"Good Men ... Running Around in Circles" Benjamin Foulois, Billy Mitchell, And the Flight for the Future of the Army Air Service (Biography‪)‬

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Benjamin Foulois never set out to become a key figure in the history of American aviation. In fact, his first encounter with a flying machine did not occur until he was twenty-eight years old. As one of America's original military aviators, he flew the U.S. Army's first dirigible balloon and its first airplane, learning to fly from early aviation pioneers, including the Wright Brothers and Glenn Curtiss. He began thinking about the military uses of air power in 1907, years before the publication of the theories of William Mitchell, Giulio Douhet, and Hugh Trenchard. Foulois twice led the Army's air forces, as Chief of Air Service for the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I from 1917 to 1918 and again as Chief of the Air Corps from 1931 to 1935. After retiring from the Army, he continued his advocacy of air power through many speeches and lectures, and as head of the Air Force Historical Foundation. Foulois died in 1967, making him one of the few eyewitnesses of military aviation from its beginnings with the Wright Flyer to the technological triumphs of the Mach 3+ SR-71 and the globe-spanning intercontinental ballistic missile.