Supplement: Snapshots of a Discipline: Selected Proceedings from the Conference on Critical Problems...

Science, Technology, and WarAuthor(s): Alex RolandSource: Technology and Culture, Vol. 36, No. 2, Supplement: Snapshots of a Discipline: SelectedProceedings from the Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in the Historyof Technology, Madison, Wisconsin, October 30-November 3, 1991 (Apr., 1995), pp. S83-S100Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the History of TechnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3106691 .

Accessed: 10/07/2014 15:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press and Society for the History of Technology are collaborating with JSTORto digitize, preserve and extend access to Technology and Culture.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 81.103.121.120 on Thu, 10 Jul 2014 15:04:40 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=shot

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3106691?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Science, Technology, and War ALEX ROLAND

I introduced the military technology session at the Madison conference by noting that the history of technology and war differs in many significant ways from other fields within the history of technology.' The papers and discussion that followed, however, suggested just the opposite. They demonstrated that in most ways technology and war behave much the same as technology elsewhere. Jon Sumida made that point explicitly, stressing that the history of military technology must be based on detailed examination of technical records informed by wide-ranging contextual analysis. This is surely a prescription for good history of technology in any field. Daniel Headrick echoed the point, emphasizing the need for social context. Barton C. Hacker presented a sweeping survey of the historiography of military technology that was both penetrating and ecumenical.2 Indeed, one point that recurred throughout the session was the need for universal history of the kind practiced by William H. McNeill, the scheduled com- mentator for the session, whose travel to Wisconsin was arrested by the weather.

DR. ROLAND is professor of history at Duke University. 'This session focused primarily on technology and war, a category that many partici-

pants understood as subsuming science and war. Most of the observations here may be construed as applying to both topics. Separate reference is made to science and war only when it seems to differ in some significant way from technology and war. In the discussion in Wisconsin, Jon Sumida placed science in a category of culture and society, only indirectly related to his primary focus. Barton Hacker expressed interest only in applied science, i.e., science that brings about technology. In reviewing the same topic, I made an argument for a significant benchmark in the literature in the 1980s. See Alex Roland, "Technology and War: The Historiographical Revolution of the 1980s," Technology and Culture 34 (January 1993): 117-34. Nothing in that article is inconsistent with the views expressed in Wisconsin.

2The following papers were presented at the history of military technology session at the Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers, University of Wiscon- sin-Madison, Fall 1991: Jon Tetsuro Sumida, "Historical Presentations of 20th- Century Naval Invention"; Daniel R. Headrick, "The Sources of Technological Innova- tion in the Armed Forces: The Case of the U.S. Navy, 1865-1915"; Barton C. Hacker, "On the History of Military Technology: Past Accomplishments, Present Problems, Future Directions."

? 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3602-001 1$01.00

S83



S84 Alex Roland

The essay that follows is really stimulated by the session more than it is shaped by it. It grants the participants' point that the history of technology and war is similar to other kinds of history of technology. It focuses, nonetheless, on the differences, for these seem to be more interesting than the similarities and more germane to the concept of having such a session in the first place. The article will conclude with some observations on the similarities and what these portend for the future of scholarship in this area.

Among the distinguishing characteristics of this subfield is an aversion in scholarly circles to things military. This tendency is not pecu- liar to the history of technology; it is pervasive. Many scholars simply find war and its associated activities distasteful. Comparable distaste has not stopped historians of medicine from studying epidemic dis- eases, nor has it stopped historians of science from studying eugenics or historians of technology from studying sewers. But it does seem to deter many scholars from studying war or things military.

More important in this regard, perhaps, is the suspicion that those who study war are themselves closet Napoleons-"war lovers," in John Hersey's term, who vicariously experience in their scholarship the lives of the great captains. There is abundant military historiography to support such an inference. The great bulk of it is still opera- tional history, drum-and-trumpet narrative weak on analysis and interpretation. So too has the history of technology and war produced its fair share of loving appreciations of the arms and armor of bygone eras. Naturally, these studies are more often history of technology than history of science, but both fields have their exemplars. Coffee tables throughout the English-speaking world groan under their weight.

Not even this guilt by association, however, has entirely deterred serious scholars from studying the topic. The field now boasts a huge and growing literature, and distinguished books have received their share of recognition from both the History of Science Society (HSS) and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). Merritt Roe Smith, for example, won the HSS Pfizer Award (along with the Fred- erick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Histo- rians) for Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change.3 Geoffrey Parker, now the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, won SHOT's 1990 Dexter Prize for The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise

3Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977).



Science, Technology, and War S85

of the West.4 One could easily make a long list of books on military topics that have been well received in recent years.5

Yet much of the literature on technology and war succeeds in the academy by presenting a decidedly antimilitary tone or interpretation. Indeed, part of its success may be derived from resonance with the antimilitary sentiment within the academy. The model of this genre is Lewis Mumford's classic Technics and Civilization (1934),6 which introduced many of the important concepts in the literature that followed. Mumford's pioneering essay on the evolution of West- ern technology identified four villains in modern civilization, forces that turned humans from a natural and ecologically sound relationship with nature toward an artificial and destructive one, which opened "the rift between mechanization and humanization."7 These were the cleric, the accountant, the miner, and the soldier. The soldier was singled out for imposing on us regimentation and dimin- ished regard for the sanctity of human life. In his train came not only increasingly deadly engines of war but also mindless and automated application of these engines to purposes of destruction. Mumford's cynicism and outrage grew through the 20th century, culminating in his two-volume study of the late 1960s, The Myth of the Machine. The second volume, The Pentagon of Power, excoriated the military- industrial complex and its excesses, seeing them as the natural outgrowths of the sorry trend that Mumford had identified decades earlier.8

The most successful and influential study of military technology in recent years picks up many of Mumford's themes, without, however, adopting his strident tone. William McNeill's The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 depicts the military as a macroparasite on Western civilization.9 McNeill specifically equates it with the microparasites he described in Plagues and Peo-

4Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988).

5See, e.g., Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986); Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1990); Barton C. Hacker, The Dragon's Tale: Radiation Safety in the Man- hattan Project, 1942-1946 (Berkeley, 1987); Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Daniel Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunica- tions and International Politics (New York, 1991).

6Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934; reprint, 1963). 7 Ibid., p. 50.

8Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York, 1967, 1970), esp. vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power.

9William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982), esp. pp. vii-ix.



S86 Alex Roland

ples,'0 the other book that flowed from his 1963 world history, The Rise of the West." McNeill had concluded from the larger study that neither the history of disease nor the history of military technology after A.D. 1000 had received the attention they deserved.

In The Pursuit of Power, McNeill argues that one reason for the rise of the West to world hegemony after 1500 was its superior military technology. That technology, he believes, emerged from the free- market economy and the hothouse of war that characterized Euro- pean civilization in the late medieval and early modern periods. Gun- powder weapons gave princes the power to reduce the castles of their vassals and change their feudal obligation of service to a tax. With tax revenues, princes could buy more artillery, subdue more vassals, and generate more income. Thus, says McNeill, arose a feedback loop consisting of military power, political power, and new technology. The military technology that fed the loop went to the highest bidder. For that reason, free competition bid it up to higher levels of sophisti- cation. When the Europeans took this arsenal on the road, beginning in the 16th century, it swept the whole earth before it.

This provocative thesis, like Mumford's earlier, is driven by pres- entism. McNeill seeks to explain not only the rise of the West but also the military-industrial complex. He views with great alarm the grip on American life held by war and preparation for war. In his history of the past millennium, he seeks the origins of that militarization. He concludes that the "command economies" of the modern period, bred by the feedback loop he discerned in the previous era, had led to a bureaucratization and rationalization of war that threatened human existence. Our ability to destroy had outrun our ability to manage ourselves politically. He advocates world government and hopes that historians in some future age will be able to look back "in wonder- tinged with awe-at the reckless rivalries and restless creativity of the millennium of upheaval, A.D. 1000-2000."12

This is history seen from the depths of the Cold War. It is nonetheless valuable and insightful for that, but it is tendentious and confus- ing in its purposefulness. McNeill is at pains early on to contrast the command economy of Sung China with the free-market economies of medieval Europe. The former, he asserts, closed down Chinese technological and military development, while the latter stimulated invention and production. But McNeill's analysis turns back on itself

'0William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976). " William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago,

1963). 2 McNeill, Pursuit of Power, p. 386.




and finally contradicts itself. In the modern period, he asserts, the West sacrificed its free-market system for modern command economies. True, these command economies were bent on force-feeding the development of military technology; the Chinese command economy of the Middle Ages had been bent on suppressing it. But McNeill uses the same term-command economy-to describe both phenomena. In his enthusiasm to explain and condemn the military-industrial complex, McNeill contradicts the thesis he had spent two-thirds of his book developing.

Readers appear to have been little troubled by the inconsistencies in McNeill's thesis and by the loose construction of the terms "command economy" and "free enterprise." The reason, one suspects, is that most are in sympathy with McNeill's sentiments about the military- industrial complex. If the proper icons are being smashed, there is little interest in contesting fine points of logic or usage. Instead, readers are inclined to agree with the conclusion and blink at the inconsis- tency. As Hacker said at Madison: "No one who reads [The Pursuit of Power] thoughtfully can fail to recognize that the long-term relationships between military and economic institutions, and their persistent interplay with technology, go a long way to explain the basic features of Western and world history."'" This is surely true, but it hardly seems to account for the remarkable appeal of McNeill's book or the unstinting praise it has received.

Other works on science and war and on technology and war have been even more political. Paul Forman's "Behind Quantum Electron- ics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940-1960" views all things military with undisguised con- tempt.'4 It subscribes to a conspiratorial interpretation of the rise of the military-industrial complex, implicating scientists and engineers. Stuart W. Leslie's The Cold War and American Science explains the rise to prominence of Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by a willingness to do the Pentagon's bidding.'5 David Noble's Forces of Production reveals the extent to which the air force controlled the development of numerically controlled machine tools in the United States.'6

' Hacker, "On the History of Military Technology" (n. 2 above). 14Paul Forman, "Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physi-

cal Research in the United States, 1940-1960," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 149-229.

5 Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York, 1993).

16 David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York, 1984).



S88 Alex Roland None of these works, of course, is wrong, or even weak. All are im-

portant pieces of scholarship by scrupulous and able historians. What is unusual about them, what is unusual about much of the scholarship on the history of technology and war, is that they are so heavily flavored by a manifest distaste for the military-industrial complex. All trajector- ies of the science and technology of war seem to end in the military- industrial complex, and everything about that phenomenon seems to beg condemnation. Conversely, condemning the military-industrial complex virtually assures praise and precludes criticism.

Now that the Cold War is over and the military-industrial complex is shrinking, this genre of the history of technology and war may well go into eclipse as well. No doubt the military-industrial complex will sur- vive in some form until the appearance of the world order that McNeill anticipates. But for the immediate future, the threat of nuclear Arma- geddon is in remission, and the peril of armed conflict in the world, however real and appalling it may still be, is changing for the better. This seems sure to alter our scholarship as well, as a new generation of historians begins to write a version of history that answers its needs. It remains to be seen if bashing the military-industrial complex will hold the allure for tomorrow's scholars that it has for today's.

What is remarkable about this body of literature is not that the au- thors were appalled by the military-industrial complex. It is rather that their concern and even revulsion were allowed to enter their historical writing as a given, as a premise, without evidence or argument. Indeed, the concern has so far proved counterfactual. However much it may have seemed that the nuclear arms race could lead nowhere but to Ar- mageddon, it did not, and it seems less likely to now than at any time in the second half of the 20th century. Still, the danger seemed so great to some that a kind of moral imperative appeared to settle on them. To write about technology and war without giving central place to the peril looming over mankind, without addressing, in Jonathan Schell's phrase, "the fate of the earth," seemed irresponsible and finally impos- sible. In the science and technology of war, the rise of the military- industrial complex was the great historical event of this era, and it wanted explanation and denunciation. No generation that had lived through the nightmare of Vietnam could concoct much confidence in our military or political institutions to use its unprecedented armed force wisely. Small wonder, then, that the military-industrial complex has played such a prominent role in the historiography of this field over the last quarter century.'7

17There are some refreshing exceptions. In addition to Weart; Hacker, The Dragon's Tale; Rhodes; and MacKenzie (all n. 5 above), see also Richard G. Hewlett and Francis




Not all those who have studied the military-industrial complex di- rectly have chosen to denounce it. Many share the views of the critics already discussed,"8 but at the other end of the spectrum, there are even some who defend the military-industrial complex.19 In between are a variety of views. The range of opinion is best captured in Ste- phen Rosen's Testing the Theory of the Military-Industrial Complex.20 The consensus there seems to be that there is a military-industrial complex, but it is not quite so monolithic or powerful as its worst critics suggest.

Another characteristic of the historiography of technology and war is that it is often more deterministic than other work. Determinism was a hot issue in the 1960s and 1970s, when Jacques Ellul was pro- ducing The Technological Society and Langdon Winner was responding with Autonomous Technology.21 With the rise of social constructivism in the 1980s, however, it seemed that the debate had run its course.22 Surely, most scholars now allow that contextual forces shaped science and technology just as much as did the internal dynamics of the technology itself. But the continuing importance of this issue, and the inability of the field to put it to rest, has been demonstrated of late by Roe Smith and Leo Marx.23

Mumford was richly deterministic. Technics and Civilization is a book of great subtlety, imagination, and insight. It can hardly be called reductionist in the way that most technological determinism tends to be. Yet, in his dogged insistence on the defining influence of the cleric, the accountant, the miner, and the soldier, Mumford suggested

Duncan, Atomic Shield, 1947-1952 (University Park, Pa., 1969), and The Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962 (Chicago, 1974).

'8H. L. Nieburg, In the Name of Science (Chicago, 1966); Carroll W. Pursell, ed., The Military-Industrial Complex (New York, 1972).

'gJohn Stanley Baumgartner, The Lonely Warriors: The Case for the Military-Industrial Complex (Los Angeles, 1970).

20Stephen Rosen, ed., Testing the Theory of the Military-Industrial Complex (Lexington, Mass., 1973).

21Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York, 1964); Langdon Winner, Autono- mous Technology: Technics out of Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

22 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2d ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1986); Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

23 Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).



S90 Alex Roland

that society was powerless to resist their impetus. Furthermore, Mum- ford attached to the characteristic materials of an age the power to shape the era for good or ill. His "eotechnic phase" (A.D. 1000-1750) was dominated by water and wood, the "paleotechnic" (1750-1900) by coal and iron, and the "neotechnic" (1900-) by electricity and alloys. Writing in the 1930s, he hoped that these new forms of energy and material would usher in a cleaner, healthier, more ecologically sound epoch in human existence. By the time he wrote The Pentagon of Power, such hopes had crashed, leaving him with a bitter cynicism. The determinism of the military-industrial complex received much of the blame.

A less bitter but equally deterministic history is Carlo Cipolla's Guns, Sails, and Empires.24 An economic historian, Cipolla argued that two technological developments, the cannon and the side-gunned sailing vessel, allowed the West to establish hegemony over the world's litto- ral. This thesis has been taken up by others, such as McNeill and Parker, and remains powerful today.

Even more famous is the stirrup thesis of Lynn White, jr. In Medi- eval Technology and Social Change, White argued that the introduction of the stirrup in Europe in the years immediately following the battle of Poitiers in A.D. 733 made the heavily armed and armored mounted warrior the dominant force on the battlefield.25 Society thus came to be organized around the mounted knight. The feudal system, said White, entailed a bargain between lord and vassal in which the latter was given the land necessary to support the equipment and retinue of the mounted warrior in return for a commitment to appear every year in the feudal array at the lord's bidding. In short, the stirrup determined feudalism. More accurately, White was actually arguing that the addition of the stirrup to the social, economic, and political soup of 8th-century Europe precipitated out the set of arrangements that came to be called feudalism.

White's argument is exhaustively documented and carefully worded, the latter to ensure that it not be construed as deterministic. It has, nonetheless, been construed as exactly that and attacked accordingly. Medievalists such as Bernard Bachrach have repeatedly challenged the White thesis, noting that the preconditions of feudalism existed long before 733 and that feudalism itself appeared long after that date. Synthetic works on the period now conclude that

24Carlo Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation in the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (1965; reprint, Manhattan, Kans., 1985).

25Lynn White, jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962).




the White thesis is discredited,2 but readers must form their own conclusions. Surely, an argument for technological determinism- that the stirrup produced feudalism-has been disproved, but White's argument was always more complex than that.

Military topics may appear more deterministic than those in other branches of technology because war itself and the factors shaping its outcome often appear deterministic. The world wars were wars of industrial production. World War I was the chemist's war; World War II the physicist's war. Both changed the course of history inalter- ably. The mushroom cloud has become the great icon of the second half of the 20th century, symbolizing both the awesome power of science and the terrible power of military force to shape events. The green revolution or the discovery of penicillin may have farther- reaching effects on history, but the technology of war has about it an immediacy and a vividness that demand attention. Perhaps they seem more deterministic because we wish they were less so.

Another distinguishing characteristic of the science and technology of war is that they operate in a unique marketplace. To historians of technology it seems like no marketplace at all. Because of its roots in economic history and its abiding concern with the nature of technological change, the history of technology has always looked to market forces as a powerful category of analysis. It was fundamental to the model of invention, development, and innovation that enjoyed great currency in the 1970s. It remained important to model builders such as the late Hugh Aitken, whose histories of the development of radio assumed the operation of a free market." Even a modeler such as Edward Constant, whose story of the origins of turbojets lies in the netherworld between the marketplace and the military, leaves unad- dressed the different ways in which development works in those two realms.28

Historians of science, it should be noted, find the absence of a traditional marketplace less disruptive, for their subjects have seldom,

26Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael Jones (Oxford, 1984), pp. 179-84; and Kelly DeVries, Medieval Military Technology (Lewiston, N.Y., 1992), pp. 95-110.

27Hugh G. J. Aitken, Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio (New York, 1976), and The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932 (Princeton, N.J., 1985). This insistence is surprising in a scholar who had written so insightfully on technological change in the nonmarket environment of a government arsenal; see his Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).

28Edward W. Constant II, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution (Baltimore, 1980).



S92 Alex Roland until recent times, been driven by market forces. Across time, science has been driven by church and state, by private patrons, by sheer curiosity, and by education. Only in recent times has the commercial marketplace provided much incentive. In this regard, science is much more like the military than is technology.

Thus, historians of science and historians of technology have tended to handle the absence of a marketplace differently. For historians of science, military support is simply another form of patronage. It carries all the questions that traditional forms of patronage have carried. What autonomy can the scientist maintain? Will the research be pure or applied? Is the level of support commensurate with the strings that are attached? What is the institutional setting of the research-a private laboratory or a government arsenal? To these are added the increasingly urgent question of the morality of military research. From the moral certitude of Fritz Haber to the moral am- bivalence of J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientists in the 20th century have ranged across the entire spectrum of ethics and politics in their search for a comfortable and defensible position.29 While the search goes on, some scientists accept military funding, others eschew it, and most worry about it.

For historians of technology, the absence of a traditional marketplace has greater implications. How, for example, can one explain the evolution of the computer without measuring the role of the military?30 In such a story, what forces are driving events? Surely not the market alone, for some of the products never enter the market; furthermore, government subsidy of research and development, to say nothing of government purchasing policies, distorts the market irretrievably. Surely, it is not the public consumer alone, for often the government is the only consumer, a situation of monopsony. In such an environment, evolutionary theories of technological development may prove to have more power than market theories, for they treat the entire environment in tracing technological change and

29L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford, 1986); Herbert F. York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb (Stanford, Calif., 1989).

so0. Bernard Cohen, "The Computer: A Case Study of the Support by Government, Especially the Military, of a New Science and Technology," in Science, Technology and the Military, ed. Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart, 2 vols. (Dordrecht, 1988), 1:119-54. See also Kenneth Flamm, Creating the Computer: Govern- ment, Industry, and High Technology (Washington, D.C., 1988); Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, N.J., 1993).



Science, Technology, and War S93 measure the results simply by the outcome, not by predetermined theories of which forces are going to dominate.3"

A fourth distinguishing characteristic of the history of technology and war is that development in this field is often viewed as proceeding more conservatively than in other fields.32 The panel in Madison re- vealed, however, no consensus on what to make of conservatism. Headrick noted in his presentation and in the discussion that followed that the U.S. military in the period he examined was surely a conservative institution, as were the British and German navies of the same period. Hacker observed that through most of history people in- volved in war simply take the existing technology for granted. Sumida confessed that he was not sure what technological conservatism means.

Elting Morison set the standard for evaluating this phenomenon in Men, Machines, and Modern Times (1966), especially in his influential essay in that volume on "Gunfire at Sea."33 In this characteristically thoughtful piece, Morison examined the institutional conservatism against which his father-in-law, William Sims, abutted when he at- tempted to introduce an innovative gunfire control system into the U.S. Navy around the turn of the century. Resisting the temptation to view the naval bureaucracy as a peculiarly conservative body, Morison cautioned that "military organizations are really societies, more rig- idly structured, more highly integrated, than most communities, but still societies."34 Their response to technological change, he believed, differed in degree but not in kind from that of other societies. Mili- tary officers had good reasons to cherish proven technologies and to resist innovation; after all, naval officers in particular risked their

S3George Basalla, The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge, 1988); Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York, 1990).

32The troubled relationship between science and the military has also been documented. See, e.g., Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1978), esp. chaps. 10, 21, and "Scientists, the Military, and the Control of Postwar Defense Research: The Case of the Research Board for National Security, 1944-1946," Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 20-47.

"3Elting Morison, "Gunfire at Sea," in his Men, Machines, and Modern Times (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 17-44. Morison explored the same topic in a full-length biography of his father-in-law, William Sims and the Modern American Navy (New York, 1968). See also Lance C. Buhl, "Mariners and Machines: Resistance to Technological Change in the American Navy, 1865-1869," Journal of American History 61 (1974): 703-27.

34Morison, "Gunfire at Sea," p. 39.



S94 Alex Roland lives and the lives of their subordinates on that technology. Arms and equipment that had been proven in battle were bound to appear more secure and trustworthy than new technology yet to win its spurs. Indeed, Morison went so far as to argue in another article that we would do well to recognize "the destructive energy in machinery." His examination of the navy's skepticism about the revolutionary warship Wampanoag after the American Civil War presents naval conservatism in a new light, almost as an early aversion to the dangers of autonomous technology.35

The great irony about traditional military conservatism toward technological change is that it reversed itself completely after World War II. This was the first war in which the weapons deployed at the end were significantly different from those with which it was launched; the most familiar examples are jet aircraft, ballistics mis- siles, proximity fuses, and, of course, the atomic bomb. These developments convinced the services that the desideratum of modern war was shifting from industrial production to technological development. The next war would be won in the research laboratory fully as much as the factory. Thus began the hothouse environment of military research and development that produced the international arms race, military-industrial complexes here and abroad, and the expansion of military interest and funds into new realms such as computers, communications, spaceflight, microelectronics, astrophysics, and a host of other fields. Scientists and engineers took up positions of power and influence in government, two of them-Harold Brown and William Perry-rising to become Secretary of Defense. Indeed, so enthusiastic and intemperate did the services become in their quest for new technology that institutional barriers had to be erected between them and their suppliers.36

The final distinguishing characteristic of this field of scholarship is a growing confusion about the boundaries of the topic. As Hacker has noted in his presentation at Madison and elsewhere, war and the

35 Morison, "Men and Machinery," in Men, Machines, and Modern Times, pp. 98-122; quotation at p. 120.

36The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in 1958 with just this purpose in mind, as was the office of the Director of Defense Research and Engi- neering. Both institutions have survived numerous organizational transformations to perform essentially the same function today, though ARPA has become more of a promoter of technology than a screen.




military are not the same thing."7 Military institutions are those social constructs put up by states to prepare for and conduct war. In turn, war is organized, armed conflict between states. Though practitioners are wont to talk about military science and the art (i.e., the technique) of war, in fact there is very little science or technology in war. War, as John U. Nef was at pains to argue over forty years ago, is a consumer of science and technology and a destroyer of the social and institutional bases from which they spring."8 Military institutions, however, are another matter. Since earliest recorded history, the military has stimulated and promoted the development of science and technology.

Though it may seem to be mere sophistry to distinguish between war and the military, the distinction is neither trivial nor unimpor- tant. Throughout history states have chosen a place for themselves on a spectrum ranging from warlike to peaceful. Those that chose to live by war-Assyria is the prototype-naturally cultivated the tools of war. Many states that preferred a less aggressive policy were nonetheless compelled by their neighbors to defend themselves. They too developed instruments of war. Until modern times, war was, in Machiavelli's phrase, the first business of the prince. To the extent that science and technology were state-supported, they were as likely as not to be supported for military purposes. Eratosthenes said that the main reason for doing cube roots was to calculate the settings for ballistae.39 Dionysius I of Syracuse set up the first-known research and development laboratory in order to develop siege equipment.40 Archimedes is reported to have turned his considerable tal- ents to the defense of Syracuse. Even apparently civilian technologies, such as monumental architecture and road building, were often driven by military purpose. War consumed science and scientists, technology and technologists. But military institutions in preparation for war were among the principal patrons of these activities.4"

37Barton C. Hacker, "Military Institutions, Weapons, and Social Change: Toward a New History of Military Technology," Technology and Culture 35 (October 1994): 768-834.

38John U. Nef, War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1950).

SgWerner Soedel and Vernard Foley, "Ancient Catapults," Scientific American 240 (March 1979): 159.

40Brian Caven, Dionysius I: War-Lord of Sicily (New Haven, Conn., 1990), pp. 94-95. 41A. Rupert Hall, Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century: A Study in the Relations of Science

and War with Reference Principally to England (Cambridge, 1952); Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (1938; reprint, New York, 1970).



S96 Alex Roland In modern times, the relationship between the state and war has

changed. War may remain in the minds of many the first business of the state, but it is no longer the main business of the state. The role of the military as a consumer and promoter of science and technology has shifted accordingly, but the new pattern is filled with contradic- tions. In the United States, for example, things military account for only 23 percent of federal expenditures, but in 1985 the military accounted for approximately 60 percent of the federal government's research and development.42 The Department of Defense now costs the federal government less than social security and less than Health and Human Services with social security left out; by the end of the century, it is projected to cost the federal government less than the interest on the national debt. At the same time, however, it also pro- vides more support for research and development than all other government agencies combined. If one accepts the argument of Walter McDougall and others that government activities such as the space program and the Department of Energy are really quasi-military manifestations of the Cold War, and if one adds the so-called black budget that is hidden in other budget categories, then the figures would change significantly. In all cases, however, military funding has a proportionally larger impact on research and development than military spending has on the national budget.

Some generalizations seem warranted. Military institutions con- tinue to play a large role in many aspects of national life, though not as large in the United States as at the height of the Cold War. Because science and technology have become ever more important in modern war, the military plays a disproportionate role in their development. The military-industrial complex is likely, therefore, to remain fertile ground for research by historians of science and historians of technology. But the distinction between things military and civilian is becoming increasingly blurred, and traditional definitions of these realms will likely prove increasingly inadequate. A quick perusal of the list of "critical technologies" recently identified by the Department of Defense will suggest how porous the barrier between military and civilian has become: semiconductor materials and microelectronic cir- cuits, software engineering, high-performance computing, machine intelligence and robotics, simulation and modeling, photonics, sensi- tive radar, passive sensors, signal and image processing, signature control, weapon system environment, data fusion, computational fluid dynamics, air-breathing propulsion, pulsed power, hyperveloc- ity projectiles and propulsion, high energy-density materials, com-

42Jacques S. Gansler, Affording Defense (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 214.




posite materials, superconductivity, biotechnology, and flexible man- ufacturing.43

Any attempt to fit these technologies into traditional notions of the tools of war is bound to fail. The focus must become the military as a social institution, one that plays an enormously important but very complex role in the development of science and technology.

The preceding catalog of distinguishing characteristics notwith- standing, it is important to note that technology and war as a field of study probably has more in common with other branches of technology than it has differences. First, it is important to remember that the term "technology" is a product of the 17th century, "scientist" a product of the 19th. Though the phenomena we now call science and technology have existed throughout human history, they were not understood in earlier ages in the same sense we now understand them. So too with military science and technology. Though we now think of these fields as the desiderata of modern warfare, ancient practitioners did not. They may well have deployed what we would now call science and technology, but they seldom thought of these fields as the primary source of military power. In that respect, these fields are like other branches of the history of science and technology, ranging from medicine to manufacture to astronomy. Practitioners used their understanding and manipulation of the material world to help do their business, but they hardly thought about science and technology as conceptually distinct categories of human activity that were to be deployed as a precondition of successful healing or pro- ducing or studying-let alone successful fighting.

Another similarity is that technology has grown more important in warfare in the period since the Industrial Revolution. Quincy Wright argued that technology became the most important determinant of war after the introduction of gunpowder, from about 1500 on." Few other scholars would go quite that far, though most who study the subject allow the importance of the gunpowder revolution. The real change came in the 19th century. Since then, great-power war has been measured in industrial production. And in the 20th century, technological innovations have often been closely tied to scientific research, from gas warfare to electronics, from materials research

4 National Research Council, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, Board on Army Science and Technology, Star 21: Strategic Technologies for the Army of the Twenty-First Century (Washington, D.C., 1992), pp. 277-80.

"4Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago, 1942; reprint, 1965).



S98 Alex Roland

to nuclear weapons. Research on the history of military technology, mirroring the history of technology in general, has come to be dominated by the study of 20th-century topics; the pattern is less clear in the history of science, though it seems true of research on science and war.

Again mirroring the larger fields from which they are drawn, histories of technology and war have shown a clear shift in recent years from internalist to contextual studies. Few, perhaps, have gone as far as Donald MacKenzie's explicitly social-constructivist study of ballistic missile guidance, Inventing Accuracy,45 but many have moved beyond the narrow, technical accounts from bygone days so often accompa- nied by loving reconstructions of arms and armor. When such studies are done well, they make a real contribution to scholarship." Too often, however, they are antiquarian and parochial, playing to the enthusiasts who collect buttons off uniforms and count the tail num- bers on aircraft.

This kind of history is associated in the minds of many with the old distinction between museums and scholarship. Museums were seen as mere repositories, their function simply to display artifacts with as much verisimilitude as possible. The best modern museums of science and technology, however, are now richly contextual. Their artifacts, instead of being ends in themselves, are scripted to fit into a larger educational agenda, one that places them in context and explains their historical significance. The same ends are now achieved by the best military museums, which inevitably display a significant amount of military technology and science.

A final similarity is that military technology is intrinsically interesting. No doubt many scholars chose the history of technology because of their personal fascination with the topic. The same allure draws scholars into the history of military technology. The instruments of war are literally awful, but this only adds to their appeal. They are the tools with which humans have conducted one of their most fundamental and dramatic activities; into these tools they have poured their ingenuity, their wickedness, and their hopes. As Mumford put it, for

45See MacKenzie (n. 5 above). 46 Ralph Payne-Gallwey, The Crossbow, Mediaeval and Modern, Military and Sporting: Its

Construction, History and Management (New York, 1903; reprint, 1958); E. W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery, vol. 1, Historical Development (Oxford, 1969); John S. Morison and J. F. Coates, The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship (Cambridge, 1986). It must be added that these are all works of exemplary and exacting scholarship, significant contributions to knowledge; it is a nice question whether or not this kind of scholarship is ever out of fashion.




their "dream of power," these were the "engines of fulfillment."47 For good or ill, the technology of war has become increasingly important to an understanding of the evolution of Western civilization.

And the distinction between things military and civilian is disap- pearing. Soldiers worry about the erosion of the warrior ethic as they become managers of violence. Civilians worry about the militarization of society as war and preparation for war spread from the military- industrial complex into hitherto pristine corners of our social fabric. And science and technology find themselves increasingly permeated by military influences and increasingly subverted to military purposes. The list of critical technologies reproduced in the previous section suggests that military and civilian considerations are becoming indistinguishable. So too is the history of technology and war likely to become indistinguishable from any other history of technology.

47 Mumford, Technics and Civilization (n. 6 above), p. 40.



A concern that received particular attention at Madison was understanding how historians of technology and science might make their histories more in- clusive-in particular, how they might better incorporate the experiences of women and racial or ethnic minorities into their studies. The following paper by Venus Green is to some degree representative of this interest, focusing on African American women in the changing technological environment of the telephone industry in the mid-20th century.

Two of the meeting's joint plenary sessions dealt with issues of gender and its relationships with science and technology, both as a category of analysis and as a source of differing experiences. Judy Wajcman discussed feminist analyses of technology, Evelyn Fox Keller focused on how gender could be used as a category in the history of science, and Carroll Pursell extended the discussion to include the construction of masculinity in technology. In a separate session, Kathleen Ochs and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt surveyed the historiography of women in technology and science, with some reference to possible future directions.

Yet another session, devoted to "Race, Technology, and Science," was the venue for Green's paper. The other contributions to this session illustrated different approaches to a long-neglected set of issues. Willie Pearson, Jr., reported on some of the early results of a survey of the roughly forty-six African Americans who earned Ph.D.s in chemistry between 1916 and 1945. He paid particular attention to understanding the relationship between the experiences of these chemists and the ideal of universalism that is understood to be one of the basic norms of modern science. Sucheta Mazumdar's essay, "Supremacy of the Technological Race? China, Japan, and the United States," enlarged the categories of interest in the discussion of race beyond the common, American black/white dichotomy. This effort also enlarged the temporal and geographical frames of discussion, extending from 18th-century Europeans' statements about China (and how perceptions of technology shaped racial perceptions) to modern Japanese attitudes toward the West and Western technology.

S100



Supplement: Snapshots of a Discipline: Selected Proceedings from the Conference on Critical Problems...

Documents

Transcript of Supplement: Snapshots of a Discipline: Selected Proceedings from the Conference on Critical Problems...