When a new technology like air power comes up, there's a lot of what gamers call theorycrafting going on. Military minds are definitely sitting around and deciding how this new technology can shake things up.

Why Air Forces Fail, edited by Higham and Harris, necessarily talks about this development of doctrine a lot. In World War I, it tended that most of the winners of the power struggles came from the people who thought of air power as a simple extension of the army, limited to reconnaissance and spotting for artillery. This is why you see the misapplication of resources, diverted to building dirigibles that turn out to be more vulnerable to ground fire than anticipated, for instance.

After World War I, developments in air craft operational range would then lead to something of a bomber cult; theory and doctrine in many places swung to emphasizing the air plane's roll in strategic bombing, with other concerns being secondary. Over the course of the war this was proven to not be as effective as expected, while resources devoted to supporting the ground forces with both close air support and interdiction attacks being much more beneficial.

So while it's true that people put a lot of thought into how best to use planes in a military role, it's not true that the people who would eventually be proven right got their policies implemented first. Militaries are deeply political places, and whichever branch has the most political pull is going to want anything new to serve what it perceives as its needs. In most places that tended to be the army, and they tended not to be as imaginative as the guys who specialized in the planes (hence the early focus on recon and spotting).

This turf war can lead to weird results even when best practices for application of air power have already been decided decades in the past and agreed upon for as long; Argentina in the 1980s, for instance, banned their air force from developing anti-ship capabilities. The air force was by far the weakest politically, and the navy didn't even invest in much of its own aviation arm—they simply went without, rather than allowing the air force to help them.