Political Quotes

“The French aircraft were unusual. Most of them were parked. We will talk about that later. Billy Mitchell gave an extraordinary warning to this country. He was not received well at the White House. There were a lot of budget hawks that did not want to spend a bunch of money on military equipment. After all, the 1930s were supposed to be a very peaceful time. So they gave him short-shrift, and he became more and more insistent in his demands that the United States gear up for what he saw as a coming storm. He made statements to the effect that we were unprepared for war, so they court martialed him. In the movie Gary Cooper played Billy Mitchell. He sacrificed his own career to wake America up. I have often thought about if Billy Mitchell came back and told us we were entering the age of air power and we had better become proficient at it or we would be in dire straits. Similarly, we have now entered the age of missiles, and now that we have seen North Korea shooting the TD-2 missile with the capability of reaching the west coast of the United States, when we look at their unstable leadership, I am reminded of the fact that we are deep in the age of missiles, and we need to be awakened, just as America needed to be awakened by Billy Mitchell in the 1920s and 1930s that we were in the age of air power; and we need to be awakened that we are deeply in the age of missiles, and we better have the ability to shoot down missiles.”