War & Peace Quote by Stuart Symington

“Bastard child” is a deliberately impolite metaphor for institutional legitimacy: Symington is describing not just bureaucratic friction but a family drama in uniform, where the parent service with the money and traditions (the Army, the Navy) treats the newer, more specialized branch as an upstart that must be supervised, corrected, and symbolically put in its place. The punch of the line is in the indignity. It’s not “coordination problems”; it’s the kind of resentment that comes from being forced to ask permission to exist.

The context matters. Symington was the first Secretary of the Air Force, navigating the late-1940s birth pains after the National Security Act created an independent Air Force in 1947. Independence on paper didn’t automatically produce autonomy in practice. Procurement, doctrine, bases, promotions, and even the story a military tells about itself are power. Symington’s “everything had to be done over” suggests a system designed to waste time and duplicate labor to reassert hierarchy: if the Army redoes the work, the Army remains the author of the outcome.

The Marines comparison is savvy, too. He’s borrowing a familiar inter-service stereotype to normalize the Air Force’s grievance and frame it as structural, not personal. The final word, “mess,” is businessman plainspoken: a tidy verdict on an organization whose incentives reward control over efficiency. Subtext: the fight for airpower was never only about strategy; it was about bureaucratic adulthood.