The matter deserves consideration. RedState writes that American bombers have never fought in the air except to defend themselves. In the war waged over Germany, B-17s and B-24s by the hundred, each armed with as many as thirteen guns, forced enemy fighters to fly through a hailstorm of bullets. Now they think an aircraft built to carry bombs can be turned into a hunter. Its merits, as TWZ has long set out, are these: its size, its very great range, the height to which it climbs, the fact that enemy eyes and radars can scarcely see it, and its keen senses. It is not planned to carry drones, they say, but it can work alongside them.

This kind of thinking is not new; in my books I gathered many cases of an instrument turned to another use. Duilius at Mylae, when the Carthaginians were the better seamen, fitted his ships with the corvus, so that the enemy's ships, once grappled, turned a sea fight into a land fight. So the Roman, no match at sea, won by the kind of fighting in which he was a match. Agrippa used the harpax, a hooked iron shot from a catapult, to drag in the ships of Sextus Pompeius. Neither was a new machine; each was an old tool fitted to a new use. I think the same of an aircraft which, because it flies high and unseen and can carry a great load of missiles, could fall upon enemy fighters unawares. For the art of command is to strike the enemy from the quarter whence he does not expect attack.

But I was curator of the waters, not a poet, and I praise nothing I have not measured. So I ask what no one has yet reported. What missiles will the aircraft carry? What radars will have to be changed? What will it cost? Will the number of fighters properly so called, the ones they call sixth-generation, be reduced on that account? All this is missing from the reports. RedState itself admits that it is not yet clear how the B-21 could be adapted to this use, and that the service is still evaluating the aircraft. Nor may we forget, as the same outlet warns, Gary Powers, whose aircraft, flying at a great height, was brought down from the sky all the same: the enemy too is preparing his arts.

Who gains? The Air Force first of all, which, if it can show that its aircraft is fit for more duties, will have a stronger case before the senate when money is discussed. I do not hold that against it: a commander who defends his instrument is doing his duty. As long ago as 2019 Major General Scott Pleus is said to have declared that those who called the new aircraft merely a fighter were thinking too narrowly. But the more often the same idea is put forward, the more a measurement is wanted. A report that contains nothing secret, and is still not handed to journalists, is read by few and praised by many. I learned this in my waters, where the ledgers showed one thing and the pipes another.

I remind the American senators of what I wrote of myself: "I think nothing so unbecoming to a man of any worth as to carry out a delegated duty on the instructions of his assistants." It is not enough to learn of a report through journalists, through roundtables, through those who have obtained a copy. The remedy is at hand, and not new: let the whole report be published, since it contains nothing secret; let the numbers of missiles, of costs, of aircraft be entered in the ledgers; let the aircraft itself be tested in the sky before it wins in speeches.

The best stratagem is the one that deceives the enemy, not the treasury. I believe a bomber can become a hunter; whether it will, I shall judge when they publish the measurements.