Excellence Is the Antidote

In the summer of 1943, the 99th Pursuit Squadron — the first unit of what would become known as the Tuskegee Airmen — flew its first combat missions over North Africa with the Twelfth Air Force. They flew P-40 Warhawks against German and Italian aircraft over Sicily and the Mediterranean. They were, by any objective measure, skilled combat aviators.

The reception they received from much of the military establishment was something other than objective.

Colonel William Momyer, the commander of the 33rd Fighter Group, submitted a report to Army Air Forces headquarters arguing that the 99th had performed poorly in combat and recommending that Black pilots be reassigned to non-combat roles. The report was given serious consideration at the highest levels. It was nearly the end of the Tuskegee experiment before it had fully begun.

The 99th's actual combat record, examined dispassionately, did not support Momyer's characterization. But combat records can be interpreted, and in an institution shaped by decades of racial exclusion, interpretation followed expectation.

What happened next is one of the most instructive stories in American military history.

The Record

The Army convened a board to study the question. The board compared the 99th's performance to that of comparable white units in the same theater, controlling for the number of missions flown, the type of aircraft, the nature of the targets, and the opposition faced.

The 99th was, statistically, performing comparably to its peers.

The recommendation to reassign Black pilots was not implemented. The 99th continued to fly. The 332nd Fighter Group — the "Red Tails," named for the distinctive markings on their aircraft's tail fins — was activated and deployed to Italy, where it flew escort missions for the Fifteenth Air Force's heavy bombers striking targets in Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe.

The 332nd compiled a record that became legendary. In escort missions over some of the most heavily defended airspace in Europe, they were credited with never losing a bomber to enemy aircraft — a claim that has been debated by historians but that reflects, at minimum, an exceptional operational record. The Red Tails flew more than fifteen thousand individual sorties, destroyed or damaged hundreds of enemy aircraft and ground installations, and produced, within their ranks, thirty-two aerial victories against enemy fighters.

The men who flew those missions had something to prove. They knew it. And they proved it.

The Argument for Merit

I want to be precise about what the Tuskegee Airmen's story demonstrates, because it is sometimes told as a simple parable of inclusion — open the door, let people in, they will succeed. That is part of the truth. But there is another part that is more important and more demanding.

The Tuskegee Airmen succeeded by being excellent. Not by arguing for their right to participate, not by filing grievances about the treatment they received, not by waiting for the institutional attitudes around them to change. They flew the missions. They maintained the aircraft. They studied the tactics. They pushed their aircraft to the limits of performance and occasionally beyond. They earned the respect of enemies who tried to kill them and allies who doubted them.

This is the oldest and most powerful argument for merit-based evaluation: excellence, demonstrated persistently and visibly, changes what arguments cannot change. Colonel Momyer's report could be written because there was not yet a sufficient body of evidence to refute it. The 332nd's record, compiled over hundreds of missions across two years of combat, could not be argued away. The evidence was in the skies over Europe, and it was irrefutable.

The conservative argument for merit is not that merit is always recognized immediately — the Tuskegee Airmen's experience proves otherwise. It is that merit, demonstrated consistently, is the most reliable path to lasting recognition. Not the only path, not always the fastest path, but the most durable.

What They Built

The Tuskegee Airmen did not merely fly. They built an institution.

The infrastructure required to produce combat pilots — Tuskegee Institute, the flight training program, the maintenance crews, the officer corps, the support network of the broader community — was assembled under conditions of deliberate institutional hostility. They were denied the facilities available to white pilots. They were told explicitly, at various points, that the program was expected to fail. They produced, under these conditions, a program capable of generating combat-ready aviators who performed at the level of their peers in the Army Air Forces.

This is not a story about what becomes possible when obstacles are removed. It is a story about what becomes possible when people of exceptional character refuse to be stopped by obstacles that were never going to be removed by waiting.

The program's graduates did not merely fly in World War II. They became the nucleus of Black military aviation for the generation that followed. They produced officers who led units in Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. They produced, ultimately, the first Black astronauts. They built institutions that outlasted the resistance they encountered.

The Antidote

Excellence is the antidote to doubt — your own, and other people's.

This is not an argument that excellence is always sufficient. The Tuskegee Airmen faced obstacles that no amount of individual achievement could have fully overcome alone; the institutional changes that followed the war required legal and political action that went well beyond the cockpit. The point is not that excellence makes everything else unnecessary.

The point is that excellence makes everything else possible. The legal and political arguments for integration of the military carried weight precisely because there was a record of demonstrated performance to point to. Abstract arguments about potential are easy to dismiss. A combat record spanning two years and fifteen thousand sorties is not.

I think about the Tuskegee Airmen every time someone tells me that the system is rigged against them, that effort is pointless, that the outcome is determined before the contest begins. These men flew in a system that was, in fact, actively hostile to their success. The Momyer report was not paranoid fantasy. The institutional resistance was real.

And they flew anyway. They maintained standards that their situation gave them every reason to relax. They demanded of themselves what no one was demanding of them, because they understood that the record they were building was not just for themselves. It was for everyone who came after.

Excellence is the antidote.

Fly anyway.