He is also an Assistant Editor of From Balloons to Drones, a scholarly web journal for the study of air power, and host of the From Balloons to Drones Podcast. He is a former Assistant Professor of Strategy at the USAF Air Command and Staff College eSchool of Graduate PME, and a former instructor of military history at the USAF Academy.
Hankins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Flying Camelot includes one of my favorite anecdotes from the book. One of the fiercest and most extreme advocates for a lightweight air-to-air fighter aircraft wrote a proposal of what his ideal plane would look like. The Navy not only rejected it but wrote a series of internal memos that brutally attacked the proposal and its author, concluding that the idea “approaches the absurd,” and argued against the proposal’s key claims in the harshest terms available to official bureaucratic documents.Visit Michael W. Hankins's website.
The Page 99 Test works rather well in this case. Although most readers will likely be lost in many of the specifics without the surrounding context, page 99 gets at most of the central themes of the book. What readers will see here is a small group of very passionate people that are informed by their unique culture—a culture largely informed by their particular interpretation of the past. That culture and that vision influenced what types of technology they wanted to create. That vision was much narrower than the institutions these men worked for (the US military services) were willing to accept. Although page 99 is a very specific single case, the elements of the book’s core arguments are there: technologies do not appear out of nowhere, they are made by people—people with cultural beliefs and world views that inform the technologies they create. Sometimes conflicting cultures collide, pushing technological development into interesting directions.
Although the core idea is there, looking only at page 99 might miss the wider arc of the book. I try to trace the evolution of fighter pilot culture from its inception during World War I, through to the Vietnam War era. Then, I zoom in on a small group of activists calling themselves the “fighter mafia,” who embodied that culture in a rather extreme sense and had a large influence on fighter aircraft development in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The story does not end there, as that group of advocates became frustrated with the compromises they had to make while working with large institutions, and instead became political activists in the 1980s, referring to themselves as “The Reformers.” In the post-Vietnam War era, this group gathered a large following through their harsh critiques of US defense policy and technology. The arguments they made then—rooted in the origins of fighter pilot culture—are still with us today in many ways.
--Marshal Zeringue
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