanding it, lest a machine that does not fear should also not hesitate. I praise above all those who search for the lost, for "to help a mortal is, for a mortal, to be a god, and this is the road to everlasting glory." Nature denied us wings and gave us ingenuity. Would that ingenuity always remembered that wings are made for saving rather than for seizing.