The Air Service sought recognition, begging the public to pay attention to this weapon that could fly long distances, break speed and altitude records, and carry a useful load. In later years, writers have given Brigadier General Billy Mitchell heroic stature for what they perceived as his single-handed fight for recognition of an independent air force. In truth, Mitchell was one of many who held those views and who spoke out for them. He was the top-ranking airman with those views, he was a flamboyant publicity seeker, and he knew how to make headlines. He was doomed to fail; he and his associates had the courage and the enthusiasm, but his opponents had the rank. And in that kind of battle, there is only one outcome.

Mitchell was a fanatic about air power. It obsessed him. Fanatics get things done, however; they are movers and shakers, even though it often costs them their careers and their lives. Then they are called martyrs, and that term also has been applied to Mitchell. He had a popular argument: air power was economical, and cheaper than battleships and ground armies. It could sink any enemy fleet that was bringing troops in an invasion attempt, and it could destroy the industrial might, and therefore the will to resist, of any enemy country. Why spend money on sinkable battleships, he argued, when you can buy far more strength for less, and sink enemy ships?

Mitchell ached to back his concepts with positive public proof. He wrote about it, spoke about it, and finally got to do something about it, because his views were shared by some high-placed Navy admirals. So the Navy, willing to put the principle to the test, carried out its own bombing attacks on the USS Indiana, an obsolete battleship, during the week of 28 October to 3 November 1920. The result was predictable; it also was suppressed. Not one word of the test report became public knowledge until the Illustrated London News published a picture of the damaged Indiana in its issue of 11 December 1921.

In January 1921, Mitchell appeared before the House Representatives' Appropriations Committee and said, among other comments, "...we can either destroy or sink any ship in existence today ... all we want is a chance to demonstrate these things..." In rebuttal, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels made a foot-in-the-mouth statement about his willingness to stand, bare-headed, on the deck or at the wheel of any battleship under attack from the air by bombers.