Curbing Innovation / 2

2 CONTROLLING MILITARY TECHNOLOGY

2.1 COMMAND TECHNOLOGY

Command technology denotes a special relationship between defense officials and inventors in which the officials specify the desirable performance characteristics of a new weapon system and challenge the inventors to come up with appropriate designs. Before the advent of command technology, invention had nearly always been the work of individuals who had to sell their invention to skeptical officials; thereafter, innovation became deliberate. Instead of setting breaks on innovation by sitting in judgment on novelties proposed by individual inventors, officials began to hurry innovation on by delineating the military requirement in advance and paying at least some of the development costs.

According to McNeill [1], the first recorded instance of planned innovation, organized and supported by public authority, took place in France between 1763 and 1767 and was carried out by French artillerists under the direction of Jean Baptiste Vacquette de Gribeauval. Before 1763, cannons were manufactured by casting the entire object in a unique and individual mold. Because the rush of hot metal always pushed the mold slightly out of position, this procedure made the alignment of the different parts of the mold difficult to maintain. Consequently, the chamber and the barrel of the gun were not perfectly parallel to the exterior of the piece, and the interior dimensions along the barrel were hardly ever regular. Jean Maritz, a Swiss engineer, suggested that one might be able to manufacture cannons far more accurately by casting the cannon as a solid piece of metal and then boring the barrel out afterwards.

The potential advantages of a straight and uniform bore were apparent. First, since the gunmetal would then be of equal thickness on all sides of the explosion, accurately centered bores would make the gun safer. Second, cannons could be made much lighter. Indeed, older designs required a relatively large tolerance between cannonball and the irregular interior surface of the barrel to avoid jamming. A barrel with regular interior dimensions would require much less clearance between projectile and bore. Consequently, a smaller powder charge could be used to produce the same amount of work because less of the expanding gases would be allowed to escape around the projectile, and therefore the barrel could be correspondingly shortened. At the same time, thinner walls could safely be constructed around the chamber where the explosion took place. The resulting cannon could be significantly lighter than older cannons and that would mean increased maneuverability and, since the gun would be quicker to return after recoil, increased fire power.

To realize all these advantages, it was important to perfect the manufacture process suggested by Maritz. That, in turn, required the development of a testing program designed to find out the safety limits for the length of the barrel and for the thickness of the gun walls corresponding to a desired velocity and missile throw weight. Gribeauval provided the organization needed to carry out these tests. Under his direction, for the first time a new weapon system was deliberately created to provide performance capabilities clearly envisioned beforehand.

Command technology, seeking deliberately to create a new weapon system, was a profoundly new idea. It therefore met with considerable resistance from the cavalry-dominated French Army. The root cause of this opposition goes back to the traditions of European army life emphasizing hierarchy, obedience, and personal bravery. These were not well fitted with Gribeauval’s use of calculation and experiment [2]:

Skill of an obscure, mathematical, and technological kind threatened to make old-fashioned courage and muscular prowess useless. The definition of what it meant to be a soldier was called into question by a weapon that could be used to kill soldiers impersonally and at a distance of more than half a mile.

Therefore, the Gribeauval experiment ultimately remained isolated and exceptional. It did, however, give Napoleon Bonaparte the artillery to conquer Europe.

The next step in the history of command technology did not occur until 1884, when the John Fisher affair began the long process of interaction between the industrial and the military establishments that culminated with the birth of the military-industrial complex. The impetus behind this development was the erosion of British strategic security that began in 1870. Decreasing transportation cost made England increasingly more dependent upon imported wheat and other foodstuffs. By the 1880s, more than half of Britain’s grain came from overseas. As a result, she became increasingly more vulnerable to attack on the high seas by any power that sported a fleet of cruisers capable of intercepting her grain shipments. A group of French naval theorists, the jeune ‘ecole, argued that fast cruisers and faster torpedo boats were all that France needed to wrest naval dominance from Britain. In 1881, the French Chamber of Deputies halted construction of armored warships and voted funds for seventy torpedo boats.

There was little that the British Navy could do to defend against such a formidable threat. British warships carried muzzle-loading guns, whose slow rate of fire and inaccurate aim at long ranges could not deal with fast, maneuverable boats that could dart in, release their torpedo, and withdraw before being attacked. This fact, as well as the remarkable success achieved by the Germans in developing a long-range, breech-loading gun, forced the Royal Navy to abandon muzzle-loaders. Conversion to breech-loaders, however, was quite expensive and the army-dominated Board of Ordnance was slow in allocating the necessary funds. To force the Board’s hand, Captain John Fisher leaked the story of Britain’s vulnerability to the press. The Pall Mall Gazette published a series of inflammatory articles that eventually forced the government to recommend an increase of 5.5 million pounds sterling in naval appropriations to be spread over five years time.

Coincidentally, the year 1884 happened to be a time of economic difficulties for British shipyards. Therefore, when the First Lord of the Admiralty disclosed his supplementary program to the House of Lords he declared [3]:

If we are to spend money on the increase of the Navy, it is desirable in consequence of the stagnation in the great shipbuilding yards of this country, that the extra expenditure should go to increase the work contract in the private yards.

This fateful decision inaugurated a relationship between government and private firms that would quickly mushroom.

The man driving this change was again John Fisher. As the commander of the naval gunnery school at Portsmouth, and later as the director of naval ordnance, he demanded and was accorded the legal right to purchase from private firms. Fisher’s move was originally intended only to create competition for the government arsenal at Woolwich. The latter’s inability to change quickly eventually gave private firms virtual monopoly on the manufacture of naval heavy weapons. Under the circumstances, strong personal links developed between technically responsible naval officers whose advice was made indispensable by the complexity of naval armament, and the managers of the private firms. This new relationship was instrumental in significantly increasing government investment in naval armaments. Thus, in 1889, the British Admiralty got more money to spend for new ships than it had asked for.

Pressure from France and Germany helped. In 1888, the French government embarked on a large-scale naval building campaign going beyond cruisers and torpedo boats. In 1908, the Germans announced a new and enlarged naval building program of their own. These facts, and the remarkable influence of Alfred T. Mahan’s recently published book [4] arguing for the importance of a powerful navy, persuaded the British government in 1908 to authorize twice as many of the Dreadnought ships created by Admiral Fisher, now the First Sea Lord, than originally proposed. In Winston Churchill’s words [5]:

In the end a curious and characteristic solution was reached. The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.

The British contribution to the development of Gribeauval’s command-technology idea, was therefore to institutionalize it. Under their guidance, command technology gained new range and breadth and began a long history of expansion. Between 1884 and the beginning of World War I, this new establishment produced, at an unprecedented pace of innovation, a wide range of naval technological change. Thus, after the introduction of quick-firing guns on warships, ship speed was significantly increased by the development of Alfred Yarrow’s new tube boiler design. This in turn led to the construction of the torpedo boat destroyer. Launched in 1893, the destroyer attained a speed of 26 knots—two or three knots faster than contemporary torpedo boats. Improvements in the accuracy of long range naval bombardment came next. H.M.S. Dreadnought outclassed the long-range gunnery of all existing warships. At 21 knots, the Dreadnought could outstrip all other capital ships, and its broadside of ten twelve-inch rifles far exceeded the throw-weight attainable before. However, her ability to hit moving targets while her deck was pitching and while she was moving at high speed and perhaps changing course, was inadequate. A.J.H. Pollen solved that problem in 1906 by designing a fire-control system that could compensate for ship motion. Finally, the revolution begun and fed by command technology produced torpedo-carrying airplanes and torpedo-carrying submarines, both of which were to revolutionize warfare.

The two world wars of the twentieth century provided the opportunity for firmly establishing and significantly enlarging the newly introduced institution of command technology. During the war years, the strength of the entire economy of the Allies was put into weapons production, giving command technology a backing that it hardly ever had before, despite the increasing attention it was getting before the war. This sudden and substantial increase in resources naturally spurred command technology to new heights of innovation and productivity. Tanks, submarines, and aircraft came into their own during these years and eventually revolutionized the conduct of war. Nuclear weapons and long-range delivery platforms, first introduced just before the end of World War II, made all-out war all but unthinkable.

The scale at which command technology came to operate in the last world war, as well as the expanding range of technological invention made possible by massive investments in research and development, required new management techniques. Such methods were developed by the Americans. These new ways of managing large scale operations were so efficient that they, together with the institution of command technology that generated them, survived the end of World War II and flourished during the post-war years.

The arms race that grew out of NATO’s attempt to contain the spread of communism put continuously increasing stress upon the system of command technology and its management. The more money that was being invested in research, development, and procurement of new and more sophisticated weapons, the more impetus was being generated for inventing new measures and countermeasures. Under the circumstances, invention in the field of military technology came to offer an almost unwieldy menu of possibilities for the decision maker to choose from.

It thus became necessary to develop some systematic way of operationally rank-ordering the vast set of technological possibilities available to the military establishment. The solution came from systems analysis. First institutionalized under Secretary of Defense McNamara’s tenure during the 1960s, its historic roots go back to the Prussian General Staff.