Perhaps because they operated a peripheral weapon , they thought more in order to justify its being and expansion .sx But they , too , were just as guilty as their superiors of over-estimating their weapon's effectiveness and dreaming of its potential .sx On the other hand , the same people were apt to divert power from their own programme by boasting .sx The claims of airshipmen , it appears , helped create the vast anti-Zeppelin forces which were maintained in England in the First World War .sx It did not take a very astute man to realize that what could be done to the enemy if we had the equipment might well be done to us when he had it , particularly if invulnerability , which the German airships possessed at first , was claimed for the delivery system .sx Between them the enthusiasts and the reactionaries created a vast feeling of insecurity , and faced with this the responsible authorities generally erred towards the safe side .sx Any new weapon will have its small band of disciples .sx But if it is to be used effectively , more personnel must be recruited .sx Volunteers may be hard to come by owing to the lure of actual combat and the uncertainty of the future with a new-fangled device .sx Thus the expanded staff is apt to be short on experienced career men and long on Hostilities Only or draftee recruits .sx This places the weapon at a disadvantage in the battle of Whitehall where it may have difficulty breaking the thin red tape , and in peacetime it will be out of favour , but in a commanding position as far as wartime development is concerned for it may well acquire decidedly more brains than the normal unit .sx The undisciplined will be quite prepared to test regulations and equipment and by empirical means come to new conclusions in both technology and technique , as the Naval Air Service did with not only air equipment , but also with armoured cars and tanks .sx This is particularly important where an entirely new element is being investigated .sx Airships presented many unknowns to be solved and these ranged from metallurgical questions to matters of aerodynamics .sx The new weapon also presents all decision-makers with the problem of the evaluation of intelligence from both the enemy's and one's own work .sx In this respect , too , there arises the question as to what is the acceptable percentage of failure ?sx In the case of airships , should all the money have been put into one Mayfly ?sx While the answer in 1908-9 was probably yes , in 1924 it should have been no .sx In almost any programme , the construction of but one prototype is bound to lead to delay , confusion , and losses if there is a disaster .sx And the likelihood of such is by no means eliminated by the present advances in technology .sx Yet the combination of psychological and politico-economic forces in Britain still persists in an approach which may well be called into question where real economics are concerned .sx It is highly unscientific to place too many innovations in any one test vehicle , if for no other reason than it attenuates the whole testing period .sx Ideally , merely one change at a time should be tried until proven , and this was well demonstrated in R101 .sx Moreover , every new weapon needs at least three prototypes :sx one for operational research , one for technical modifications , and one for experimental use as a testbed for the next-generation ideas .sx Thus the building of only one prototype provides policy-makers with the rather appalling fact that they may have to accept a 100 per cent failure rate , and yet still have to justify continuing expenditure on such work in order not to be placed in a disadvantageous position in an international race .sx The loss of R38 , amongst other factors , immediately suspended work on more advanced types as well as discouraging commercial incentive .sx The obverse of this coin is the desire to standardize too soon , for duplication there must be if a weapon is to be handled by average troops and ordinary commanders .sx This was the difficulty of 1916 in the British rigid airship programme :sx the designers were allowed to seek after perfection to the detriment of operational uniformity , while the Royal Flying Corps had allowed similarity to preclude competitive progress .sx The ministerial head of a service department is always in a difficult position in peacetime .sx In Britain , for instance , the Treasury rules , so only a weapon with either the Prime Minister's or the Chancellor of the Exchequer's approval or diffidence can get sufficient funds .sx After a major conflict the Treasury is most apt to insist on the payment of past debts and the consumption of available equipment before authorizing any new expenditures .sx This it certainly did in the years immediately after the Treaty of Versailles .sx Peace is a dastardly affair where new weapons are concerned .sx There is an immediate erosion of personnel .sx Operations rapidly taper off and even constructional work will be suspended while politics and economics once more take the field to bid for the voters' favour .sx The immediate hope is for some crisis , such as the suspicion that the Germans might not accept the Treaty of 1919 , or that the whole concern can be turned over to commercial profit .sx But the latter can be successful only if the entrepreneurs are allowed to obtain for a reasonable sum what would otherwise be scrapped and have facilities and official support to exploit it .sx Moreover , they must feel financially secure and not suspect that the State aims to take over once a service is established .sx The government may well face the choice as it did in 1919 of scrapping the whole business or of subsidizing a commercial operation .sx This creates a situation in which the weapons advocates may be able to divide and conquer .sx However , there are two difficulties- civilian acumen may be lacking , and the whole may be too peripheral and too much of a gamble for either of the other parties .sx As personnel and material deteriorate , immediate action is essential and this must be topped with a prestigial success which will create political pressure .sx This makes the odds high , and , in the case of airships , it led to R34's trans-Atlantic flight and to R101's death .sx How did all this affect the airship programme ?sx Mayfly was initiated in a period of concern with Germany's intentions and collapsed at the end of a severe political crisis in Britain .sx Airship work was revived when another defence scare came along ; then cancelled when it was thought that the war would have cleared the air by late 1915 .sx The whole programme was revivified during the wide-open war economy and collapsed in the peacetime retrenchment .sx It then became caught up in the conflicting streams of the save-the-Empire movement and the Labour Party's desire to run a successful national transport system .sx The collapse of the economy and the de@2nouement of R101 caused airships to be abandoned for economic reasons , which were rapidly reinforced by technological arguments in favour of the aeroplane .sx Who Made Airship Policy ?sx .sx The original impetus appears to have come from the Germans through the naval and military attache@2s to Fisher and the Prime Minister .sx Asquith by his decision in July , 1908 placed the First Sea Lord in a position to implement plans already sketched out by Bacon and other technically astute officers .sx Bacon guided the early design stages of Mayfly until relieved by Sueter , and the first airship programme then proceeded under its own steam and with the blessing of the Committee of Imperial Defence until the disaster of September , 1911 .sx Churchill as the new First Lord with A. K. Wilson as his First Sea Lord then decided against any further work .sx The second programme came into being again because of the Germans and through the joint agency of Sueter and Seely , Secretary for War , who chaired the Committee of Imperial Defence sub-committee on aeronautics .sx Thus in mid-1912 a further reappraisal , at least in part , influenced by a change in heart at the Admiralty , came into being with Asquith , as head of the Committee of Imperial Defence , accepting in 1913 the need for another rigid airship .sx And once again Churchill in early 1915 became the one who decided that the whole thing should be abandoned and gave the order to cancel No .sx 9 , and presumably also earlier , No .sx 14 and No .sx 15 .sx And so it went on .sx After the war , the transfer of lighter-than-air from the Admiralty to the Air Ministry again put Churchill into a policy-making role in regard to airships over which he had exercised some influence as Minister of Munitions from 1917 to 1919 .sx As Secretary of State for Air he had to reconcile his fondness for maintaining the Empire with his desire for economy and political success .sx Airships fitted into both patterns .sx At the same time , Churchill was also Secretary of War and gave much of his time to the Army .sx The Under-Secretary of State for Air , Seely , was pro-airships as he had been as the pre-war Secretary for War , while Sir Frederick Sykes as Chief of the Air Staff and then as Controller-General of Civil Aviation was also a supporter .sx Sir Hugh Trenchard , who succeeded Sykes , appears to have favoured airships in their place , and if prestige , the Estimates , and the R.A.F. could allow for them .sx As Seely resigned and the other Under-Secretaries were not much interested , as long as Churchill remained the Air Minister , he and Trenchard made policy .sx But policy was also made at lower levels .sx In much the same class as Rickover , Whittle , and Dornberger , Sueter guided constructional and design concepts until he was posted .sx In the early years of the R.A.F. the Director of Research and the Air Member for Supply and Research had their says .sx Maitland as Superintendent of Airships appears to have been left on the fringes as was Masterman after he transferred from the Navy to the R.A.F. It must be recalled , however , that the Director of Research on one occasion made policy when he plumped for cutting R38's trials to but fifty hours with subsequent unfortunate results .sx In the case of the Imperial Scheme , policy was made by a wide variety of people .sx A. H. Ashbolt and Cmdr .sx Burney provided the primary pressure .sx Trenchard was interested because he saw a way of acquiring military strength for a relatively minor expenditure on the Estimates while at the same time mollifying the Admiralty , then in the process of being denied a naval air arm and the destruction of the R.A.F. Sir Samuel Hoare was openly in favour and this was in keeping with his character as a publicity-conscious Air Minister .sx But in the case of the Conservative Burney Scheme there was one of those rare instances of the monarch helping make policy by taking a personal interest in a particular development .sx Into this picture then was catapulted Lord Thomson , an obvious enthusiast , who told the Air Staff to " screw up " the Conservative scheme .sx He and his Under-Secretary , a Bradford alderman and pacifist named Leach , knew nothing about airships and little about international commercial organizations .sx In the realm of civil air intelligence their natural advisor was the enthusiastic Sir Sefton Brancker , the Director of the Department of Civil Aviation at the Air Ministry .sx But Brancker was not exceptionally well-qualified to give advice on this subject .sx Moreover , the Secretary and his Under-Secretary called largely upon the serving members of the Air Council for their opinions , then made a scheme and submitted it to the Cabinet without allowing those very advisers time to consider it .sx Thus the latter were forced to the unusual step of drawing up a memorandum for the Cabinet for their own protection .sx Nor was the experienced Chief of the Air Staff adequately consulted .sx The Cabinet then proceeded to accept a programme which had not been approved by the Air Council .sx Yet in this case , while the Aeronautical Research Committee did not have the access to the Cabinet that it had had in 1909 , it did have considerable influence .sx It was the findings of the special technical committee on the loss of R38 which heavily influenced the Thomsonian decision to make this an experimental programme rather than an operational one .sx