Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers

Johnson examines the U.S. Army's innovations for both armor and aviation between the world wars, offering valuable insights for future military innovation.

David E. Johnson is a senior research staff member at RAND. A retired U.S. Army field artillery colonel, he served in a variety of command and staff assignments in the United States, Korea, Germany, and Hawaii. His last assignment was at the National Defense University, where he served as Director of Academic Affairs, Chief of Staff, and Professor.

This well documented and convincingly argued book... speaks to the follies of extremists in today's airpower versus land power debates.

This book gives great insights into our military's (not just the U.S. Army's) innovative process during the interwar years. As we now find ourselves in a similar interwar period, with similar interwar opportunities for either stagnation or innovation, the book is extremely relevant to today's national defense establishment. There is great insight to be derived from these pages.... Johnson has done a superb job of researching his subject. He has written an interesting book based on mountains of documentation.... There is much more to Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers than documented history. To the educated reader, this book is a warning for today.

The subject of Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers is familiar—an interwar army, crippled by austerity and public apathy—fails to modernize and enters the next war unprepared for the challenges it faces. But David E. Johnson departs from traditional interpretations of this scenario.... Johnson paints a bleak picture of an Army designed to preserve itself rather than prepare for the next war.

Johnson's nicely researched and well written study is much more than an interesting account of tank and airplane development during the interwar years. Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers is a fascinating intellectual and cultural history of the interwar Army with intriguing implications for our own day..

Johnson's densely factual volume is elegantly written.... He successfully demonstrates that the United States Army that entered World War II reflected the biases and resistance to innovation that existed throughout the interwar years.

Johnson's book should be read and his conclusions debated. His work is timely and relevant to the Army and Air Force today.

In Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers, David Johnson does an excellent job of taking in the big picture, breaking it down into its parts and then tieing it back together to form a cohesive whole of U.S.Army policy during the interwar period.

A powerful book.... Johnson convincingly takes aim at the current wishful thinking that a sound defense depends merely on money spent, and that only politicians, not soldiers, are responsible for their lack of preparedness. His powerful and convincing historical analysis offers profound implications for today.

A fine place to get a feel for the enormous task of military transformation—and also get a gritty appreciation of the risks involved—is David Johnson's Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers. The War on Terror and accelerating demands for change in the Pentagon... make this book extremely relevant. Every military transformer should read it—and reckon with it.

William A. Owens, Vice Chairman of the Board of Teledesic and CEO of Teledesic Holdings, Ltd.:

David Johnson has written a must-read for anyone following today's Pentagon debates concerning the culture and budgets of the United States military. He has provided one of the most insightful analyses of the development of the U.S. Army and Air Force between the World Wars with a special set of lessons to be learned about how a bureaucratic military system precludes the best decisions for the good of the nation's overall national security missions.

Harold R. Winton, author of To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927–1938:

Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers is a superbly researched and tightly argued work that chronicles the period of transformation of the United States Army from a constabulary force to the military instrument of a major world power. It forces the objective reader to reconsider the notion that America's interwar Army was purely the product of social, political, and fiscal indifference. Perhaps most importantly, it provides a poignant reminder that the destiny of the Republic in the twenty-first century will be inextricably bound up with the vision, wisdom, and professional acumen of its military leaders.