To the Editor— Lieutenant Colonel Thomas E. Shrader's "The End of Surface Warships" in JFQ 58 (3d Quarter, 2010) may have a correct message, and he is doubtless right that a view from outside any establishment can be valuable. But the article might have been improved had it been run by a naval or airpower historian prior to submission. It is wrong in some details, the sample size is not large enough, and the cases selected to "prove" his point are inadequate. Moreover, as with many of us, he seems to make the assumption that history repeats itself.
First, a couple of the minor detail errors: Billy Mitchell was never in the U.S. Army Air Corps because he resigned his commission in January 1926, a few months before the Air Corps was established. Second, the Hellcat of World War II was not a jet.
