Afd 100929 008 PDF
Afd 100929 008 PDF
Afd 100929 008 PDF
AND WARFARE
Edited by
Monte D. Wright, Lt. Colonel, USAF, Air Force Academy
and
Lawrence J. Paszek, Office of Air Force History
vii
INTRODUCTION
ix
to new weapons. While they made much of the need for liberally edu-
cated officers and published elaborate diagrams of infantry forma-
tions, such writings were almost entirely image-building and had no
practical effect on what actually happened on the battlefields. Finally,
soldiers had no understanding of what science was and therefore could
not call on its aid. The idea of progress was not widespread, and
technological advances were isolated, not appearing to the soldier as
a process of which he could take advantage.
X
world; for the literary world was inhabited by egoists, by men who
would not obey orders, by those who resisted the taxes that would
permit overhaul of the army, and by those who looked to the army
as a place where they could buy commissions for their sons. The deci-
sion to center the curriculum on math was part of a larger attempt
to seal off the military from civilian culture of the time.
Professor Hughes does not rebut Bien’s thesis but argues that the
relationship between technology and warfare generally, and the impor-
tance of mathematics in the dominant mode of warfare, siegecraft,
specifically, together with the increasing role of artillery required a
math-centered curriculum. The relationship is so obvious to Hughes
that he believes “it would be more difficult to explain a failure to
stress mathematics than to explain the stress on it.”
xi
difficult. While wartime researchers had been drawn from diverse aca-
demic specialties, the postwar organization was staffed almost exclu-
!;ively with mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, a change advocated
‘by the burgeoning Operations Research Society of Amkrica. T h e peace-
)time operations research office in USAF Headquarters was for several
years located far down the chain of command and lacked control over
!;imilar offices at the headquarters of major commands (SAC, TAC,
Ietc.) . Much important research, particularly on questions of broad
.iignificanre to national security and long-range planning, was referred
to an external organization, RAND. In time, RAND reports encouraged
similar work within the Air Force, if only to blunt a RAND proposal
with a counter-proposal, based on equally impressive research.
Professor Holley concludes that the Air Force has made less than
optimum use of the tool since World War 11, because of an ineffective
structure, or an inadequate doctrine, for the application of operations
research.
Mr. Perry finds Holley too charitable. Perry notes that the main
achievements of operations research in the RAF were made by engi-
neers at a time when Great Britain was losing the war. Desperate
measures were called for, and the British overcame the traditional
military distrust of science and scientists to take advantage of their
contributions. Operations research of both the British and Americans
during World War I1 dealt mostly with routine procedures, things
that had to be done, were being done, and might be done more effi-
ciently. T h e quantum jump implied in the postwar change of name
xii
to systems analysis not only required dealing with many unknowns:
more significantly, it required asking questions of vast, future signifi-
cance. When the Air Force was unwilling or unable to choose between
competing weapon systems, the Secretary of Defense intruded into
areas that had formerly been reserved to the military. T h e Air Force
did recognize the value of operations research and institutionalized it,
so that it would be available for the next war. But meanwhile, as a part
of the institution, operations researchers were as incapable as any
bureaucratic group of fundamentally reforming their own bureaucracy;
and whether the individuals in the bureaucracy were scientists or
humanists was immaterial.
xiii
military strategy, and hence on science-technologjy, has been Russian
and Chinese capability.
xiv
military, Kranzberg believes, stems from its closer relationship with
science-technology.
xv
officers, but one in which habit and tradition held almost undisputed
sway. There was no general, ruling idea as to the purpose of a navy,
so that when new ideas appeared, they could not be related to an
overall scheme and were therefore discarded piecemeal. Only with
Mahan’s theory did this condition change. Morison then considers the
opposite problem today: one in which the society, including the mili-
tary, is conditioned to rapid and continual change; and he suggests
that this may be placing too heavy a load on the military, which is
after all an institution that requires a certain amount of dedication to
routine, to faith and tradition, if it is to function. Further, the modern
enthusiasm for concentration on means, for rapid technological im-
provements, may result in insufficient attention to ends. In the over-
riding concern with hardware, more attractive alternative policies
may not even ,be considered. Other institutions have been overloaded-
the cities, universities, established habits and conventions. What is
needed is a new general, governing idea, such as Mahan’s, an idea
that can lead to new institutions and new values that “will enable us
to control the extraordinary energies and applications that we have
power over, in such a way that they will serve man and society most
effectively.” Morison sees such cooperative ventures as the Symposium
as a promising beginning in that quest.
xvi
The First Session
3
4
Engineering _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - - X -
Explosives - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - _ _ _ - X X X
Mechanics _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - - X' X' X
Metallurgy - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ X .___ -
X_ _ _ _ _ x
-
No one at this time thought of using calibrated sights or other complex aids to
long range shooting on small arms.
a I use the word here in the older, more restricted sense, including everything
kom the design of fortifications and siege works to the moving of earth and
construction of masonry, but excluding mechanical engineering.
This includes cranes and hoisting devices, boring machines, carriages and
limbers, and much paraphernalia needed for the manipulation of heavy guns.
' This includes both mechanical devices used in engineering and those employed
by besiegers against a fortification.
swords; the locksmith worked with file and chisel on half a dozen curly
little levers and so on. All this was totally innocent of chemical science
and crystallography. Locks, barrels, blades were made by specialised
developments of the common blacksmiths skill. The gunfounder, again,
excelled in his art because he prepared larger and often more beautiful
castings in bronze or iron than any other metal-founder; but he too knew
nothing of metallurgy, not so much as the nature of the difference
between cast iron, wrought iron, and steel. Of course, I do not mean to
say there was no metallurgical invention; invention of bellows and
furnaces, fresh alloys of bronze, and even treatment of iron castings went
on all the time. But none of it was invention based on science.
Consider now the mechanics of weapons. As my diagram showed,
this question is relevant to small arms and siege warfare. I think it would
be pedantic to go into such details as the mechanical design of gun
carriages, based on conventional waggon practice, or such a will-of-the-
wisp (first found in the fourteenth century) as the “armoured car”; it
was a favourite of the fifteenth century engineers, and Leonardo’s
drawing, so perfunctory as to be impossible, is familiar. Siege engines
were always a speciality of war. They too existed, or I should rather say
were illustrated, in Leonardo’s notebooks and those of Francesco di
Giorgio Martini, as well as the printed work of Roberto Valburio
(1472). I have no evidence that such cumbersome, complex machines
JF.H. Baer, “The Air Rifle That Went to War,” American Rifleman 115 (Dec.
1967) : 32-35.
‘Wilhelm Hassenstein, Das Feuenuerkbuch volt 1420 (Munich, 1941) .
10
sited in order to protect the desired area; sometimes areas of housing had
to be knocked down if they stood in the way of the defencef, or i%peded
their usefulness. Expert engineers might differ as to the principl$‘to be
followed, as happened with regard to Berwick-on-Tweed in Elizabeth’s
reign.5 But whatever the difficulties of application to a particular site,
and these were grave, the military engineer throughout this- period
followed fairly clear principles-the ones that evolved first in Italy, in
reaction to the introduction of cannon and the failure of medieval
methods of static defence. The medieval castle repelled besieger&by the
height of its stout wall, strengthened by round towers at intervds, and
further protected by a moat which also impeded attempts to batter the
walls or mine beneath them. Defensive missiles were hurled directly
down from above. After the introduction of firearms a breach could be
opened by cannon placed at a relatively safe distance from the wall, and
the defenders could be annoyed by explosive bombs flung from mortars
(this type of bombardment was familiar to both Valturio and Lzonardo
in the fifteenth century). If an attack was made on a breach, ,or the
besiegers attempted a direct assault by scaling the wall, it was difficult
for the defenders to concentrate their fire against them, harassed in turn
by the counter fire of the besiegers. The first step the Italian engineers
took in strengthening the defence was to break up the straight or-curtain
‘Lynn White, Jr., “Jacopo Aconcio as an Engineer,” American Historical Review
72 (Jan. 1967): 425-44.
>CrCNDIR6
as the Lancashire prodd i t survived among poachers and others into the nineteenth:
and it is still manufactured for sporting purposes at the present day.
17
in the same proportions but four times the force and size will not send the bolt
four times as far.
.4nd again,
I ask if a crossbow sends a bolt weighing two ounces a distance of four hundred
braccia, how many braccia will it send one of four ounces?lo
This has always been taken au pied de la Zettre, though I fail to see why
Tartaglia's venerable bombardier should not rather be put with the
Ancient Mariner, Shelley's traveller from distant lands, and countless
Masters and Scholars of didactic dialogue. However, we can hardly
suppose Tartaglia would have renounced experience had he possessed it.
The solution, resting on no very clear argument, is that 45' of
elevation gives the extreme range. I have no doubt but that this was an
intuitive result based on proportional symmetry; Tartaglia claims it was
verified by trial. He also knew that complementary angles should give
equal ranges, and claimed further that the extreme range is always ten
times the point-blank. Hence he did not argue that the initial rectilinear
segments are always equal at any angle. The curved segment he took to
be an arc of circle to which the linear segments were tangential.
Tartaglia's theory is not much more than a dressed up version of
Albert's or Leonardo's, and the mathematical garnish is really quite
arbitrary. His most original contention was that no part of the
trajectory-not even the point blank-is truly rectilinear; yet in geometry
he always treated it in the way I have described. His conceptions are
Aristotelian ones, modified by the impetus theory. As Koyre has
remarked, it was exceedingly difficult in these matters to step outside the
tradition, and in so far as Tartaglia departed from it-especially in
abandoning the idea of strictly rectilinear segments-this did not help
him to solve the geometrical problem.
T h e recondite and sometimes absurd philosophical arguments that
“See Peter Whitehorne, Certain Waies for the Orderyng of Souldiers in Battelray
and Setting of Battailes (London, 1562) ; Cyprian Lucar, Three Bookes of Colloquies
.
(London, 1588) ; and Walter Ryff, Der Furnembsten . . Architectur . . . (Nurnberg,
1547).
“Sig. A iii. “At randons” means, elevated above the point-blank (hence,
tellingly enough, the more usual random).
practice was impossible, and rules likely to be less effective than the good
gunner’s experience and correction of his aim.
Some historians (Edgar Zilsel and recently Christopher Hill) have
made much of the existence of a whole group of superior artisans at this
period, from the architect-engineers through painters and musicians to
gunners, surveyors, navigators, cartographers, and instrument makers,
apothecaries, opticians, clock makers, and so on. Obviously, levels of
craft skill did exist; some crafts employed simple mathematics, others
chemical knowledge. Clearly too these superior craftsmen contributed to
the refinement of technology. But one should be cautious of taking
“mathematics” in too grandiose a sense; one should remember that
gunners and sailors were simple men, and that, for sure, they were
consumers, not creators, of mathematics.
However, we can now see how well the world was prepared for at
least one feature of the kinematical discoveries of Galileo; the writers on
practical mathematics and artillery had long been confident that their
art must follow some rational mathematical scheme, and they were
prepared to believe that Galileo had discovered it. T h e writers did not
test his theory by experiment nor enquire about its application in the
field; it was enough that the new theory looked right, even if sometimes
the explanation of its curved trajectory harked back to Tartaglia, rather
than Galileo himself.
As everyone knows, Galileo rediscovered and applied to actual
bodies falling at the surface of the earth the square-law of acceleration;
he understood perfectly the vectorial combination of motions, and this
gave him the parabola as the path of a projectile-neglecting the
curvature of the earth itself. Accordingly, at the end of his Discourses on
T w o New Sciences (1638) he was able to produce that great desidera-
tum, a theoretical range table, and a number of accurate propositions
about projectile motion. This work on ballistics was developed further
by Galileo’s pupil, Evangelista Torricelli, who generalised and com-
pleted the theory, after which it passed into general circulation.
What was Galileo’s interest in solving the problem of projectile
motion, which as we know occupied him for over thirty years? T o my
mind the utilitarian aspects of the T w o New Sciences have been grossly
exaggerated. Galileo was above all a mathematical philosopher; most of
his life work was devoted to the general theory of mechanics, not to say
astronomy and cosmology. But he liked to display his abilities in the
most direct and conspicuous fashion. There can be no doubt that the
T w o New S c i m c e s was written to demonstrate the falsity of the simple
rules of proportion followed in the old craft tradition, and the
s,uperiority of the new, philosophical laws devised by Galileo himself. He
21
was not, so to speak, on the same side as the artisans; he was proving that
the philosopher understood things better than they did. For a century
and more, gunners had fumbled at the mystery of ballistics; Galileo’s
new treatment of kinematics unlocked it at once. Galileo was quite
explicit about this. I n 1632, after Bonaventura Cavalieri had first put the
parabolic theory in print, he complained to a friend about the loss of
“the renown, which I so keenly desired and had promised myseif from
my long labours” in mechanics, saying that to master the trajectory of a
projectile had been their chief objective. It was, after all, the most
celebrated of all problems in mechanics, quite apart from any question
of the usefulness of its solution.
Did Galileo believe his own solution to be useful? If we suppose
Galileo to have been drawn all along, as Tartaglia said he himself was,
to a practical problem of artillery, and if Galileo really thought that he
had solved this practical problem, then the answer clearly is, Yes.
Certainly Galileo talked about his ballistic theory in a very practical
way. But he was also quite aware that when movements are very swift
they are greatly impeded by the resistance of the air: this resistance was
especially strong in the case of musket and cannon balls. “The enormous
impetus of these violent shots,” he wrote, “may cause some deformation
of the trajectory, making the beginning of the parabola flatter and less
curved than the end;” but so far as this book is concerned, he went on,
“this is a matter of small consequence in practical operations, the main
one of which is the preparation of a table of ranges for shots of high
elevation . . . and since shots of this kind are fired from mortars using
small charges . . . they follow their prescribed paths very exactly.”16
Hence Galileo correctly enough supposed that the parabolic theory could
have a limited application. However, he was by no means always
scrupulous in making this clear-his tables do include the small angles-
while Torricelli was even more realistic in his language, thereby creating
the impression that the parabolic theory had completely solved the
problem of exterior ballistics, at least in principle. When challenged,
Torricelli attributed discrepancies in practice to the imperfections of
guns and gunners, being seemingly reluctant, unlike Galileo, to admit
that a large physical factor had been omitted from the parabolic theory.
Later writers on the theory of gunnery until well on in the
eighteenth century were content to rely on this beautifully idealist
conception, which became general from about 1670 onwards. Such
influential “practical” treatises as Robert Anderson’s Genuine Use and
Effects of the Gunne and Franqois Blondel’s Art de jeter les bombes
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS
NOT CITED IN THE NOTES
Biringucci, Vanoccio. De la Pirotechnia. Venice, 1540.
Cavalieri, Bonaventura. Lo Specchio Ustorio. Bologna, 1632.
Dircks, H. T h e Life, T i m e s and Scientific Labours of the Second Marquis of Worcester.
London, 1685.
Ffoulkes, Charles. T h e Gunfounders of England. Cambridge, Eng., 1937.
Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Trallati di architectura ingegneria e arte militaire, a
cura de Corrado Maltese. Milan, 1967.
Frankl, P. “T h e Secret of the Medieval Mason.” Art Bulletin 27 (Mar. 1945) : 46-64.
Galilei, Galileo. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze.
Leiden, 1638.
[Gregory, James]. Tentamina quaedam geometrica de m o t u penduli et projectorum.
Glasgow, 1672.
Guerlac, Henry. “John Mayow and the Aerial Nitre.” Actes du 7”“ Congris
Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, pp. 332-49. Jerusalem, 1953.
Hale, J. R . “Th e Early Development of the Bastion.” I n Europe i n the Late Middle
Ages, edited by J . R. Hale and others, pp. 466-94. Evanston, 1965.
Hall, A. Rupert. Ballistics i n the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, Eng., 1952.
. “Th e Changing Technical Act.” Technology and Culture 3 (Fall, 1962) :
501-15.
. “Merton Revisited.” History of Science 2 (1963) : 1-15.
. “T h e Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution.” In
Critical Problems i n the History of Science, edited by Marshall Clagett, pp. 3-23.
Madison, 1959.
Halley, Edmond. “A Discourse Concerning Gravity . . . and the Motion of Projects.”
Philosophical Transactions, London, vol. 16 (1687) .
Hill, Christopher. Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. Oxford, 1965.
Koyrk, Alexandre, “La dynamique de Nicolo Tartaglia.” In La science au seizidme
sitcle, Colloque de Royaumont, 1957, pp. 93-113. Paris, 1960.
Lorini, Buonaiuto. L e fortificationi. Folio edition. Venice, 1609.
Lot, Ferdinand. P a r t militaire et les armies au Moyen Age en Europe et dans le
Proche Orient. Paris, 1946.
MacIvor, lain. “T h e Elizabethan Fortification at Berwick-upon-Tweed.” Antiquaries’
Journal, vol. 45 (1965).
Nef, J. U . “War and Economic Progress, 1540-1640.” Economic History Reuiev, 1st
series, vol. 12 (1942).
Newton, Sir Isaac. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. London, 1687.
Ramelli, Agostino. L e diverse et artificiose machine. Paris, 1588.
Rattansi, P. M. “T h e Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society.” Notes and Records of
the Royal Society 23 (1968) : 129-43.
Robins, Benjamin. N e w Principles of Gunnery. London, 1742.
Santbech, Daniel. Problematum astronomicorum et geometricorum sectiones septem.
Basel, 1561.
Tartaglia, Niccolo. Nova scientia. Venice, 1537.
. Quesiti, et inventioni diverse. Venice, 1546.
Torricelli, Evangelista. Opera geometrica. Florence, 1644.
Uffano, Diego. Arttllerie. Translated by Th. de Brye. Frankfurt, 1614.
Valturio, Roberto. De re militari. Verona, 1472.
Walter, E. J. “Warum gab es im Alterturn keine Dynamik?” Archives Internationales
&Histoire des Sciences 3 (1948) : 365-82.
Webb, Henry J . Elizabethan Military Science, the Books and the Practice, Madison,
1965.
Zilsel, Edgar. “The Sociological Roots of Science.” American Journal of Sociology
47 (1942): 544-62.
Commentary
J. R. Hale*
University of Warwick++
25
26
permanence of their employment or their contact with the ruler and his
ministers to rethink any aspect of military practice.
The insulation of armies from the worlds of technology and science
was, in fact, even more complete in peacetime than in war. At least
during campaigns that lasted many years, such as those in the Nether-
lands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there was
occasion for the exchange of ideas between the engineers and artillerists
of different countries, for the trial and error tactical adjustments that
led, for instance, to the development of the infantry square and the
fire-and-wheel-about evolution of mounted pistoleers. But when peace
came an army as good as vanished; the short-termers went home, the
mercenaries marched off to the next job, the free lance rode his horse in
search of another trouble-spot-he was always welcome on the Habsburg-
Turkish frontier-and the generals returned to their estates or their
civilian offices under the crown.
Now peace was more commonly the result of financial exhaustion
than of battle or siege. Overwhelmingly the tax structure of western
Europe had been shaped by the needs of war. Taxes hit the poor more
than the rich, and wars commonly ended with food riots at home and
the possibility of social revolution. There was every incentive, then, to
cut military expenditure to zero as soon as hostilities ceased. T h e clas-
sical tag, “In peace prepare for war,” was much bandied about but
could not be acted upon. Government-controlled gun foundries were
starved of money for testing, let alone experiment; the militia compa-
nies, legally kept in being in peace and expected to turn out for regular
training, were starved of powder and shot and frequently were allowed
only enough powder to flash in the pan. When war began again the
old equipment was hauled out of storage and contracts given to armour-
ers and gun-founders who could produce traditionally proven weapons
as quickly as possible.
I have tried to give a picture-necessarily impressionistic and in-
complete-of armies doomed to inefficiency and thus inimicable to ex-
periment, short-budgeted, lacking in continuity of personnel, linked
to industry only intermittently (and then through non-military con-
tractors) , organizationally closed against any interrelationship between
the discoveries of science and the needs of war.
There was one exception to this closure. Inventors frequently wrote
to governments claiming to be able to revolutionise the art “of war. In
Venice, for instance, one of the functions of the office of the Prowedi-
tori of fortresses was to examine such claims and arrange for trials to be
made or models constructed, if they thought it worth while. Of the
inventions submitted between 1578 and 1630-mainly for earth-shifting
28
and fifteenth centuries were followed by cast bronze cannon and finally
by cast iron ones. Western European craftsmen and gunners reversed the
fifteenth century trend toward ponderous, giant weapons in favor of
smaller, more flexible guns. T h e first of the latter were cast by men who
made bells, aided in the casting by the gunners themselves: both were
skilled workmen who operated on a rule of thumb basis. We should
note, in passing, that these men were as valuable to princes as scientists
are to modern governments, and that their services were eagerly sought
after and handsomely rewarded. T h e gun foundries first appeared in
the Walloon Netherlands, southern Germany, eastern France, and
northern Italy. Men from these areas were lured away to establish works
in England, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and even far away Russia.
T h e important seventeenth century story was the development of
the cast iron gun. Even as late as the American Civil War gunners
recognized that the best guns were made of “fonte” or bronze: they
were lighter, less apt to explode, and less susceptible to corrosion. HOW-
ever, iron is less expensive than copper and tin, and as the governments
of princes came more and more under the direction of men of the pen
rather than of soldiers, this fact grew in importance. Early attempts to
cast guns of iron were largely failures; the methods used for casting
anchors or cooking pots were not adequate for cannons, but in time, the
ironmasters learned how to eliminate some of the impurities in their
metal and to cool the guns slowly, thus casting with fewer faults. Trial,
error, and accidents had much to do with the process. For example, the
English gun makers of the early seventeenth century became the most
important in Europe, probably because their iron ore was mixed with
phosphorus rather than with sulphur. It may also be that the large
domestic “private market” for cannon in England, where predatory pat-
terns easily led to piracy, may also have accounted for the fortunes of
the English cannon makers. By the mid-seventeenth century, when the
English crisis in forest products slowed up the English ironmasters,
Swedish cannon makers assumed first place in the European markets.
However, a glance at the Amsterdam market, where the munitions
trade of the seventeenth century was largely centered, will show that
by 1670 iron guns were being cast in many parts of Europe. We may
safely assume that these weapons were the product of master craftsmen.
T h e ironmasters, like the rest of men, knew no chemistry, and the evo-
lution of the guns suggests that their shape was the result of the advice,
perhaps of the direction, of master gunners who even by 1650 were not
yet completely accepted as soldiers, but whose role in sieges and in field
warfare was becoming ever more and more important.
I n the latter seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries the manu-
35
facture and testing of these guns was often carried out in arsenals under
the supervision of the ministry of war or marine, so that engineers and
bureaucrats took a place in the development of the gun. T h e process,
however, was slow. By the mid-eighteenth century French cannons were
standardized so that the balls more exactly fitted the bore and could be
interchanged from one gun to another. About the same time in Ger-
many men learned that by reducing the charge of powder it was also
possible to reduce the weight of the cannon. Thus a four pounder was
reduced from about 600 kgs to about 300 kgs; a 12 pounder from 1,600
kgs to 900 kgs. This gave much more flexibility to the artillery, especially
since the reform was accompanied by better caissons, new harness for the
horses, new methods of sacking the powder, and more effective hard-
ware for servicing the guns.
Another interesting aspect of the evolution of the cast iron gun was
the emergence of heavy mortars that could be mounted on shipboard or
carried along with the siege train. There was a significant improvement
in these weapons about 1680, when they became the weapon for the
bombardment of cities with explosive shells both from the sea and from
the land. One has only to see what happened to Genoa, Algiers, and the
Flemish towns in the early 1680s, or the poundings that the Anglo-
Dutch navies gave the French Channel ports in the 1690s and later in
the War of the Spanish Succession. T h e bombardment of these French
ports was responsible for the first proposal, to my knowledge, for the
recognition of the immunity of “open cities” from bombardment. I n
the eighteenth century the Prussians had mortars light enough to be
used in the field. Their effectiveness was definitely proved at Rossbach
when the mortar fire from behind a hill worked heavy damage on the
French army.
T h e cannon delivered solid shot or a sort of grape and cannister;
the former was effective against fortifications and troops in column;
the latter was often a devastating stroke against a line. T h e mortars
could launch an explosive shell, but without penetrating power. By the
opening years of the eighteenth century the howitzer was also known,
but its explosive shell was not perfected until the end of the century
when better methods of setting fuses came into existence.
I cannot emphasize too much the importance of these guns on the
development of the art of war. By reducing the cost of each by a third
to a fourth, and by using plentiful iron rather than scarce copper and
tin, the cast iron gun enormously increased fire power. Without them
the great fleets of the latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would
have been impossible. Even though the bronze gun still had greater
prestige, three-fourths of the guns on the fleets of 1690-1789 were cast
36
iron. In 1600 artillery was used largely at sea and for sieges; the guns
were too heavy and awkward for successful field operations. During the
Thirty Years’ War, Gustavus Adolphus introduced the first useful cast
iron fieldpieces. They were small in caliber, but they could be fired
more rapidly than an infantryman could fire his piece. Of course they
did not immediately revolutionize the battlefield; indeed, the pike was
still “queen” and did not disappear until the end of the century. None-
theless, these g u ~ were
s evidence of a trend: by 1688 the French army
had a goal-not really reached to be sure-of one gun for every thousand
men on the field. By the end of the century it had become four to a
thousand. In 1688 the king’s army numbered about 100,000 men; by
1705 it was over 400,000 men. They could not have been armed entirely
with bronze guns, but with cast iron it was possible.
Need I point out that these guns made inroads on the traditional
methods of fighting? One has only to see the French batteries at Mal-
plaquet mowing down the Dutch regiments with ferocious fire, or the
Prussian and Austrian batteries in the mid-eighteenth century, to real-
ize their importance. Of equal moment was the significance of the new
firepower at sea. It gave European sailors absolute advantage over the
ships and harbors of the Near East and the Orient and played an im-
portant part in the wars between Europeans during the latter years of
Louis XIV and the eighteenth century.
Perhaps of equal importance was the development of more effective
weapons in the hands of the seventeenth century infantrymen. By 1500-
1550 firearms had completely displaced the cross- and longbows, but
until the Thirty Years’ War they were not effective enough to make the
cavalryman’s caracole a dangerous maneuver, and musketmen needed
the protection of pikemen against a cavalry charge. Thus in 1650 the
infantry regiment was a mixed company of pike and musketmen. While
they needed each other they did not make a very flexible or effective
weapon. No one was more harmless than a pikeman as long as the
horses kept their distance, and the pikes were no longer useful in a bat-
tle between infantrymen. There were two problems to be solved: the
musket had to be made more effective, and protection against cavalry,
other than the pike, had to be found. By the middle of the seventeenth
century, gunsmiths had perfected the weapon needed for better fire-
power, but soldiers were too cautious to use it. Sportsmen knew the
flintlock, or fusil, and many individual soldiers tried to arm themselves
with this weapon; but war ministers like Le Tellier and Louvois, and
soldiers like Turenne, preferred the matchlock both because its ef-
fective range was longer than the fusil, or flintlock, and they feared
that the latter would not fire if the weather turned wet. Thus the
37
the old matchlock musket that had a tendency to explode. Thus the
volley was weakened. Gradually the line tightened to a point where the
volley did present a wall of fire. This was the fusillade that taught
Frederick I1 that firepower was the queen of the battlefield. Soldiers
marching on the double against a firing line had little chance of success
unless they also presented a wall of fire. This was the origin of Frede-
rick’s “moving wall of fire”; his soldiers were trained to march and
shoot. Other armies found it difficult to imitate this maneuver for it
required much discipline and rigorous practice. T h e French officers were
sure that it did not correspond to the genius of their nation, but their
response by an attack with a line fifty ranks deep was a disaster, for only
the first lines had the shock effect, while the whole body was exposed
to enfilading fire by both cannon and fusillade. For similar reasons the
French armies of 1914 suffered a comparable debacle on the Alsacian
front.
T h e fusillade, however, was not the most effective use of the fusil.
T h e soldiers were trained to fire on command rather &an at a target.
This was one of the reasons that soldiers ignored the rifled weapon.
They depended upon the “wall of fire” rather than upon the individual
shot-indeed, Frederick’s troops were trained to aim at the ground some
fifteen feet ahead of the enemy on the assumption that the kick of the
fusil would result in a hit. I n the latter years of the century soldiers
learned that the fusillade fired on command was effective for the first
volley, but thereafter more telling execution came from allowing the
troops to fire at will rather than at command. I t was better to shoot
to kill rather than merely in unison. Several important improvements
in the weapon that made this tactic viable were the iron ramrod, better
cartridges, and fusils that were better standardized. These seem to have
been the work of gunsmiths and sportsmen rather than scientists.
There were other technological developments that affected the art
of war. A small example might be found in the portable bake oven that
came into use in the French army toward the middle of the Dutch War.
Louis XIV ruefully tells us that the campaign of 1672 might have
turned out differently had his troops been supplied with bread baked in
the field, rather than depending upon the villages and towns; but this is
a questionable point, for even toward the end of the eighteenth century
field ovens were unable to supply all the bread and biscuit needed by an
army. There were also improvements in pontoon boats as well as boats
for river transportation, but the number needed never seemed to be
available. T h e tools for mining and trenching, developed by siege
engineers, also became more effective. One of my students has recently
39
also acted as the eyes and ears of the king's government. Many of the
innovations in the ways of handling fodder, munitions, and arms came
from these men rather than the soldiers who used them.
If these remarks have wandered somewhat far from a discussion of
science and technology, perhaps I can justify them by recalling that
soldiers must be convinced of the value of their weapons if they are to
function effectively, but this fact makes them conservative and unwilling
to try innovations. At the opening of the sixteenth century when the
different methods of fighting that had emerged independently in Spain,
France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany were tested against each other
in the so-called Italian Wars, one might have expected that all armies
would immediately adopt the best aspects of each, or at least would
attempt to do so. This in fact did not happen perhaps because the
captains, rather than a central authority, were responsible €or the arming
and training of the troops. It took almost a century before European
armies digested the problems posed by the confrontations of the Italian
wars. However when the organization, training, and arming of troops
and the maintenance of warships and sailors became the function of
ministers of war and marine, the process of adoption as well as
innovation was speeded up considerably so that we might insist that the
military revolution that brought back the Roman armies to Europe's
soil and Roman lines to the frontiers was primarily the result of the new
techniques for organizing and directing the military establishments: and
this was, in fact, the product of a new technology.
Discussion
this transition period, because between 1650 and 1850 there was a
profound change in the attitude of some soldiers, some administrators,
some craftsmen toward technology.
Professor HALE:Can I say something very briefly? I am sure these
questions are on the right lines, and I am sure the answer lies partly
with the administrator, and I would toss that to Professor Wolf. What I
am looking forward to findin’g out in the sessions which succeed this, is
how far there was a correlation between the actual knowledge of the
fighting man and the application of scientifically influenced technology
to war. I recently read what I think is a fascinating biography of Admiral
Fitzroy, who was the man in charge of Beagle when Darwin went on that
surveying voyage to Patagonia and the Galapagos Islands, and who later
became the head of the first Met. office in England. Now Fitzroy went
as a career seaman to what passed then for a college for naval officers,
and he took a lot of science, advanced astronomy, advanced mathematics,
and so on. Now I have looked at some of the textbooks of this academy-
they were elementary to a fault, It was impossible for a boy leaving that
establishment at 16 to have the faintest idea of how a scientist thought,
or how a scientist could couch a thesis in terms that a technologist could
implement and produce something useful for war. And yet what he did
derive was an enormous respect for science as such. He became-he
followed one (American, alas) Commander Torley-he became the
world’s authority on weather forecasting. He was, I think, the first
man to use this term, forecasting of the weather: and he sent out
survey ships to send back weather reports. He used in the very
early days the Morse telegraph to receive information quickly. All his
techniques were in fact scientific, but his conclusions were unscientific.
What you have is the phenomenon of a man who went through an
educative process that couldn’t have made him into a scientist, but
nevertheless lived in an environment that made him take up an
occupation, an approach to a problem, meteorology, that can be called
scientific. So, how far do we have to wait until the concept of science, as
such, is sufficiently invasive of the mind of a pretty ignorant and badly
educated man to make the armed forces as a whole responsive to the
advances of science?
Professor WOLF: I cannot answer your question, of course; but
even if it is not the question I was thinking about, it is an interesting
one. I think again that I would go back to the characters that we call the
intendants and commissars of the army-they appeared in the 17th
century and go into the 18th. These are the lineal descendants of the
people who went with the king when the king went out with his army.
T h e king took his chancellor and his treasurer, and he himself directed
affairs. The kings directed the marshals as long as they were with the
46
army. When they left the army and when the armies became SO
complicated that kings no longer played a role in them, they had to
arrange for commissars, for intendants, people like that to represent the
war ministry. These people played a tremendously important role. They
were intelligent, or many of them were. I followed one around Alsace in
one of the wars of Louis Qnator7e, and he had to deal with the problems
of powder, guns, pontoon boats, fodder-a full series of the problems of
military organimtion that led him to make proposals. Today these
proposals seem simplistic indeed. They do not demand science, but they
were proposals that technologically inventive people could solve; and I
am sure that, if yoti want to find the pressure of technology as the origin
of science affecting warfare and the ways of soldiers, you will find a good
deal of i t in the5e royal officials who went with the army. They were
usually engineers of the war ministry, or they might be lawyers. Men
trained as lawyers and engineers picked up the other parts of the military
activity and transmitted the information about it back to the war
ministry; as these war ministries became more and more complicated,
they engaged engineers and various kinds of people-some of them were
soldiers and some were not-to utilize information and develop the ideas
that officials proposed. This can be studied. I have a student now i n Paris
working on the intendants of the 1670s; and I believe it will prove to be
a very fruitful field for investigation, for understanding the processes of
modern warfare as they develop in the empirical period. That doesn’t
answer your question, Professor, but it’s the best I can do with it.
Professor ROPP:I would like to hear from Professor White. What
would he call this infrastructure, or the preconditions for science to
affect warfare? It certainly existed.
THECHAIRMAN: I think that possibly another element might have
been added to the title of this entire conference: “Science, Technology,
Management, and Warfare.” T h e more I get into technological history,
the more I’m convinced that management as an art is just as important
as technology for getting things done. Of course, Lewis Mumford has
made some rather extreme statements in recent years about this, but in a
very real sense government is the fundamental machine. I think that as
we get deeper into these matters we shall find that we are faced with
both a technological revolution and a managerial revolution, which
dovetailed in the most extraordinary way, affecting not only industry but
also warfare.
May I just throw in a final breath before the gong rings? I n what
has been said there have been a number of remarks about propaganda
or blarney. T h e implication is that warfare in the earlier period, and
perhaps more recently than we are widely prepared to admit, has been
47
T H E IMPACT OF
SCIENCE/ TECHNOLOGY O N
MILITARY INSTITUTIONS,
1700-1850
MILITARY EDUCATION I N 18TH
CENTURY FRANCE; TECHNICAL AND
NON-TECHNICAL DETERMINANTS*
David D. Bien
University of Michigan
* Although I have not tried to list here the scattered references, I base much of
this paper on data and impressions derived from sources for the Bcole tnilitaire in
Series M and MM, Archives Nationales, Paris, and in series Yb, Archives du Ministere
de la Guerre, Vincennes.
51
52
Further, the father had to have had long military service, and the family
had to be too poor to provide the son an education. Failure to meet any
of these criteria was used systematically as grounds for exclusion. T h e
founders and their successors made no attempt to select boys of especially
high intelligence or capacity. The special qualities they were to bring to
the new and reformed army would be developed in them by a kind of
educational engineering at the school itself. It was hoped and expected
that the boys would learn a great deal, but there was also an egalitarian
assumption, no doubt correct, that nearly anyone who made the effort
could learn what was needed to be a good officer of infantry or cavalry.
T h e administrators were always pleased when the unusually able few
turned out to be so adept at math that they could compete successfully,
by passing the examinations, for entry into the artillery. But these few
were not their main concern. What they wished +c) produce were
professional officers who could fill the lower grades in the nontechnical
branches.
For this purpose, they designed a new curriculum, one that seemed
revolutionary to contemporaries. Paris de Meyzieu, the nephew of the
founder and himself in charge of studies at the &ole militaire, described
the program and its intent in an article that appeared in 1755 in the
great Encycloptdie. There he spoke of the need for a vocational
education, for training that, by contrast to what the collkges offered,
would vary in its nature with the profession. He spoke of the risks that
were involved in any other education that might end “by making a
bishop of a geometer.” His readers would catch this reference to the
classical education of the collkges without difficulty. This Bcole militaire
would produce only warriors, and he added that he and his colleagues
had no intention at all of developing scholars. In the school, the students
would study and learn about many subjects: religion, “to the extent
suitable for a military man”; French grammar, in order to emphasize
understanding and an ability to express oneself easily; Latin, because
knowing it made the learning of other foreign languages easier; German
and Italian, because these were the languages of the regions where wars
would be fought; geography, when it was useful by informing young
men about the terrain of likely theatres of war; history, where “one finds
examples of virtue, courage, prudence, greatness of soul, attachment to
the sovereign . . .”; a little natural law; military ordinances, drill,
handling weapons, and in the last year, tactics. Physical exercise was also
important.5
T h e most important single study, however, was none of these. I t
was mathematics. Paris de Meyzieu put it simply: “Among all the kinds
OZbid., p. 310.
Ibid.
56
simple bravery. They were ready to die, and did in fact get themselves
killed in large numbers, but often uselessly because they did not have the
right habits and knowledge. A new sense of honor, more mundane but
more useful, had to be developed, one that would be professional and
would rest on hard work more than simple heroism.
But how had this old officer corps been recruited? It was composed
partly of uneducated rural nobles who arrived in their regiments
sometimes ready to learn, sometimes not, but in any case never to find
anyone there to instruct them. The larger number had the money to buy
commissions and to live well; they had also been to school. Most had
attended a collkge and thus could write poems, declaim, and read Latin.
They could be witty and clever. Theirs was a world of culture, money,
and cities, and to this world they kept ties and returned whenever they
felt like it. They absented themselves freely, often at times when the
military professionals thought that they should have been training their
troops and learning their military functions, sometimes even during war.
These were the men raised by PPre Navarre, and others like him, who
would insist that boys learn Latin before French, and math almost not at
all.
What began to appear was the formation within the Enlightenment
of two mutually hostile cultures, each of which misunderstood the other.
In 1761 Pere Navarre at Toulouse, just one year before he won the
literary academy's prize for the essay on education, won another prize
for his analysis of how the esprit de systkrne and esprit ge'omktrique
contributed to despotism. In his view, belles-lettres or literature was the
bastion of freedom and liberties against the incursions of a tyranny that
was embedded in a geometric world of quantity.9 For him, as for many,
it did not seem accidental that it was Vauban, the military engineer and
fortress builder, who had toward 1700 designed the plan to tax equally
the produce of all land in France. Vauban the army officer and quantifier
appeared to many the perfect expression of a mentality that, in
destroying tax exemptions for privileged persons and classes, would
destroy also qualitative distinctions between individuals and corporate
groups that were the essence of their liberties. T h e popular Montesquieu
and others, including the military reformer Guibert when he was in his
early salon and literary phase, invoked the lessons of the Roman
Republic in favor of a citizen army, full of enthusiasm and patriotism,
but amateur, an army that all kinds of nobles, not just professionals
steeped in math, might participate in intermittently. President Bouhier
at Grenoble, like Montesquieu a parlementaire, was speaking for the
world of humanities, liberty, and constitutional restrictions on the
~
France du XVI‘ au XVIII‘ sihcle,” Revue d‘histoire des sciences et de leurs applirq-
tions 7 (1954): 15.
the reformers of the army themselves recognized. Given the aims and
purposes of the army administrators, rhetoric and logic might have made
a perfectly reasonable curriculum for infantry and cavalry lieutenants.
The army was thought simply to need serious officers, ones who could
reason clearly and who would devote themselves to work. Nothing that
most officersdid required more than a little arithmetic, and certainly not
algebra. The materials for revising and reforming the education based
on rhetoric were everywhere a t hand, but the Bcole militaire elected not
to use them. Why?
For the answer to this question, we need to look, I think, into the
political, social, and moral spheres as much as into the technical. The
aristocratic, sovereign courts, or Parlements, and the Church as well,
were filled by persons steeped in Latin, rhetoric, and literature; they
were also the institutions that seemed to be blocking reform in the state
and blocking the establishment of a rational tax base that could support
a better army where rich young officers could not buy their way in. The
amateur and dilettante officer had usually been educated in a colltge.
Literature seemed light and frivolous, not at all consistent with the
rising secular Puritanism of army reformers. The solution to these
problems seemed to be to seal the army off from a society that looked to
them corrupt, to make the army self-contained, a separate world. Into
the &ole militaire, as into the whole officer corps after 1781, would be
recruited the sons of old noble families whose fathers and ancestors
were, by their long military service, within the guild. Ideally these sons
should also be poor so that, lacking an independent base in influential
relatives and lacking alternatives to long and serious professional service,
they could be formed into what the army believed it needed. Then, when
it came to molding this human raw material through education, it
seemed appropriate to impose on it the new and separate culture of
mathematics, an intellectual culture that would distinguish and remove
the young officers from the larger culture that was seen to threaten the
nation’s military health and power.
If the decision for math, then, had to do with practical needs,
these needs were not the kind that we usually define as technical. Offi-
cers would not use their math much, and by the 1780s some were even
reacting against it as stultifying and destructive of initiative in the
individual officer. Perhaps the emphasis on mathematics helped to
create a new military culture within which problems could be defined
differently; perhaps there were technical and even technological results
that came from the new education. But to explain how the new
“technical” education for all officers appeared and spread, we will do
better to look into the social and moral dimensions to the problem.
Commentary
John Shy*
University of Michigan
Western Military Education, 1700-1850
Professor Hughes does not agree, so readers will have to decide for themselves
whether changes in the tools of war in the eighteenth century can account for
changes in military education, in France and elsewhere. Some of our disagreement
may arise from his concern with the long-run effects of certain technological changes
on technology itself, while mine is with the immediate effects on warfare and the
military profession.
63
are what draw our attention. First and most obvious is the near simul-
taneity of founding: both the timing and the specific circumstances
make it clear that each institution represents a response to the changes
in warfare effected by the French Revolution. Second is the unusual
importance each institution attached to the study of mathematics.
Much as the emphasis on math at the Bcole polytechnique and for
entrance to Saint-Cyr influenced the shape of French secondary educa-
tion throughout the nineteenth century, military reformers in Prussia
after the disaster at Jena in 1806 called for greater stress on mathematics
in the secondary schools, describing math as the discipline that best
develops the powers of judgment. West Point (1802), while sending
most of its tiny contingent into line regiments, took the Ecole PoZy-
technique as its model, and through the early decades of the nineteenth
century West Point was a leading center of mathematical studies in the
United States. Organizers of Sandhurst (1802) understandably did not
advertise French models to justify their own enterprise, but from the
beginning it was understood that mathematics was the measure of
academic success and the principal pathway to a commission in a line
regiment without purchase. Sandhurst, like the Bcole polytechnique,
suffered repeated attacks after 1815 for emphasizing mathematics at the
expense of either a more practical or a more liberal education for the
profession of arms.8
‘Standard histories of the various academies bear but the assertions in this
paragraph, but only the evidence found in archives and contemporary publications
can fully support everything said. On russia, Poten, Militar-Erziehungswesen,and
Gottlieb Friedlaender, Die KonigZiche HZZgemeine Kriegs-SchuZe (Berlin, 1854) ; on
the United States, Stephen E. Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country (Baltimore, 1966);
on Britain, Augustus Mockler-Ferryman. Annals gj Sundhrmt (London, 1900).
Henry Barnard, Military Schools, rev. ed. (New York, 1872) is also valuable. I can
leave the case of Austria to Professor Rothenberg, but it is worth ndting that plans
for the reform of Austrian military education in the 1860s called for an end to
“an exclusive mathematical course” (Barnard, p. 453) .
67
education, but also as the best means of attaining mental acuteness and a
clearly logical mode of thought?
+ Since delivering this commentary, Dr. Hughes has been appointed Professor
of the history of Technology, Southern Methodist University.
‘Henry Guerlac, “Vauban: The Impact of Science on War,” in Makers 01
Modern Strategy, ed. by Edward Mead Earle (Princeton, 1943), pp. 34-35.
69
70
the century, on the eve of the Napoleonic wars when field warfare
became common, the French were developing a new scheme of fortifi-
cation, the “perpendicular,” based on the work of mathematician
Gaspard Monge and the military engineer Lazare C a r n ~ t Before
.~ this
the principles of Vauban had exerted the major influence. At the en@-
neering school at MCzihref, established in 1748, the official school of
thought was based on Vaiiban.6 The drama and the dynamic of the
Napoleonic wars should no1 obscure that when the students at the newly
founded Bcole militaire were required to study mathematics, it was as
a prerequisite for the study of siegecraft, which remained a focus of
the education of a military officer-perhaps even of the “education of
a gentleman.”
It is not necessary to dwell here on the relevance of geometry and
mathematical analysis to fortification and siegecraft. Professor Lynn
White has written that in fortification as early as the sixteenth century
“safety was achieved less by tangible masses of masonry than by abstract
geometrical patterns of lines of fire.”* By then the Italians had per-
fected the bastioned fortress, and as early as 1557 an Italian author
treated the planning and c‘esign of fortification as purely abstract and
ge~metrical.~ There is also no need here to demonstrate that the suc-
cesses of Vauban in fortification, and especially in siege, greatly en-
hanced the prestige of espr’t gtomttl-ique, a spirit manifest in the man
and his works. Although he flourished in the seventeenth century, his
two famous works on fortification and siegecraft were not published
until 1737 and 174O.lO After Vauban, engineers made enormous efforts
to improve upon details. In the eighteenth century this refinement
involved precise calculation of the amount of sapping-the number of
days-necessary to overwhelni a fortification. There was danger that
the overly subtle system and analysis would produce impractical
the0ry.l’ In view of the ascendancy of fortification and siegecraft and
the efficacy of mathematical analysis when applied to it, at the time the
Bcole militaire was founded, I believe that it would be more difficult
to explain a failure to stress mathematics than to explain the stress on it.
John U. Nef, Western Civilization since the Renaissance (New York, 1963),
p. 319.
Louis Charles Jackson, ‘*Fortification and Siegecraft,” T h e Encyclopaedia
Britannica (11th ed.; New York, lUlO), p. 688.
‘%bastien le Prestre de Vauban, A Manual of Siegecraft and Fortification, ed.
and trans. by George A. Rothrocl (Ann Arbor, 1968), p, v.
Lynn White, “ J a c o w Acon. io as an Engineer,” dmericnn Historical Review
72 (1967) : 425.
’Horst de la Croix, “The Literature o n Fortification in Renaissance Italy,”
Technology and Culture 4 (1963) .41.
lo Guerlac, “Vauban,” p. 12.
75
76
81
82
the new arrangement was to do something for the tltves dzi roi by
getting them out of the Paris school where the routine and isolation
did in fact resemble those of a monastery, and also to attract paying
students who would rise quite high.
Professor CLARKG. REYNOLDS, University of Maine: In the dis-
cussion of the impact of science and technology on the military from
1700 to 1850, it seems to me there is a preoccupation perhaps of
American military historians for land warfare in Western Europe, and
I think we shouldn’t go away from here without thinking about the
naval questions. Because the period 1700-1815 is such a tremendous
period of change in naval history, someone should have been repre-
sented on one of these panels whether this morning or this afternoon,
because it is a whole separate problem and furthermore involves a case
study of Great Britain which is unique. Secondly, I am still worried
about the great gap of eastern Europe. For instance, the close relation-
ship between the French and the Russian military systems all the way
from Peter the Great to the present. Mr. Rothenberg’s discussion about
the education of enlisted men in this field, due to reforms of the
Russian army about the end of this period, was highly significant. So,
I would simply like to ask, “Was there any sort of impact on the Rus-
sian system by these French reforms of the late 18th century?”
Professor ROTHENBERG: Well, there was a degree of exchange of
information between armies in the 18th century. I forgot to mention-
since my time was running out-that General Gribeauval, the later
reformer of the French artillery service, got his original training in
Liechtenstein’s artillery school. Simultaneously, the Russians had mil-
itary attaches-we would call them totlay-in Austria; and General
Peter Shuvaloff, the creator of the Russian artillery service, did try
out some of his new pieces in Austria and got back reports on their
effectiveness. It seems to me, however, that the interconnection between
the services in eastern Europe is not so much based on the French model,
but that the Russians learned much from the Austrians and Prussians.
I have seen numerous instances of officer exchanges and even whole
regiments which go from the Austrian into the Russian service. I have
seen relatively little in the Russian service of the French. Now the
Turks, on the other hand, took heavily from the French. This is true
especially in 1737-39. But I have not come across, except in the
Shuvaloff episode, any real, systematic exchange of ideas. I keep on
seeing things in the realm of the practical-in 1758 eight experimental
howitzers were sent from the St. Petersburg arsenal for further testing
in Vienna-things like that. But I have not seen any intellectual ex-
a3
T H E IMPACT OF
SCIENCE/ TECHNOLOGY O N 20TH
CENTURY WARFARE
Introductory Remarks
87
88
89
90
aerial gunnery school. For many months I had been teaching young
airmen how to aim their guns to hit attacking aircraft. Our lessons,
largely derived from British sources, revolved around the problem of
estimating the proper lead, much as one does when duck hunting.
We taught what we ourselves had learned, and we taught it in good
faith, the best we knew how. But then one day we were told that
everything we had been teaching was all wrong.
This was a shocking and humbling experience. How many of
those names on the roll of honor in the headquarters building, those
gunners killed in action over Germany or in the Pacific, were my
fault? Badly shaken, we instructors had to learn all over again. In-
stead of teaching gunners to lead, we now discovered they must lag;
instcad of aiming ahead of the fighter, now in seeming defiance of all
common sense, we apparently had to aim behind it! This was all
most disconcerting.
T h e new art of “position firing” and the mysteries of the “pursuit
curve,” we found, were the work of some distinguished scientists who
called themselves Operational Research analysts. That was the first
time I had ever heard of the phrase, but I was impressed. Even if their
instructions seemed to defy common sense, they worked; they got
results, and that is what counted. T h e whole story of how an astron-
omer from the Mount Wilson Observatory, a zoologist from Wash-
ington University at Saint Louis, and a math instructor from Johns
Hopkins, among others, worked out the necessary formulas deserves
to be told even though it cannot be told here. My only point at the
moment is that from that day onward I was persuaded that Operation-
al Research was a new discipline to be taken seriously.
From the time of Archimedes onward, history is replete with ex-
amples of military commanders-and industrial managers-who have
used a form of Operations Research to improve their effectiveness.2
But not until the era of World War I1 did OR acquire its elaborate
institutional basis and widespread military application, beginning with
an Air Ministry unit established in 1987.3 From the British, especially
the work of P.M.S. Blackett, the line of descent to the US is obvious.
Many individuals recognized the exciting potential of OR for the Air
Force, but one of the best perceptions was that prepared in 1942 by
For scme interesting precursors in the field of OR, see W. F. Whitmore, “Edison
and Operations Research,” Operations Research 1 (1952) : 83-85; and H. K. Weiss,
“The Fiske Model of Warfare,” Ibid. 10 (1962) : 569-70.
a E. C. Williams, “Reflections on Operational Research,” Operations Research 2
(1954) : 441; and Great Britain, Air Ministry, The Origin and Development of
Operational Research in the Royal A i r Force (HMSO, 1963).
91
With the end of the war the OA units were denuded. Virtually
everyone was anxious to get out and get home immediately. For the
scientists the problem was especially acute. The war in the Pacific
ended in September; if one cut out and returned to the campus im-
mediately, one could make the academic year just starting. If one
lingered to see what the Air Force might offer, it would be too late
for the university and one might have to wait for another whole year.
So the Air Force ended up with a tiny caretaker OA unit at Head-
quarters, largely concerned with demobilizing individuals.
The authorities seemed to agree that some kind of Operational
Research capability was desirable, but who would staff it and where
should it be located? Since the OA units of the war period were civilian
and had no formal Tables of Organization, there was no automatic
survival based on pure momentum or Parkinson’s law. And with many
of the able civilian analysts departed, there were few left to study
the matter.
There were plenty of problems: should the permanent organization
be civilian or military? If the former, could really able analysts be
recruited within the rigidities of Civil Service? Would truly imaginative
men be willing to work within the restraints inevitable in a permanent
bureaucratic organization? Should the OA effort be in-house or farmed
out on contract? Or a mixture of both? Where should the activity be
located? Should each major commander have his own service, or should
a Headquarters office provide general Operational Research services
for all echelons? Where should the Headquarters OA office be located:
In the Scientific Advisory Board? In the Research and Development
staff, the Training staff, or the Operations staff? It is interesting to note
that some effort was made to prepare a history of OR during the war,
but no formal publication emerged. Just how far the organizational
experience of the war years was analyzed to inform the decision-makers
for peacetime remains unclear.’
‘The early postwar efforts to place OA in the Air Force structure can be traced
in Maxwell AFB Historical Div. archive 168.64-28.
93
In general, then, whenever the Air Force had problems for analysis
relating to matters of broad national security policy and long-range
* W. C. Randels, “Some Qualities to Be Desired in Operations Research
Personnel,” Operations Research 4 (1956) : 116.
“For an example of OA orientation toward a pure science outlook, see LeRoy
Brothers, “Education for Operations Research,” Operations Research 4 (1956) :
415-21, with its suggestion of “sabbatical” leaves for OA analysts to universities.
“ A brief resume of military OR appears in A. W. Boldyreff, ed., “A Decade of
Military Operations Research in Perspective-a Symposium,” (1958) , in Operatioiis
Research 8 (1960) : 798-860. Unfortunately, the paper on the AF OA office given at
the symposium was not submitted for publication.
96
and others directly for various Air Force agencies. Would they, in
their labors, exhibit the same kind of scientific detachment on which the
Headquarters OA shop had built its reputation? Wouldn’t these hired
analysts be under an overwhelming temptation to come up with the
kind of answers they thought their hosts would like to get? Even a
Commanding General who wishes to hear the hard truth about his
own organization sometimes finds it difficult to do so. One is reminded
of the comment of the elderly cardinal to his young colleague who
had just received the red hat: “You will never again in your life eat
a bad meal or hear the truth spoken.”
The Headquarters OA shop had other problems, too. Not least
among these was the matter of maintaining an effective relationship
with the analysts assigned to the various subordinate component com-
mands of the Air Force. T o what extent, for example, could the Head-
quarters Director exercise any meaningful control over the character
and quality of the work being done by analysts within the Strategic
Air Command? This was the period when airpower doctrine was
largely embodied in the concept of massive retaliation. Plans for war-
time contingencies concentrated on the delivery of nuclear warheads.
In this environment, SAC was pre-eminent. It regularly received the
lion’s share of men, materiel, and money from the resources available
to the Air Force. Thus SAC, from its earliest beginnings, was able to
build a strong staff of analysts, some 15 in 1948 at a time when the
Air Force Headquarters shop had only ten. And while some semblance
of infrequent contact existed between the two groups, the SAC analysts
charted a more or less independent course.
The dilemmas confronting the Director of OA at Headquarters are
manifest. If he wished to supervise or even to replicate the work done
by analysts out in the Commands, he was largely forestalled by the
simple fact that analysts in the field reported to their own commanders
and not to him. The experience of World War I1 had shown that
without this arrangement, analysts in the field would never get the
local cooperation essential to their success. So there was little expecta-
tion of any change in these command relationships. Whatever supervi-
sion Headquarters OA was to exercise over the field would be by
mutual desire-not by directive. At the same time the scope of the
Headquarters OA organization seemed at least in some measure
threatened by the penchant to use outside contractors, particularly on
long-range policy studies. This practice may in some respects have
been in response to the implicit desires of the Headquarters analysts
themselves. Fbr they were in no small degree committed to a purist
approach in their studies by their desire to maintain an impeccably
98
Was it really possible for OA to stay out of Systems Analysis and still
remain useful as a Headquarters staff agency? During the McNamara
era the name of the game was cost effectiveness, and even an organization
of modest ambitions, quite apart from any desire to avoid the soft or
non-scientific end of the data spectrum, could scarcely avoid becoming
involved. Indeed, so urgent was the need for Systems Analysis studies
within the Air Force to cope with the insistent demands coming down
from the Department of Defense, that several alternative types of
in-house analysis organirations were considered by the Air Staff-in some
respects, not unlike the merger or consolidation that had been suggested
and discarded several years previously. The Director of Operations
Analysis, Paul Hower, was invited to consider becoming the Technical
Director of a large, new organization with a staff combining virtually all
the military and civilian analysts whose work impacted directly on all
planning and programming activities at the Air Force Headquarters
level. Whether this suggestion reflected a meaningful appreciation of OA
on the, part of the high command or simply a gesture of personal respect
toward its leader, is a matter of speculation. T h e offer was tempting, but
the Director of the Operations Analysis shop resisted the temptation.
Why? What were his motives? Certainly he was concerned for the
preservation of professional standards. A meticulous craftsman himself,
was he reluctant to see his organization diluted and the technical
character of its work drastically altered? Did he foresee that a move into
Systems Analysis would require a staff of economists and social scientists
rather than the hard science, math-physics types he had on board? Or
did he foresee that this type of consolidation, however superficially
appealing, was an over-reaction to the problem of fragmented analytic
(1959) : 423-29.
resources? Whatever his motives, in the best scholarly tradition, he
decided to oppose consolidation. He was successful in resisting the
change.
Of course, this still left the need for an organization to do the
long-range, force composition studies requiring large staffs of military
officers and some supporting analysts. T o fill this void a Studies and
Analysis office was formed with a clearly defined role that was
complementary to rather than competitive with the OA office.
But what of OA? Did the OA staff, having backed away, at least
temporarily, from the big job in Systems Analysis, initiate an aggressive
program of Operational Research looking to the field commands where
so much of the real world action was to be found? A certain amount of
analytic work relating to current operations was going on at the Pacific
Air Command (PACAF) and at several other centers. In South Vietnam,
where it was most needed, however, the response, at least initially, was
poor and the product mediocre. This left the Headquarters OA shop in
a vulnerable position. Both the new Chief of Staff and the Vice Chief
were enthusiastic supporters of Operations Research, and they expected
a high quality performance from the organization. So too did Dr. Harold
Brown, the Secretary of the Air Force.
Secretary Brown was unusually well equipped to understand the
potential of OR as a tool of defense management. His years of experience
at the Livermore Radiation Laboratory and as Director of Research and
Engineering in the Department of Defense not only gave him a general
familiarity with the techniques of OR but, in addition, a demonstrated
capacity to apply the tool himself. Convinced that the existing OA
organization was not being exploited to the utmost by the Air Force,
Secretary Brown and the Chief of Staff initiated an independent review
of the OA organization.
T h e sudden death in 1967 of the highly respected Director of OA,
Paul Hower, the man who had backed away from Systems Analysis,
coincided with the review triggered by Secretary Brown. In view of the
significant dissatisfaction with the analytic studies, and the lack thereof,
flowing back from Vietnam, some observers anticipated that the OA
organization was in for rough sailing ahead. Fortunately, the outside
investigators called in to appraise the situation moved with dispatch, and
so too did the Air Force high command.
In the first place, there was no delay in appointing a new Director.
An unusually well-rounded man with wide experience both in and
outside the Air Force was chosen to fill the slot. The new appointee, ROSS
Thackeray, not only had strong academic credentials in math and
105
‘“AFR 27-7, 5 Apr. 1968, superseding that of 5 Oct. 1959. See also Change 1, 12
A.ug. 1958.
“ AFR 27-7, 5 Apr. 1968, section 5a (4) .
106
”Based on interviews with Arc Light team members 24 Oct. and 12 Dec. 1968.
107
life. But opinions such as these, while gratifying, were no substitute for
statistical measures or hard evidence on cost effectiveness.
T h e various ingenious means by which the analysts compared the
costs and capabilities of the B-52 with the performance of conventional
artillery and the performance of fighter-bombers need not occupy us
here. Suffice it to say that even in the span of several days their studies
opened up a whole series of problems for investigation, each offering
opportunities for improvingthe effectiveness of air operations by a large
factor. War is inherently wasteful. Improvements in yield by a factor of
five, ten, or even twenty are still just as possible as they were in World
War 11. What is required is the imaginative and resourceful application
of highly qualified brainpower by men with broad experience and
analytical minds, men with wit enough to know there is more than one
way to skin the cat.
For example, since impact areas were often inaccessible and hard to
quantify in conventional terms for bomb damage assessment, the
analysts adroitly turned the problem upside down. Instead of evaluating
damage, they switched to an intensive study of how targets were selected.
If, say, 100 targets are nominated each day by ground force commanders,
intelligence units, and others, and only five strikes per day can be
mounted, by what process are the candidates for bombing selected? Does
this process actually select the most lucrative targets? What priorities
prevail? How objective is the selection? What steps can be taken toward
optimization?
Although the results of the B-52 study may never be published in
their entirety, it is possible to say that the analysts have given the Air
Force some hard data from which to make a case for the B-52 as a
modern airborne analogue for cavalry and artillery. Far more important
than the findings of this particular report, however, is the new focus and
attitude of the OA analysts at Air Force Headquarters. The organization
is in the business of Operations Research in a highly positive way. A new
vitality animates the staff.
Only time will tell whether or not Operations Analysis has at last
reached the Promised Land. Meanwhile, what can we learn from these
twenty-odd years of wandering in the Wilderness? Historians are not
interested in praise or blame, only in understanding. In this frame of
reference a few observations may be ventured.
No one will deny that Operations Research as a tool of command
has not always been used to its full potential. It is also a fact that the
spectacular success of a makeshift, temporary, ad hoc collection of
inspired amateurs during World War I1 has not always been matched by
108
T h e main objective here has been to trace the broad outlines and to
suggest a thesis which will, one may hope, point the way for further and
deeper investigation. The author will be pleased if this effort provokes
contradictions and amplifications in the interest of fuller understanding.
Let me conclude by suggesting that what has been said here of
Operations Research may well be true of other management tools and
weapons for decision-making in the Air Force-and for that matter in
the Department of Defense as well as industry. Surely the evidence here
presented suggests that even in an organization as overwhelmingly
technical as the Air Force, there is still a large place for political
scientists, historians, and others similarly trained to ask searching,
probing, difficult, and often embarrassing questions of their technologi-
cally oriented c011eagues.~~
m I am especially indebted to W. Barton Leach and LeRoy Brothers for their
letters shedding light on OR in the USAF.
Commentary
Robert L. Perry*
The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California
*The views expressed in this paper are those of the author. They should not be
interpreted as reflecting the views of The RAND Corporation or the official opinion
or policy of any of its governmental or private research sponsors. This paper has been
published as RAND report P-4114.
‘Rudolf B. Schmerl, “The Scientist as Seer,” in A Stress Analysis of a Strapless
Evening Gown and Other Essays for a Scientific Age, ed. Robert A. Baker (Englewood
Cliffs, N. J., 1963), p. 186.
110
111
historians, I maintain, to spit in the occasional eye that wants spitting in.
Otherwise, we might as well become political scientists.
Next, I do not agree with Professor Holley or the Operations
Research Society of America that there is a special brand of analytical
thought which occurs at the knee of some peculiar curve and becomes
purer than something else called Operations Analysis, or Systems
Analysis, or even-if you will pardon the phrase-Cost-Benefit Analysis.
It does not make a great deal of difference whether one gets his Monte
Carlo distribution by throwing dice or by reading between the beeps of
an IBM Model 360. The numbers don’t care. And since the point of it
all is to recommend solutions to specific individual problems, there
would appear to be some native advantage to assigning dimensional
values to as many relevant uncertainties as can be identified in each
problem. I know Professor Holley essentially agrees with that doctrine,
even if he does not say so here, because he has explicitly used it in one of
the finest studies of Air Force-or Air Forces-decision-making yet
written, his Buying Aircraft: Mattriel Procurement for the Army Air
Forces, in the Army historical series.2
Finally, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it does not matter much
whether an analysis is conducted in the Pentagon or on the third level
below Offutt Air Force Base or in Santa Monica, if it is done well. That
is all that matters. It is plain from Professor Holley’s account, although
he has been extremely careful to avoid unfounded criticism, that
Headquarters, United States Air Force, was spectacularly unskillful in
exploiting the potential of operations research, but it is also apparent
that one must exercise extreme care that the implications of such
findings do not unfairly prejudice evaluation of the analysis operations
of other agencies, institutions, or headquarters which have not been
explicitly examined.
The precepts of operations research are not new. Liddell Hart
observed in October 1937 that “the way that decisions are reached on
questions of strategy, tactics, organization, etc., is lamentably un-
scientific.” He urged that the investigation of problems “be given to a
body of officers who can devote their whole time to exploring the data on
record, collecting it from outside, and working out the conclusions in a
free atmosphere.” 3 Liddell Hart h’ad more to say and much that was
equally pertinent, but that is the crux of what may be the first and
certainly is one of the best statements of a requirement for operations
research.
* Irving Brinton Holley, Jr., Buying Aircraft: Matiriel Procurement for the Army
.4ir Forces (Washington: Department of the Army, 1964).
*Basil H. Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War (London, 1944), p. 125.
112
As the British saw it, operations research had two initial and two
subsequent aspects. First there was the evaluation of the operational
performance of an equipment or a weapon, and second an analysis of the
relationship between tactics and weaponry to see to what extent one
influenced the form of the other. Two extensions of operations research
appeared later. One concerned the prediction of the course of future
operations which might be either tactical or strategic, with the object of
influencing policy. The last had to do with the study of the efficiency of
organizations in actual operations."
I t seems evident from a comparison of (a) the British notion of
what matters were within the purview of operations research with @)
the actual experience of the postwar USAF in these matters, that the
British view was very much the broader. Headquarters, United States Air
Force, seems to have kept its beak pretty much on the first line of inquiry
opened by the British, and although the Tactical and Strategic Air
Commands may have tried excursions into the relationship between
tactics and weaponry, they were field commands and dared not venture
into issues affecting changes in strategy, or organizational evaluation.
Was there some peculiar element in the British experience that led them
to such a generous view and something else in the American experience,
or the American establishment, that caused quite a different perspective
to result? These are legitimate questions, but it is not likely that they can
be fully and satisfactorily explored here.
Still, something can be gained by a quick look.
Before the start of the European War the R.A.F. had three
fundamental experiences of operational research. The first involved the
influence of radar, newly developed, on air tactics. The second was an
attempt during the special bombing trials of 1937-1938 to discover the
accuracy of bomber attacks on various targets and the effect of
antiaircraft fire on low altitude and dive bombing attacks. The third
involved experiments with methods of controlling the interception of
intruding bombers and ultimately led to the creation of control room or
operations room procedures.
Significantly, in all cases the principal inquiries were conducted by
civilians who were mostly specialists in the engineering sciences, and the
results were in all cases contrary to the hopes and beliefs of principal
military figures and many senior civilians. There has been some
'This explanation of the span of operational research is taken from a speech
made in 1952 by E. C. Williams, Director of Operational Research at the Admiralty,
and cited in The Origins and Development of Operational Research in the Royal Air
Force (London: HMSO, 1963), p. xviii.
113
He added:
Perhaps . . . it is to the professionalism and isolation of the military estahlish-
ment . . . that we have to look more than anywhere else in order to understand
the fact that until quite recent times the military mind has been suspicious of
the changes which are provoked by technological advance-and correspondingly
suspicious of scientists.'
' Solly Zuckerman, Scientists and War: the Impact of Science on Military and Civil
Affairs (London, 1966), pp. 8-9, 13.
114
done long ago. Or not done.”8 Professor Holley has explicitly denied
any such intent, but nonetheless he has indirectly and somewhat too
gently told us what the Air Force has not done or has done quite
inexpertly during twenty-odd years of tinkering with operations research
in Air Force headquarters, both as a function and as an institution.
Operations research as it was conceived and practiced during World
War I1 represented a means for performing more effectively or more
efficiently tasks that the military services would somehow ultimately be
obliged to perform in any case. In those earlier and more violent days,
“effective” and “economical” implied lesser casualties and slighter
wastage of materiel than would otherwise occur. As tends to be true of
all military establishments, everywhere, and at all times, the Air Force,
having discovered that operations research was a particularly useful
technique for specific applications, decided to enfold it in the existing
structure of a permanent organization. But the Air Force seems to have
been blind to the reality that both the circumstances that made
operations research initially valuable and the characteristics of the
discipline were perishable.
It is an interesting commentary on the character of operations
research‘ as used by the United States Air Force and as remarked by
Professor Holley that its first significant contribution was to improve the
bombing effectiveness of B-17 and B-24 aircraft in 1944, and its most
recent accomplishment to recommend ways of improving the bombing
effectiveness of B-52 aircraft over Vietnam. It would seem that in 25
years the designations of the aircraft and the targets have changed, but
not much else.
Operations research began by addressing quite small issues-or at
least issues that could be addressed in rather small terms. Bombing
accuracy, gunnery practices, maintenance concepts, supply and inventory
problems: these were the wartime topics. And although such topics
remained important to the postwar Air Force, they were overtaken and
subordinated to much larger issues of weapons choice, strategic doctrine,
procedures of research and development, methods of ensuring inter-
service cooperation in combat conditions, and such matters. Operations
research in the Air Force generally has not sought out such larger
questions or, in approaching them, has attempted to narrow the
uncertainties by excluding consideration of items that are difficult to
quantify. Here is a sub-aspect of the problem: the difficulty of handling
large policy issues in an organization designed for smaller questions.
Moreover, Professor Holley observes, the operations research organiza-
tion in Air Force headquarters preferred to deal with matters that lent
New York Times Book Section, 29 Dec. 1964.
115
have helped much to answer questions that were never asked, and it is
quite evident that operations research, for one reason or another, did
not permit itself to become involved in large complex problems of policy
that might conceivably have required the services of non-numerologists.
Once a function has been as carefully defined by its practitioners as
was postwar operations research, the function tends to become the
nucleus of an institution, and institutions are the stuff of which
bureaucracies are made.
One of the dominant attributes of any ordinary bureaucracy like the
Royal Navy, the German Post Office system, the Politburo, or the Roman
Curia is that it accepts a stable set of values early in its existence and
rarely, if ever, changes them of its own volition. Bureaucracies are
self-perpetuating. They do not die of neglect-as witness the continued
vitality of the United States Indian Bureau-and are decidedly difficult
to kill: the Suez Canal Commission still lives, somewhere. Institutions
change mostly in their response to outside pressures. If the pressure can
be relieved elsewhere, as in the creation of alternative ways of doing
essential systems analysis, an institutionalized operations research func-
tion will change little and the parent service-here the Air Force-will
suffer thereby.
Consider a recurrent question that has perturbed the Air Force for
two decades: What kinds of weapons should be selected for development
emphasis. As early as 1945 the Air Force, still part of the Army, saw the
need of developing and deploying bombardment missiles. Yet it was not
until 1957-twelve years later-that the Air Force gave up persistent
efforts to develop aerodynamic cruise missiles in preference to ballistic
missiles for the bombardment mission, notwithstanding that for several
years the greater value of ballistic missiles had been established to the
satisfaction of virtually all independent analysts. This question is
further discussed in the Appendix to these remarks.
A friend of mine who is far better equipped than I to comment on
the development of operations research in the Air Force, or on a paper
about its development, has observed with considerable astuteness that
the really striking achievements of operations research in the Royal
Air Force, where it had its first and greatest successes, occurred while
England was losing the War, and at a time when radical notions and
outspoken criticisms were listened to because radical measures were
desperately needed.
Institutional change is rarely popular and institutional change is
particularly unpopular if neither the institution nor its masters can
find reason for dissatisfaction with matters as they have been. Let me
119
Appendix*
These matters are discussed by E. E. Morison, Men, Machines and Modern Times
(Cambridge, Mass., 1966). pp. 37-39; and by Robert Perry, “The Ballistic Missile
Decisions,” RAND Corporation Report P-3686, Oct. 1967.
121
Jerome B. Wiesner, Where Science and Politics Meet (New York, 1965), p. 68.
’Ralph Sanders and Fred R. Brown, eds., Science and Technology: Vital National
Assets (Washington, D. C., 1966). p. 1.
123
Quantitative Relationships between Science-Technology
and Warfare
‘“The good military officer was an expert in a technical skill such as civil
engineering, ship design, cartography, or hydrography.” Samuel P. Huntington. The
Soldier and the State (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). p. 193.
125
According to Jack Raymond, Power at the Pentagon (New York, 1964), p. 97,
Vannevar Bush said that “military domination was a statement that meant nothing
whatever under those circumstances.” However, in Modern Arms and Free Men (New
York, 1949), p. 47, Dr. Bush foresaw the possibility of future problems arising from
large-scale government support of scientific research.
12 Leslie R. Groves, Now I t Can Be Told (New York, 1962). Foreword.
la See Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939/1946
parameters antedated World War 11, but their importance has been
magnified in the postwar era. America’s global treaty commitments
made imperative more information about the societies and cultures in
which our military forces might operate; there had to be propaganda
in order to win uncertain peoples over to our foreign policy pwposes
and military means; and there was the need for counter-insurgency
techniques in support of limited-warfare objectives. Furthermore, the
military establishment required the social sciences for its own manage-
ment problems: analyses of manpower requirements and resources;
techniques for personnel selection, classification, training, and per-
formance evaluation; and for matters of organizational effectiveness,
such as motivation and morale, leadership, command and staff relations,
communication, organizational change, and criteria of unit effective-
nessZ5
Another characteristic of contemporary science and technology
is the breakdown of old disciplinary barriers. T h e result is the forma-
tion of new interdisciplinary researches, such as material sciences;
the abandonment of old classifications of civil, mechanical, electrical,
etc., engineering, which grew out of the engineering practice of the
19th century; and the creation of hybrid sciences, such as biophysics,
biochemistry, and bioengineering. Similarly, the mission responsibilities
of the separate military services broke down following World War 11.
Prior to and throughout that war, the Army, Navy, and (army) Air
Force each had single and distinctive primary missions, even though
some secondary mission responsibilities overlapped. Changes in military
technology have blurred the former primary-mission separation. T h e
Navy widened its responsibility from simple sea combat to include
strategic offensives, first with the carrier air forces and then with the
Polaris missile submarines. The Air Force, which concentrated after
World War I1 on long-range delivery vehicles and nuclear weapons,
has developed a substantial continental air-defense force and airlift
force. Perhaps these overlapping mission responsibilities made it
necessary to utilize cost-benefit analysis in order to allocate mission
resources. In other words, the managerial innovations were made neces-
sary by changes in strategy which themselves had been dictated by
technological changes in warfare.
Another characteristic of our contemporary revolution has been
the transformation in the nature and direction of scientific and tech-
26 Raymond F. Bowers, “The Military Establishment” in The Uses of Sociolo&,
ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, William H. Sewell, and Harold L. Wilensky (New York, 1967).
p. 256. T h e most celebrated military effort to utilize the social sciences-for studying
conditions which might lead to armed insurrection in developing countries--led to a
debacle: Project Camelot (1965).
nological activity, and this too has been reflected in military work.
Large R&D laboratories, research teams, federal support for science
and technology-all characterize our modern scientific and technological
activity, and all are part and parcel of military R&D. Although the
most quoted portion of Eisenhower’s “farewell” address dealt with the
“military-industrial complex,” in the same speech he also brought out
these factors:
Akin to and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-
military posture has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution research has become central. It also becomes more
formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for,
by, or at the direction of the Federal Government. Today the solitary
inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of
scientists, in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free
university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,
has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the
huge costs involved, the government contract becomes virtually a substitute
for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds
of electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars
by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever
present and is gravely to be regarded.”
than did big wars, and that the United States must be prepared to
fight limited wars and to cope with threats of insurgency against free
government^.^^
T h e combination of Kissinger’s and Taylor’s ideas-those of the
academic intellectual and the experienced military commander-plus
American experience with Communist aggression in various parts of
the world, including Cuba and the early American involvement in
Vietnam, changed the Pentagon’s set of priorities and stimulated scien-
tific and technological efforts to cope with problems of limited wars in
addition to all-out nuclear war.
Even though flexible response called for the ability for the United
States to carry on limited, conventional, and counterinsurgency war-
fare, that did not mean that the technology to be employed was to be
old-fashioned or obsolete. The weaponry employed by the United
States in the Vietnam War, for example, is “modern and complex,
generally possessing a flexible munitions capability.” 33 Furthermore,
new dimensions were given to limited warfare, as illustrated by the
employment of the helicopter in that conflict. Exploitation of the
helicopter has had important consequences for the conduct of land
operations, “both as a means of logistic support to the forward area
and for the rapid deployment of troops into battle.” T h e area of land
which can be dominated by a formation of a given size is now vastly
increased, particularly in terrain where communications are deficient
Defense Management, ed. Stephen Enke (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), pp. 92-94.
“Robert McNamara, “The General Problem of Nuclear War,” in Defense,
Science, and Public Policy, ed. Edwin Mansfield (New York, 1968), pp. 7-8.
I‘ Schlesinger, “Changing Environment,” p. 105.
Latin maxim, “Si vis pacern, para bellum” (If you want peace, prepare
for war).
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Push
reply to Project Hindsight. Key scientific events which led toward five
major technological innovations were traced. Unlike Project Hindsight,
Traces did not deal with weapon systems but with other developments
of social and economic significance: birth control pills, the electron
microscope, video tape recording, ceramic-metallic materials, and matrix
isolation. Instead of setting a backward time-limit of 1945, Traces went
back more than a century in studying the scientific roots of certain
.innovations. Dividing its key events into non-mission research, mission-
oriented research, and development and application, Traces discovered
that non-mission events amounted to approximately 70% of the total,
20% to mission-oriented research, and 10% to development and appli-
cation. Furthermore, the number of non-mission events peaked signifi-
cantly between the 20th and 30th year prior to an innovation, whereas
Hindsight found a delay of five to ten years between the DOD invest-
ment in research and the payoff.
I do not find that the conclusions of Traces and Project Hindsight
are contradictory. Had Project Hindsight looked further back in time or
wider afield than weapon systems, its conclusions might have been much
closer in percentages to those of Traces, while Traces might have come
up with a somewhat different set of percentages had it chosen a different
set of innovations, particularly some involving mechanical rather than
chemical, biological, and electronic devices. They agree that both
fundamental and applied research play roles in innovative activity and
that mission-oriented research becomes increasingly important as the
time comes closer to the final innovation. T h e importance of this latter
point to our study lies in the fact that even when some basic scientific
discoveries have opened up vistas of military exploitation, and even
when the project is in the stage of technological development, it fre-
quently becomes necessary to return to the laboratories for some basic
research-even though it is mission-oriented-and this helps explain the
push-pull relationship between science and technology themselves.
Examples of scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations
providing the pull for military developments are familiar to all of us. In
this setting, it is appropriate to recall that the air parameter of warfare
arose from a civilian achievement. Only after the Wright brothers’
curiosity and experiments had shown that heavier-than-air flight was
possible did the military display much interest. This is not to deny that
many of the subsequent developments in aircraft arose from the military
push, but the great breakthrough itself-the advent of powered flight-
was independent of any military concerns.
T h e most striking example of the scientific pull in recent times
arose from basic scientific investigations of the atom. T h e story is so well
150
and even the Air Force had to ground its F-111s in Vietnam after a
succession of crashes. T h e TFX story, wholly apart from the controversy
between the services and over which company would win the contract,
indicates that science and technology, despite an extremely strong
military push, could not produce a plane which possessed the “com-
monality” which McNamara insisted upon.
Secretary McNamara had left office before the failure of the F-111
venture became apparent, but his application of cost-benefit analysis to
the TFX problem faces us with a major question in analyzing the
military push on science and technology: How does the cost-benefit
approach to weapon systems development affect scientific and tech-
nological advance? I know of no study which has investigated this
question. Yet, planned-program-budgeting, which forms part of the
cost-effectiveness system installed by McNamara in 1961, has un-
doubtedly affected the allocation of resources to specific areas of science
and technology.
Charles Hitch, former comptroller of the DOD and one of the
prime advocates of programing and cost-effectiveness techniques, has
pointed out that it is only when weapon systems have reached the stage
of advanced development that cost and possible benefits begin to be
considered, and hence cost-effectiveness studies do not act as too sharp a
brake on the innovation process. Yet Christopher Hartley has pointed
out that considerations of cost rather than technical feasibility led the
United States to invest in Minuteman and Polaris rather than Skybolt,
and there are probably other examples of this type.4T
On the other hand, a case might be made that the emphasis on costs
has perhaps stimulated a search for alternative technologies, just as
similar cost competition in private industry has been productive of
technological innovation. At the same time, the enormous cost of today’s
weapons, the long lead time necessary to produce complex weapons, and
the wide choice of weapons available through advanced technology
would seem to make imperative some form of budgetary analysis in
allocating resources for science and technology. Until we have close and
objective investigations of actual cases, we cannot determine whether the
present system of cost-benefit analysis has stimulated or hampered
discovery and innovation.
We also cannot tell whether military R&D should be divorced from
production, and performed in nonprofit research institutes and govern-
MEdward C. Ezell, “The Search for a Lightweight Rifle: the M-14 and M-16
Rifles,” Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1969.
“Burton H. Klein, “Policy Issues Involved in the Conduct of Military
Development Programs,” in Economics of Research and Development, ed. Richard A.
Tybout (Columbus, Ohio, 1965), pp. 318-19.
155
for space vehicles is said to have resulted in items for civilian consump
tion-although it is a moot point if the Corningware coffeepot owes
very much to the ceramic nose cone. Nevertheless, cepain military
components or developments, such as the miniaturization of electronic
devices, can be utilized in civilian products.
It has been argued that military technology has had an impact on
civilian industry by encouraging the emergence of new technologies
such as electronics. In addition, these new technologies enable existing
industries to develop a new range of equipment, instruments, and mate-
rials that are replacing, improving, or extending old types of production.
Yet, much of the new technology stimulated by military requirements
has not been widely adopted by civilian industry. For example, large
aerospace companies which specialize in producing for the military
“obtain only one or two per cent of their sales from products based on
their defense/space work that are sold in commercial markets. The
list of abandoned commercial ventures is long, ranging from stainless-
steel caskets to powered wheelbarrows, to garbage-reduction ma-
chinery.” 80 It would appear that military technology no longer has the
direct impact on civilian technology that it had in the years before
World War 11.
There are reasons for this difference. I have mentioned some of
them, including the highly specialized nature of today’s military
requirements and the sophistication of modern weaponry and equip
ment. But there are other differences. One is the time factor. Military
science-technology works under pressure-in orde? to meet competitive
scientific and technological advances by the Soviet Union in military
hardware-and civilian industry does not labor under such pressures.
There also seems to be a higher degree of uncertainty in military
R&D than in civilian science-technology.
There is uncertainty about the future detailed objectives of our military
forces, about the future effectiveness of these forces, and about the alternative
.
means available for achieving these objectives. . . There are many internal
uncertainties also. Will a particular technological approach work as
predicted? Will the components integrate together without serious inter-
ference? Will the sub-systems be sufficiently reliable to permit the achieve-
ment of mission objectives?
Aircraft and missile companies alone employ more scientists and engi-
neers on research and development work than the combined total of
the chemical, drug, petroleum, motor vehicle, rubber, and machinery
industries. Weidenbaum estimates that about 52% of all the scientists
and engineers doing R&D work in American industry are engaged on
projects funded either by DOD or NASA.63
The fact is that the DOD and NASA finance about three-fifths of
all research and development performed in the United States, far
surpassing in dollar significance the R&D funds supplied by all other
sources, including private industry, colleges and universities, and other
non-profit institutions.?*It is interesting to note, also, that the govern-
ment outlay for university research represents two-thirds of all the
research money which the universities have available.
Defense science and technology have thus become of major signifi-
cance for American society, not only because of the magnitude of their
expenditures and their importance to our nation’s defense, but also
because they are vital to support of research and education in science
and engineering. As a corollary, because the defense program utilizes
a major share of our scientific and engineering talent and supports so
much of the R&D effort, it thus plays a large role in shaping the course
of scientific and technological advance.73
The federal government, especially for defense purposes, has
become the Maecenas, the patron, of science and technology, displacing
the university, industry, and private foundations. Furthermore, it has
fashioned a wide variety of institutions to administer its vastly increased
commitment for scientific and technological excellence.74
In order to understand the full significance of this, in terms of the
71 Jacoby and Stockfisch, “Scope and Nature of the Defense Sector,” quoted in
question of the quality of the scientific research, but with the lack of
ariy firm indicators, we must assume that much of it was trivial, some
of it was worthwhile, and a relatively small amount of it was trulv
significant-just as in .the case of most scientific researches throughout
history.
President Eisenhower in his talk seemed to link intellectual
curiosity with blackboards, and government contracts with computers.
But let us not confuse presidential rhetoric with facts. While it is true
that government funds have been used to purchase computers for scien-
tific research, it simply is not true that there are hundreds of new elec-
tronic computers for every old blackboard. And if there were, I should
say that the situation deserves at least two hurrahs rather than dire
forebodings. For the electronic computer is a powerful tool for the
human intellect, an invaluable servant of human curiosity, enabling us
to seek for the answers of questions which could scarcely have been
asked before.
In any event, the blackboard remains; it is far frnm obsolete, and
it still assists us in scientific-technological research. Ike was a great
enough man to be forgiven his nostalgia for the past; the rest of us must
live in and prepare others for tomorrow’s world, and in that case we
need the computer as well as the blackboard.
With this reference to our late President’s nostalgia for the past,
we are ready to look back and see just where our study of the inter-
actions between science-technology and warfare during the post-World
War I1 era have carried us.
First, we have attempted to show that science and technology play
a greater role in warfare than ever before in human history, and that a
military technological revolution has accompanied the scientific and
technological revolution of our time. The military commitment to
science and technology is shown in the spending of the Defense Depart-
ment for research and development, the increase in the number of
scientists and engineers employed by the military itself or indirectly
supported by defense expenditures, and DOD support of the education
of scientists and engineers as representing a resource for national
security.
Furthermore, defense expenditures for science and technology
promise to continue into the foreseeable future. Even if the Viet-
namese war were to end tomorrow, we have been told that defense
167
expenditures would not decline precipitously. Given the fact that mili-
tary power in today’s world rests increasingly upon scientific and
technological capacity, we can expect military R&D expenditures to
be maintained at a high level even if peace should break out. The
level of support for science and technology in our military establishment
is quantitative evidence of the way in which the military interacts with
science and technology to a larger extent than ever before in our nation’s
or the world’s history.
Although the military has become more closely tied to science-
technology, military technology is becoming increasingly different from
civilian technology. The specialized nature of military requirements,
the sophisticated and complex weapons and instruments of contempo-
rary scientific-technological warfare, and the varying production meth-
ods utilized for the new military technology have brought about a
dichotomy between military and civilian science-technology which had
not previously existed.
Paradoxically, just at the time when the products and processes of
military science-technology are being distinguished from their civilian
counterparts, there has been a rapprochement between the military and
business, especially in defense-related industries, resulting in the forma-
tion of the “military-industrial complex.” President Eisenhower’s warn-
ing about the military’s influence on political decision-making, espe-
cially when allied with powerful business interests, calls into question
the distribution of power and the representation of interests in our
nation’s politics.
At the same time, the importance of scientists and technologists in
the nation’s defense effort has also brought them to the fore as a factor
in political decision-making. It was once said that war is too important
to be left to the generals, but increasingly war is being left to the
scientists and engineers. Perhaps it is too important for them also.
Although Don K. Price thinks that our democratic processes are suffi-
ciently varied and that the centers of power within our country are
adequately dispersed so that no one group can exercise a disproportion-
ate degree of power over a long period,T5 the fact remains that a new
estate-the Scientific Estate-has entered into the American political
process. This has come about largely because of warfare’s increasing
dependence upon the scientific-technological parameters.
Because of the power of the scientific estate in political decision-
making, the alienation of the scientists from the military poses a major
prdblem, especially given the scientific character and foundations of
Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men (New York, 1949) .
See Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton,
1962) .
169
I have been deliberating for nearly two months, and through sev-
eral drafts, as to what approach I should take in this commentary. I can
assure you that the problem still eludes me somewhat. For one thing,
I very much appreciate Professor Holley’s presentation because it stands
as testimony beyond his major study-Ideas and Weapons-that he has
the courage to venture into areas of history too forbidding for most of
us. For another, the options available in any consideration of the
“action-reaction and interaction”-to borrow Dr. Kranzberg’s telling
phrase-of science, technology, and warfare after World War I1 are so
great, that I felt like a practitioner of systems analysis, but without the
sophisticated techniques and rigorous discipline to which the experts
aspire. But after re-reading the papers of Professors Holley and Kranz-
berg, after re-thinking the ideas raised by the Symposium, and after
giving second thoughts to the fact that I am a social and political
historian thrust suddenly amidst this exceptional coterie of military
historians, I decided to accept the invitation of Colonel Hurley to
discuss the subject in broad terms. More specifically, I decided to focus
on what I consider to be a very significant implication of Professor
Holley’s paper, and then to supplement it by a swift retreat to my
own competence and research.
That implication, or message, as I read it, is that the alliance be-
tween science, technology, and warfare in the postwar period has never
been so easily and effectively consummated as outward manifestations
might suggest. It is not automatic. It takes place in the flux of history,
subject on the one hand to the vast range of personal emotions-of hope,
aspiration, prejudice, envy, fear, and uncertainty-and on the other to
the unpredictable demands of external events, whether they be eco-
nomic, political, social, cultural, or iutellectual. More precisely, Profes-
sor Holley portrays one aspect of that relationship, which was marked
by unfulfilled expectations, or in his own words, which began as a
“wartime triumph” and “fell short.” I can sympathize with the nostalgic
disappointment which on occasions finds its way into his story, for
operations research should seemingly have shared in the remarkable
171
172
hTowth and success which was characteristic of most other areas of the
scientific-military alliance. It had made vital contributions during the
war; it had earned the respect and dedication of military leaders; and
it did answer to the needs of the Cold War. Yet Headquarters Opera-
tions Analysis “wandered for 20 years in the wilderness.” At the heart
of the explanation for this, as Professor Holley has told us, was the
problem of organization and top management, of structure and leader-
ship. But a significant part of the explanation also had to do with the
human or personal: the fear on the part of a group of professionals
about losing the respect of their colleagues; their suspicion about outside
analysts; their inability to alter their standards and life style, or to
define their raison d‘&tr-ein a period of rapid change.
Operations analysis did not reach maximum effectiveness, therefore,
primarily because of internal complications or inadequacies within the
Air Force. Future studies, I suspect, will show that other postwar efforts
have suffered from similar and equivalent internal limitations. But the
military-scientific-technologicalrelationship has also been a victim of
powerful external pressures. My own research on the United States’
importation of some 640 German scientists and engineers between 1945
and 1952 clearly shows the impact of politics, economics, and morality
upon that relationship. The thrust to import the Germans, and thereby
integrate an entire nation’s technology into our own, was strong and
forceful within the services. Yet historical trends, profound and for
years unyielding, restricted the program. I would like to briefly note
some of the major influences as a kind of complement to Professor
Holley’s theme.
In the spring of 1945 there was no policy in Washington to import
enemy scientists. Indeed, such considerations as had been made were
all intent on keeping them closely controlled in an occupied Germany.
The State Department’s Safehaven program aimed at preventing the
travel of scientists from the Reich to other nations, especially to Latin
America; and the Foreign Economic Administration’s studies on how to
keep Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the world, insisted
that the scientists were needed for the reconstruction of their homeland
and could make no conceivable contribution to our own weapons tech-
nology. Yet other forces were leading toward a different conclusion. T h e
wartime respect accorded to Germany as the world‘s leading nation in
science, the widespread apprehension about her “wonder weapons,”
and the immediate need for technological intelligence about weapons in
use, created a compelling fascination about her accomplishments. Begin-
ning in 1944 a host of technical intelligence teams descended on the
continent; their interrogations and their findings led to requests for
the immediate evacuation of several hundred personnel.
173
By July of 1945 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had acted favorably upon
the requests through the establishment of Project Overcast, which
provided for the temporary importation of as many as 350 scientists for
a period of six months. Yet the end of the war in September destroyed
the rationale behind their program-that the scientists could contribute
to the war effort against Japan. The issue nonetheless remained alive.
Some officers pushed for a permanent immigration plan to augment our
weapons technology, inspired in no small measure by their excitement
over the utilization of small clusters of Germans at Wright Field, Fort
Bliss, and at a naval installation on Long Island. Other military per-
sonnel were concerned about the delicate problems involved in using
former enemies, a sentiment that met almost unanimous favor within
the scientific community.
175
176
their lives trying to comprehend what went on back in the old days
and explain it, keep it alive, and indoctrinate the new priests as they
come along, so that this tradition will be kept going. I don’t know at
what fraction of the population it wilI level off, but perhaps the same
as any other priesthood, a reasonably small proportion of the population
of our society.
Now what consequences will this have for the subject at hand
today?
First, it will mean that science and technology will again become
decoupled from the military. Nothing much will be happening in
science and technology any more, just as nothing much happened with
saddles and the pike and the instruments of warfare in antiquity. They
will become decoupled and running wars will again become an art. Of
course, the tools the soldiers have to do it with will be fantastically
complex compared to what they have now. The revolution is not over
yet. We have another century to go, and a great deal is going to happen
before it ends.
Second, who is going to keep the tradition alive? I claim it is the
successors of you ladies and gentlemen. T h e historians of science and
technology are not only going to have to keep alive the memory of the
men who did it, and the organizations that did it; but also they are
going to have to transmit the body of science and technology. T h e
future of science and technology really belongs to you, not to the
people who are at the moment carrying on the *revolution. Their days
are numbered. Certainly the future holds little for prophets. When we
arrive in those times, we will know that the more distant future holds
nothing new. Historians are going to reign and Chief Scientists are
simply going to fade away.
Colonel FRANCIS X. KANE, USAF (Space and Missile Systems Or-
ganization, AFSC): Professor Brodie, I submit that I answered the
question you posed about Vietnam implicitly in my article in Fortune
in 1964. I said then, as I say now, that systems analysis is an art. It
requires more than cost effectiveness. It requires more than ops analysis.
It requires the inputs of political scientists and others to make the
weighty decisions on strategy which must be made in the military
sphere. Lacking those other inputs it was inevitable that our course of
action would be insufficient.
Well, I have been a planner for 25 years. Planners are supposed
to look ahead. I didn’t look ahead when I accepted Colonel Hurley’s
invitation. I didn’t realize I would be the man in the black hat when I
Pot here. I have been at the center of the decisions that Professor
179
Holley talked about, when we weighed the fate of ops analysis in the
Air Force, when we weighed the fate of systems analysis in the Air
Force, when we weighed the impact of technological revoluti‘bn. In
fact, I guess, I am unique in that I have the only continuity of that
whole process from 1946 until today. Therefore, I must disagree with
history as recorded by the historian and say, “That ain’t the way it
was, Charlie.” And I do that with great reluctance because my horo-
scope this morning said, “Don’t be critical.” And I do it with great
reluctance for another reason. I draw heavily on his book, Ideas and
Weapons, which I think is a landmark in the whole process of under-
standing relationships between technology and strategy. But my sources
are different because I was on the scene.
Let me recount the way I saw the situation. In 1946, I was in the
hospital at Walter Reed waiting to go to Georgetown to be part of the
Jesuit plot. So they sent me to the Pentagon for a few months and there
I got involved in the kind of statistical projections Professor Holley
discussed in the demobilization period, and there I got to know the ops
analysts of the Air Force. In 1949, after being at Georgetown eighteen
months, I was put in War Plans where we did the first comprehensive
systems analysis undertaken by the Air Force. Its very peculiar title indi-
cated that we were just at the beginning of a revolution. It was called
the Air Force Mobilization Plan. We were still laboring under the
illusion that in the defense of Europe in the 1950s we could still have
time to mobilize. So, we started off with that assumption. We turned
to our friends in ops analysis to help us with those problems. We soon
learned that they were, as Professor Holley said, worrying about aircraft
problems and the way aircraft operate in tactical situations and opera-
tional situations, whereas our concern was entirely different.
We were trying to do things which are normal in the analysis we
do every day in the Air Force, that is try to introduce new weapon sys-
tems. We had a top secret annex and we hardly breathed the words
Navaho, Atlas, although we had to say when they would come into
being, what they would cost, and what aircraft we would give up as a
consequence. We also had to show how we would lose aircraft as we
tried to attack Russia-deliver weapons on Soviet cities in the face of
their defenses. Later those analyses were given an esoteric term, “draw-
down curves.” That was a key word in the early 1950s when some of our
colleagues from RAND arrived on the scene. We did “draw-down
curves’’ that startled the Air Force generals because they assumed as in
World War I1 that once war started, numbers of units, numbers
of people, numbers of aircraft would continue to rise. So we did a lot
of innovative work trying to understand the new situation we faced,
finally coming to a realization that the World War I1 experience had
limited relevance for the future of the Air Force in the defense of this
country.
Now at the same time we performed another great service. We
helped RAND get started. The ops analysts apparently don’t like this
innovation. But as we were doing these various projections of war in
the 1950s we had several overseers come from the embryonic RAND
office and spend weeks with us. Later they went back and briefed Gen-
eral Landon on the wonderful innovations they had discovered and they
were proposing he adopt. So he called us all in to hear the briefing from
our colleagues in RAND, and they told us what we had been telling
them for several weeks. As a novelist said, “The briefing was followed
by an embarrassed silence.” But in any event, since then there have
been very close ties as we built up the really comprehensive interplay
of all the elements of strategy that must be analyzed to make the kind
of decisions which we have been making and must continue to make in
the future. Now in that whole period we drew on ops analysts as indi-
viduals. We never drew on ops analysis as an organization.
T h e Air Force sent me off to France for three years, and I spent a
year at Maxwell ’1 riting my dissertation. I came back to the Pentagon
to find that the ops analysts were still worrying about aircraft problems,
and we were trying to solve missle and space problems. When I returned
to the Pentagon the next time in 1964 to try to start the office called
Studies and Analysis there still wasn’t a single analyst who was worrying
about space operations, although we had trained by that time hundreds
of Air Force officers at Maxwell to understand the fundamentals of
space operation.
Now I had hoped when I read Professor Holley’s paper that he was
finally going to tell me what was in Paul Hower’s mind when he kept
cips analysis out of Studies and Analysis, because I was the one at the
blackboard drawing wiring diagrams and trying to put people from
c~psanalysis into Studies and Analysis. We didn’t get involved in the
continuation of doctrine, and we didn’t get involved in the traditions of
cips analysis. We worried about the fact that certain ops analysts were
GS 18s and therefore couldn’t work for Majors, and other ops analysts
were GS 19s and couldn’t work for Colonels. And so at 1O:OO or 11:OO
each night we would go home with nothing resolved. So I think,
Professor Holley, you should turn around your moral and say it’s a case
of pure Parkinsonism. A group of people filled the need at one time, but
they became obsessed with that problem and failed to keep in touch with
what was really going on in the world of strategy. They became so intent
on their own operational problems, their own bureaucratic problems,
I hat they restricted themselves to what they set out to do and that was to
181
worry about aircraft tactics in certain situations. Since we have had few
occasions to worry about aircraft tactics-World War 11, Korea, and
Vietnam-their usefulness returns to the scene only when those kinds of
problems are addressed. That is why RAND filled the void that ops
analysis didn’t fill. That is why other companies-STGfilled the void
which RAND didn’t fill. Now we have hundreds of people doing ops
analysis of space operations and we have very few people at RAND who
do those problems, and we draw on them as individuals just as they used
to draw on ops analysts as individuals. Some of my closest friends are
people like Fred Nyland, Russ Shaver, Ted Parker, Don Emerson, and
others who work with us on specific problems that we have in identifying
decisions to be made on acquiring future systems.
Having been at the heart of the problem of using analysis for de-
cision making and having been one of the participants in the revolution
and still pushing the revolution in technology-as a matter of fact I have
forty projects currently underway, all for future systems or technology-
I conclude that the revolution is far from over and that our impact on
the civilian side of our economy is going to be greater than ever. For
example, we are trying to invent a navigation satellite system which will
completely revolutionize air traffic control of the civil fleet and will
probably be used by all the boat owners in Santa Monica harbor. Those
indirect applications are going to be as much leaven to the civil sector as
have been the direct transfer of technologies into building TVs and
transistors.
I would like to conclude then with some further observations about
the whole process. As I see it, we must remember that technology leads
strategy. That’s a fundamental concern of us who are in the technology
side, because we have not only to make the changes, we have to under-
stand where they are going. We don’t depend on an organization,
Professor Holley, to keep up our doctrine. We depend on ourselves, the
individuals who are making the changes, to see what the impact is. We
do special studies such as one we call Strat-70. What is the impact of
future technology on strategy? What is the impact of future space
technology on tactical operations? We look at those problems to
understand the changes which are required in future operations. And
they come not from an organization sitting off to one side, but from
people in the main stream of the changes they are creating. Technology
leads strategy and therefore puts a special burden on the developers of
strategy.
Secondly, technology is additive. Like Professor Brodie, I started off
with the National Guard in the horse-drawn artillery, except I did it by
a subterfuge. I was a Boy Scout. I loved horses and I wasn’t old enough,
182
so the Guard took on a troop of Boy Scouts to help us learn to ride. The
Air Force still has horses. Technology is additive. We still keep the
weapons we had before. The foot soldier still uses the pike, but he calls
it a bayonet and so on. We have to look at the choices available from t
k
technologies of the past as well as those of the future.
And here I would like to close on my negative note, but also a
hopeful one, because the future is still undetermined. The main thrust
of the past several years has been a denial of the use of history. We have
had an anti-historical attitude at the decision making levels of the
Defense Department. Everytime we try to derive future needs from past
problems, we are told, “Don’t look at the past earlier than,” say, “the
invention of the ICBM. You cannot equate the strategies and problems
of the past with those of the future.” The historian has to prove that that
attitude is completely unsound. We must derive our future from the
past. There is no other way to do it.
I have about 275 people working for me, of which 150 do analysis,
and of which 50 do ops analysis. Every six months ?rofessor Quade
from RAND comes over and runs a course on analysis for all the new
officers in SAMSO. We always have the same debate. I say, “What comes
after analysis?” All the innovations have been made by people under 32,
and the people in the audience are all under 32, so I pose the question to
them, “What comes after analysis?” Professor Quade always says, “More
analysis.” Well, I believe something more than analysis lies in the future
and I believe the heart of it is to take a step called building a
technological strategy, which tries to integrate all the past history, the
lessons we have learned from the past, the potentials of technology for
the future, but more important the leaven of policy which can come only
from the political side of the family.
Thank you.
THECHAIRMAN: Thank you, Colonel Kane. I find it positively
charming to know that the Air Force still has horses. Colonel Kane
didn’t tell us the function of them. I thought commercial fertilizers were
cheap, abundant, and very effective.
Now, Dr. Emme should not be denied the opportunity to say a few
words.
Dr. EUGENE M. EMME(National Aeronautics and Space Administra-
tion) : Commenting on this morning’s papers on recent history, I submit,
we should recall at once what Lynn White suggested in the opening
session: There are dangers of over-specializingon the concerns of science,
technology, and warfare without looking at the total fabric of things and
people, machines and men, and their ideas and institutions in their
183
relevant context as the historian goes about his age-old job of describing
how it really was in the 1960s. If we attempt to essay it as we would like
1.0 think it was, or to help us solve tomorrow’s problems, or even to
understand today, it will not be documented as it was.
Thank you for being so patient.
THECHAIRMAN: With that we can adjourn the session and proceed
to lunch. Thank you very much.
THE 11th HARMON MEMORIAL
LECTURE I N MILITARY HISTORY
Each year since 1959 the United States Air Force academy has sponsored the “Har-
mon Memorial Lecture Series’’ in meniory of Lieutenant General Hubert R.
Harmon, the first Superintendent and “Father” of the Academy.
A committee of nationally-known civilian historians and Academy representatives
selects an outstanding military historian to be the lecturer, who is then invited to
present an original lecture on a subject of his choice within the field. This is the 11th
in the series sponsored by the Department of History.
THE WAR OF IDEAS;
T H E UNITED STATES NAVY, 1870-1890
Elting E. Morison
Yale University
189
It cannot have escaped your notice that anyone who lives in this
society today, whether in an armed force or outside of it, lives in an
environment based in large part upon scientific understanding and
engineering applications, and in order to thread our way through that
complicated, densely intellectual environment, we must all master
certain kinds of information and master certain ways of dealing with
ideas. So I thought it would be more interesting to spend some time
tonight talking about, as I say, “The Care and Feeding of Ideas,” or the
dangers of having too few ideas on the one hand, or on the other, the
dangers of having too many.
I will start this investigation with the Navy of the period that I was
billed to talk about, from 1870 to 1890. For much of the period that I
will be concerned with there was little science, less technology, little
invention, and fewer ideas. I think the quickest way for me to give YOU
some sense of what that environment was like, what an armed force was
like a hundred years ago, is simply to tell you a few stories or anecdotes.
These will of course distort the meaning of the whole somewhat and I
am aware of that, but I am anxious to give you a general feeling for what
the world of the United States Navy in those years was about. We can
correct some of the distortions later.
First of all I would like to talk about David Dixon Porter, one of
the most celebrated naval officers who ever lived and the most effective
commander in the Civil War. In the year 1886 he appeared before a
committee of Congress to argue with all of the force at his disposal for
keeping full sail on warships. This was 80 years after the Claremont,
Fulton’s steamship, had begun her regular duty between Albany and
New York. It was about 45 years after the first merchant vessel had
crossed the Atlantic under steam. Yet, the Admiral of the Navy
approached the Congress of the United States to plead with all his force
to retain full sail power on the naval vessels of the United States?
A second brief anecdote deals with ship design. It occurred along
about 1885 to some members of the Navy that they needed a new kind of
ship, but they were puzzled by how to proceed because they had been
building vessels out of wood (in a way that I will come to later) but
they knew they had to try something new, and they had no one available
to help them. So they told one officer to go about the shipyards of Europe
and buy the plan of a useful warship for the United States Navy. He was
obviously an indefatigable officer. He came up not with one plan for
one ship but with four different plans for various parts of one ship,
which he had culled from various shipyards. The resulting vessel was a
Harold and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power (Princeton,
l939), p. 195.
191
fundamental wisdom about tactics was still Nelson’s great dictum, “NO
officer can go very far wrong who lays his ship alongside an enemy.”
In strategy the highest thought was that you existed to protect the
coastline. You went out on a station if there was war and waited for the
enemy to come to you. You then went close to her and at very short
ranges either boarded or rammed or poured broadsides into her.
In all, nobody really quite knew why there was a Navy at this
period. The definition of what a Navy was supposed to do and how it
was supposed to do it was not clear. There was no naval doctrine. There
were no strategic ideas and there were very few tactical rules except the
rules of thumb. T h e result was a series of wooden ships mostly under
sail (I am talking about most of this period from 1870 to 1890 at least)
that went on individual missions following patterns of sailing that were
devised shortly after the War of 1812. The mission was the suppression
of the pirates in the Mediterranean, the prevention of the slave trade
from Africa to this country, or showing the flag in alien ports. But in the
last third of the nineteenth century, the pirates had disappeared from
the scene, and the slave trade was over.
Naval society was run by faith and by habit. It had really no ideas
at all. It never changed at all during this period and it was an
exceedingly stable and pleasant life for many people. It was not,
however, as though the seamen were in Eden before the serpent. In fact
officers had had a taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. They did
know much more at this time than their actions suggested. They had
been through a civil war a very short time before, and in the course of
that conflict they had learned that steam was infinitely superior to sail.
They had learned that iron was infinitely superior to wood. They had
learned that rifles were infinitely superior to smoothbores. They had
learned that a blockade was infinitely superior to coast defense by
isolated ships. They had, in fact, learned all the things they were turning
their backs on. In the course of the Civil War two ships had been built
that were twenty-five years ahead of their time. Fifty years after that, at
the very turn of the century, a great naval designer said those two vessels
were the greatest men-of-war that had ever been built. They had speeds
that were not equalled for a quarter of a century. They had sea-keeping
qualities that were not equalled for thirty years. They had maneuvera-
bility and fire power. They lasted exactly two years after the Civil War,
when one was made a Navy receiving ship and the other was sold into
the merchant marine.5
The Navy had the instruments, they had the demonstration that all
‘Bennett, Steam Navv, Chapter 29 gives the fullest account of these ships,
of the things they had learned in the Civil War might make a brand new
and effective and exciting Navy. Yet they systematically destroyed the
weapons and turned their backs on the ideas. All the new-fangled stuff
was turned back, and in order to assure that they would not have to deal
with these complicated new systems and thoughts, the men who had
been at the bottom of them, who ’were technical men, engineers and
naval constructors, were either demoted or were put into stations or
into positions or into areas of the Navy where they could do no harm by
having new ideas. So they returned to paradise in 1865, which was the
condition of things before the Civil War, and they could maintain this
posture for several very interesting reasons.
First, there was peace and it was a real peace of a kind that we do
not understand now. They had no view of a war ever happening again.
Second there was no system such as what we now call the military-
industrial complex. Steel had to be bought abroad. There was no
effective steel company in this country right after the war. Ship designs
had to be bought abroad. We did not have, once you got rid of the
original engineers, anyone with enough know-how in the system. Third,
there was Congress, as there always is; and congressmen were devoted to
the idea of coastal defense so that they could tell their constituents that
Charleston or Portsmouth or Boston would be protected by these single
ships. This was a great comfort to people who lived there. Finally, there
was (and I think this is one of the fundamental things), there was
abroad in the land or in the Navy, no real intellectual notion of how to
use the Navy, what it was for, or how to go about doing anything except
sailing in these antique patterns. So back you went to look for the pirates
who were not there, to repress the slave trade that did not exist, and to
show the flag.
Now it sounds as though nothing was happening. In fact new ideas
were floating about in this bloodstream, mostly among the younger
officers. There was a man named Fiske who came up with a brand new
range finder with a telescopic sight that he showed proudly to the
captain of his vessel. The captain was a celebrated naval officer,
“Fighting Bob” Evans. He took one look at it and tossed it overside on
the grounds it was useless in the present situation. Then there was a
man who recommended that armor plate be used, and for years he came
up against the resistance of naval officers who felt that wooden ships
were more effective. There was a man named Homer Poundstone who
developed a new design called the all big gun battleship that fifteen years
later became the major capital ship of Britain. There was a man named
Sims in gunnery who devised all kinds of new ways of shooting; these,
too, were sat on.
195
The reason for this was, as I say, that there was an interest in
retaining a system which had been satisfactory to grow up in, and live in,
and which did not seem to need to be changed; there was no under-
standing of why one should change. Finally, there was no way within the
system to make all these things fit together. Someone developed a new
range finder. What use was it if you were going to fight by ramming and
broadside at close range? It could not necessarily lead to telescopic sights
that would provide, after the range finder, a better bead on the enemy.
These were isolated ideas that never fitted together because there was
no general theory or system into which they could fit. I can give you an
example.
Now both habit and theory give pattern and structure to a society,
but the one, habit, provides a rigid, resistant, impenetrable scheme for
going on exactly as you have, whereas the other, a theoretical structure,
provides a pattern and a means for assimilating ideas that can relate to
each other, that can change and move and grow. Now in all military
establishments, as you well know, there is a certain amount of routine,
and there is a certain amount of loyalty and devotion to routine. It is
simply that in the Navy of the period I was talking about the devotion
was too great and unqualified. I think any armed force can run, as any
society can run, the risk of proceeding by habit and faith and devotion to
certain primitive schemes until it runs out of energy and steam. As long
as you are existing within a theoretical structure-a body of ideas-you..
have a chance to grow and survive. Now that is the first part of what I
wanted to talk about-what happens to a society when it loses its interest
in ideas and falls back on familiar patterns i n d ancient loyalties,
however noble and however splendid a past they may have had.
I want now to speak about the second part. We will leave the Navy.
T h e first part was the possibility of having too few ideas in a community.
T h e second part is the possible danger of having too many ideas in a
community. Today we are 180 degrees from where the Navy was in the
previous century. The difference is as from night to day. We have a
system going for us of pumping new ideas and devices into the whole
society, although I am speaking at the moment just about an armed
force. That system has its base in fundamental science, which is still
conducted in the society mostly by universities, and in engineering
applications that are still conducted mostly in industries and in places
like the Bell Laboratories, and within the research and development
agencies of the armed forces. You have as a result of this system of
interaction between general and fundamental ideas and specific appli-
cations, a system that has markedly cut down, for one thing, the time
from the moment you have an idea to its application.
Poor old Bradley Fiske, when he had the idea of a range finder, had
to spend about fifteen years before he could get anybody to listen to him
and had to take about five years more to make a good one. Today such is
the system, it seems to me, that the lag between the first fundamental
notion and the application is reduced, by the nature of the system I have
mentioned, to a minimum. I could describe at great length, if you
wanted me to, the nature of this process for systematically producing and
developing new ideas. I can give you some feeling for the results of it very
quickly.
I was in Pearl Harbor on a destroyer in January of this year, and I
had not seen a destroyer in about eighteen years. The number of things
on that vessel that I had never seen before, and the number of new
things one had to learn to make use of those new things, had totally
197
Now, thus far I have spoken only of the armed forces, but I said to
you earlier that my interest in them historically has been too look at
them, to try to think my way through into problems that are more
obviously part of the whole society but less easy to think about because
most societies are more loosely structured, less articulated than armed
forces, so you cannot see the effect so clearly. I think that what I have
been speaking about is the possibility of overloading the structure of an
armed force with new ideas and the possibility of getting so concerned
with those new ideas that you lose sight of why you are developing them
and what you want to use them for. This is not a problem for the
military alone. It is a problem that we must all face together.
:' c
201
202
innovation.” /
Bacon, Francis, 4
Baldwin, Hanson, 127
Belgrade, siege of, 77
Belidor, Bernard Forest de, 22, 72
Bell Laboratories, 196
212
Caesar, Julius, 29
Carnot, Joseph Francois, 65, 71
Carnot, Lazare Nicholas, 73
Catherine the Great, 63
Cavalieri, Bonaventura, 21
“Chaos Foundation,” 77
Charles of Lorraine (de Valois), 76
Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, 77
China, Communist, 138, 142
Civil Service, 92, 95, 99, 108
Civil War, U.S., xiii, xv, 34, 87, 125, 190, 193-194
Clausewitz, Karl von, 63, 198
Clifford, Clark, 176
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 33, 53
Cold War, xiv, 129, 136, 162, 172, 173
213
Fascism, 127
Federation .of American Scientists, 173
Fighter aircraft:
F-Ill, 151-152
TFX, xiv, 151-152, 154
214
Japan, 169
Jefferson, Thomas, 124, 156, 169
Jena, battle of, 66
216
Jesuits, 52-53
Johnson, Ben, 30
Johnson, Ellis, 94
Johnson, Lyndon B., 137, 184
Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), 129, 173
Joint New Weapons Committee, 91
Joseph 11, King of Germany, 75, 78
McNamara, Robert S., xii, 44, 99, 103, 133, 142, 151-152, 175, 176, 183
Mahan, Alfred T., xvi, 195, 199
Malplaquet, France, 36
Manhattan Project, 165
Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, 63, 75, 77, 78
Marinoni, Johann Jacob, 77
Marlborough, Duke of (John Churchill), 41
217
Uffano, Diego, 19
U.S.Air Force, 134, 135, 140, 179, 189, 197, 199
Headquarters, xii, 92-93, 95, 96, 98-99, 103, 104, 105, 107, 111,
112, 113, 116, 172
Chief of Staff, 99, 104
Director of Operations Analysis, 96-97, 98-99, 103-106, 108,
117
Studies and Analysis, xii, 104, 180
Vice Chief of Staff, 98-99, 104
U.S.Army, 94, 95, 106, 118, 134, 168, 183, 197
War Department, 125
USS Nautilus, 132
U.S.Navy,xv, 87,95, 131-132, 134, 154, 165,189-199
USSR, 129,138-139,141-142,158,173, 179
ICBM, 100
Valburio, Roberto, 7
Vauban, Sebastien, 33, 39, 40, 57, 61, 69, 71
Vaublanc, Comte de, 56
Vienna, Austria, 79, 82
Academy, 77-78
Bombardier Corps, 79, 80
Siege of, 77
Vienna-Neustadt, academy, 75, 77
221