Originally posted by 1Boner
I hate it when you,re right.
You know that don,'t you?
But I,m not sure how much I would trust Wikpedia.
I answered off the cuff, figuring the recon guys had to defend themselves from other recon guys.
And I thought that planes were used as recon before they were used as weapons.
Planes were'nt thought of as weapons until much later.
That was my train of thought.
Probably wrong again,
Boner
You are basically on the right track.
The first military use of planes was recon. Not only because there were not any tactics ot strategy for aerial warfare devised, but also because of the severe technical limitations of pre-WWI airplanes.
Remember, the first channel crossing was made only in 1909, in a plane with merely 26HP...
The low numbers of airplanes in use and the absence of any wars between the major powers using them simply prevented any air combat. The first military use of planes was the Italo-Turkish war i posted about, followed by the Balkan war of 1912.
(BTW, the concept dropping bombs from the air was nothing new at that time, there have been baloons and airships before planes.)
Only with the beginning of WWI this problem surfaced, the wish for denying enemy recon sorties lead to armed planes - first handguns, then rifles and a whole assortment of bizarre ideas, until the machinegun armament was universally accepted.
