STEPHEN D. CHIABOTTI
Strategy appears to have as many definitions as people trying to define it. I prefer “the management of context for continuing advantage.” The first part comes from a former student named Mark Davis, who returned from the battle of Fallujah in Iraq saying, “Strategy is all about managing context.” The second part comes from colleague Everett Carl Dolman, whose Pure Strategy emphasizes the objective of continuing relative advantage in the management of ways, means, and ends.1
Technology also sports a variety of definitions. Some would, with chronological and sociological ignorance, define it as “applied science.” While many modern technologies speak to the application of science, many do not; as one goes back in time, the frequency of technology being perceived as a “craft tradition” increases. In fact, prior to the late nineteenth century military technology exhibited precious little of what Robert Boyle succinctly described as “investigation by hypothesis subjected to rigorous experimental cross examination.”2 Yet, throughout most of history, technology in the form of tools and techniques has purposely altered the environment.
In other words, while technology is part of the context the strategist must manage, it also serves the same purpose. Hence, the notion of symbiosis. Technologies can transform context and, by inference, strategy itself. Similarly, strategy can transform technologies. One need look only as far as nuclear weapons to confirm this contention. The United States deliberately, as a strategy, enlisted scientific talent and spent billions of dollars to create nuclear weapons. These, in turn, changed the context of strategy, at least for the seven decades since and perhaps forever.
Context is also forever changing: biologically, environmentally, socially, and technologically. Each of these factors has its own rate of progression or change. But of the four, technology changes most rapidly, followed by sociology, then environment, and (perhaps in reaction to environmental changes) biology. Consequently, the strategist, while not ignoring the other factors, would do well to pay close attention to the least stable variable in a universe of possibilities. “Unstable, but somewhat predictable, and very impactful” would most closely describe technological development. Or, as Henry Adams so succinctly quipped on the acceleration of history, “Bombs educate vigorously.”3
So how do game-changing, war-winning technologies enter military arsenals? Herein lies a dichotomy nested in the technostrategic symbiosis. Technology is an agent of change, and organizations, military ones included, tend to resist change. They are most likely to seek change when expanding, having suffered a reversal, or pressured from without.4 But then how does the winning military organization subsequently undergoing contraction in peacetime ensure that it is technologically prepared to win the next war? On the surface, it would appear that technological innovation plays the same role as the National Football League draft, in ensuring that the weak will grow stronger and the strong weaker by conferring advantage in the selection of talent to losers over winners. But then, in that league winners tend to be richer and can apply that advantage to the free-agent market, providing they are willing to accept the changes marquee players will make to team chemistry.
Sports analogies aside, the problem of technological innovation in the military is important, complex, and fraught with dramatic strategic implications. In fact, innovation is the central problem in the relationship between strategy and technology. Although David Edgerton contends that innovation is overplayed in the history of technology, one would be hard-pressed to ignore the impact of new devices and methods of employment on strategy.5 From the Schwiepwald, outside Königgrätz, where prone, rail-borne Prussian riflemen used their new breechloaders to cut down the aspirations of the Austrian empire, to the deserts of Iraq, where Americans used new, stealthy precision weapons to end the reign of both Saddam Hussein and the Soviet empire, technological innovation has mattered strategically. So how does it occur? How does the opportunity—nay, the imperative—presented by new technologies overcome the inertia of military organizations?
To ask such a question is to pit technological determinism against social constructivism in explaining the diffusion of tools and techniques for warfare. As Lynn White so elegantly phrased it, “A new device merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter.”6 What does? Determinists like Ray Kurzweil speak of the inexorable pressure and innate humanity of the exponential curve of technical progression.7 Yet constructivists like Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker point to the “empirical program of relativism” in science and how it corresponds to the “social construction of technology,” where “artifacts” are shaped by social forces until they reach “closure.”8 Between these poles of argument lie systems thinkers like Thomas Parke Hughes and John Law. Hughes perceives a “technological momentum” that borrows some fury from the determinist argument in the early stages of technological development but then yields to social forces as technologies mature.9 Law introduces the notion of heterogeneous engineering in technological systems, wherein agency is ascribed to people, technology, and environment.10 Hughes and Law probably come closest to the truth in contending that technical and social forces have about equal weight in the equation of change and that both must be managed by strategists seeking advantage. Examples will illustrate the argument.
Throughout most of history, technology mattered little to strategic calculation. That is not to say that technology was not important to the conduct of war but rather that there was little advantage to be gained by manipulating technology. The weapons of war advanced, but they did so very slowly. The musket used by British soldiers under Wellington at Waterloo was little changed from that used by those under Marlborough at Blenheim over a century before. Nelson’s Victory was over forty years old at Trafalgar. This slow rate of technical progression was complemented by the osmotic nature of cultures with regard to technology in general and, specifically, of military cultures to successful weaponry. Once something worked, it was adopted by others. The French advantage in mobile field artillery that Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval had pioneered in the late eighteenth century served Napoleon well in early campaigns and up through the battles of Jena and Auerstadt in 1806. By the time of Leipzig in 1814, however, others had caught up, and the galloping guns of the French conferred little advantage. Things began to change, however, in middle of the nineteenth century.
While it is difficult to pinpoint a cause of this technical one-upsmanship, Douglass North leans heavily on property rights. By the early nineteenth century, American patent law had ensured that people could own not only land and structures but also ideas. Patent offices soon proliferated to other nations, and self-interested parties had financial incentives to invent and innovate.11 This development served to warm the relationship of two strange kinds of bedfellows: military men and merchants. One class was rooted in land and loyalty, the other in markets and money. Throughout most of history, they had little trust in or use for each other. But that began to change with the founding of cannon by private entrepreneurs in the middle of the eighteenth century. It turns out that Louis XIV could get the best guns only from the makers in Liege, where his reign held little sway. As William McNeill so eloquently asserts, “private efforts to maximize profits tended to reward economies in the use of all the factors of production. Market behavior, in short, induced a level of efficiency compulsion rarely could match.”12 This simple truth underwrites the alliance of merchants and military that has persisted to this day.
In attempting to explain the emergence of technical advantage in strategic planning, one could also speculate on the confluence of the political, industrial, and managerial revolutions. Walter Millis used this construct to explain the migration from limited to total wars.13 The political revolution started in the American colonies and reached full fury in France. By setting the social conditions for the mass army, it greatly multiplied the effect of any technical improvements. The industrial revolution was rooted in the British textile industry and provided the wherewithal to equip the issue of the levée en masse. The managerial revolution was rooted in the Prussian general staff as an institutional response to the genius of Napoleon. Among the charters of the Generalstab was to remain abreast of changes in technology and, when appropriate, to procure them for the army.
The General Staff had aged two generations by the middle of the nineteenth century, and by then a number of technologies were presenting opportunities for strategic innovation. Principal among these was the steam-powered railroad. From antiquity to roughly 1860, the sea presented the most efficient line of communication, and command of the sea conferred great advantages in both freedom of action and economy of force. Ferdinand Foch maintained that these two principles circumscribed all others in the military art.14 Needless to say, A. T. Mahan, in his Spencerian polemic for American sea power, based his entire theory on the logistic efficiency of maritime commerce. Ironically, Mahan published The Influence of Seapower upon History: 1660–1783 at precisely the moment another form of transportation began to matter more in the equation.15 And that was the railroad. In fairness to Mahan, sea power and command of the sea still mattered, but in the vast reaches of Eurasia the railroad showed considerable promise for those who wished to project power to the outer reaches of a “heartland” that stretched from the Bay of Biscay to Port Arthur and from Archangel to the Sea of Azov.16 Although nearly every nation built railroads, it was the Prussian and later German General Staff that seized upon the strategic opportunities that inhered in the new form of transport for a nation gifted with a central position in the Eurasian landmass and with limited opportunities for maritime power. While the railroad appeared at first to be the ideal defensive technology, since nations could change gauges at their borders, the Germans realized the offensive capability of a rapidly mobilized army carried to the frontier ahead of the enemy’s mobilization schedule. An army on the strategic offensive could be carried by train to the border, disembark fresh for the march, and surround the opposing force, thus fighting from the tactical defensive. The bullet-stopping power of dirt conferred a considerable advantage to the tactical defender from the mid-nineteenth century until well into the twentieth.
Notably, it was also the Prussian General Staff that embarked in 1841 on a twenty-year program to equip its soldiers with breechloading rifles. As Dennis Showalter has noted, the unification of principalities into the German nation was largely a story of Railroads and Rifles.17 The third R of German unification, artillery, in the form of cast-steel breechloaders manufactured by Alfred Krupp, was documented by Michael Howard in The Franco-Prussian War.18 One could argue that lack of organizational inertia and a complementary spirit of free inquiry that typified the German General Staff in this period were instrumental in fomenting the technical changes that led to strategic innovation. But we would be remiss to discount the genius of Helmuth Moltke the Elder in engineering the changes and employing them in succession against the Danes, Austrians, and French. In so doing, Moltke not only provided the military complement to Bismarck’s diplomacy in unifying Germany; he also set, in mobilization schedules tied to rail transport, the strategic parameters for the epochal event of history—World War I.
The contrast to Moltke’s genius in employing new technologies is perhaps best demonstrated by the example of the French mitrailleuse, a large, wheeled prototype of the Gatling gun that had tremendous potential for overcoming German advantages in both population and mobilization. But the French employed it as artillery, far from the front lines and without much use in an indirect-fire role.19 The French were more successful in reequipping their army—with the Chassepot breechloader, superior to the German Dreyse needle gun—in the scant four years between the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. At Metz, Sedan, and later Paris, however, they suffered greatly from the indirect fire of Krupp’s artillery, developed and deployed in exactly the same period of time as the Chassepot rifle. Krupp’s artillery brought a new development to the practice of war. A century and a half later, American airmen coined the term “parallel warfare” in reference to their ability to destroy targets throughout a theater of operations and thereby produce a systemic paralysis in the enemy. By 1870, the Germans, using long-range artillery, had achieved the same effect in a radius of action that we would term “tactical.” By 1940, using tanks, motorized transport, and aircraft, they had widened the effect of “parallel” attack to a radius more “operational” in scope. In retrospect, the antecedents of technical imperatives for strategic innovation are clear in the German Wars of Unification. While, as mentioned earlier, bombs may indeed educate vigorously, the converse is also true; the German General Staff stands as testament to the fact that military practitioners must engage in education that they might bomb with vigor.
Lest the reader find the author Germanophilic, by the middle of the twentieth century the Teutons had gotten it wrong. The technical imperatives for strategic innovation were perhaps even stronger, but they were mismanaged in the event, and fortunes suffered accordingly. Rather, in the case of jet propulsion and rocketry, good fortune was to be bequeathed in posterity to Germany’s enemies.
The Messerschmitt 262 Schwable represents one of the most dramatic aviation developments of World War II. The twin-engine turbojet had both the speed and firepower to disrupt Allied bomber formations and gain air superiority for the Luftwaffe, despite the decided advantages the Allies had in aircraft production. The 262 was the aerial analog to the German Ostkampfer fighting four-to-one odds on the Eastern Front. Yet the program foundered in design changes and production delays. Some would later blame Hitler’s infatuation with using the plane as a bomber, while others cite the ridiculously short life of its engines. Nonetheless, properly managed, the jet fighter might have turned the tables in the air war—and thereby the ground war, which so often depended upon aerial capability.20 Why did the grandsons of the men who brought us the Dreyse needle gun, clockwork rail mobilization, and cast-steel, breechloading artillery not seize upon the dire need for this air-superiority jet and engineer its success?
The answer probably lies in the incompatibility of Nazi ideology with “defensive” weapons and the subsequent absence of a champion who could overcome the friction that inhered in German bureaucratic and command structures. These frictions exist in all bureaucracies and commands, representing what John Law termed “dissociative” forces with regard to systemic success.21 They are overcome by blending what Clausewitz termed “iron will” and “genius.”22 Neither Willy Messerschmitt, Hermann Goering, nor Erhard Milch appears to have possessed the requisite combination of brute force and finesse necessary to field a revolutionary weapon system in numbers sufficient to impact the outcome of a war. But one could also argue that the Nazis had other things on their minds.
The V-2 was an offensive weapon system and, in form as well as function, a near perfect match to Nazi ideology. From its Buck Rogers shape to its indefensible hypersonic approach, it was the perfect Vergeltungswaffe, or “vengeance weapon.” Also, the rocket was manufactured by slave labor, in horrific conditions at the Dora concentration camp near Sachsenhausen, again exhibiting a macabre congruence to the neo-feudal Weltanschauung of Hitler’s regime. In contrast to Milch and Messerschmitt, Werner von Braun and his military counterpart in the development of the V-2, Walther Dornberger, were men of considerable talent who knew how to get things done in the bizarre culture of the Third Reich. (Isaac Asimov once quipped that von Braun had aimed at the stars and hit London.) Yet it was the strategic aim of the Germans that needed refinement. What did they hope to accomplish with a development program nearly as expensive as the Manhattan Project? Certainly more than killing 5,200 British citizens—yet such was the final tally, along with a minor disruption of Allied logistics in the invasion port of Antwerp. (Now, had they wished to colonize the moon . . .) The point taken here is that technological development may require at times both finesse and brute force, but it also requires vision. And lacking that, the other two don’t matter much.
Imagine a V-2 with an explosive payload powerful enough to destroy London. This is precisely the image formed by Bernard Schriever upon taking a briefing from noted physicist and mathematician Johnny von Neumann on the possibilities of thermonuclear weapons. Just as Moltke’s railroads were complemented by breechloading rifles and artillery, so was von Braun’s rocket in need of a nuclear weapon to be effective. Moreover, to be effective over intercontinental distances, in addition to a payload several thousand times more powerful per weight than TNT, it needed a better guidance system and a way of reentering the atmosphere without burning up. By the middle of the 1950s all three of these problems were teetering on the cusp of solutions. The guidance problem was solved by Stark Draper in the Lincoln Lab at MIT using a pendulum-induced, gyrostabilized accelerometer that would provide inertial guidance for terminal accuracy of less than three thousand feet over a distance of five thousand miles.23 The reentry problem found the counterintuitive solution of ablative shielding—presenting a blunt surface designed to burn up in the atmospheric friction encountered in the missile’s descent.
Thermonuclear explosives culminated a research program started at the turn of the century by Ernest Rutherford, when he discovered the atomic nucleus by firing beta particles (ionized helium) at gold foil and noting that some of them bounced back. Atomic nuclei are held together by a curve of binding energy.24 Lighter elements, such as helium, give up energy when their nuclei are fused. This is the process that powers the universe. At the other end of the binding curve, heavier elements, such as uranium, produce energy when their nuclei are broken apart in fission. Both processes occur in nature. Fusion, however, requires the tremendous heat generated by the gravitational collapse of hydrogen gas; this is how the sun powers our solar system. Fission occurs naturally through the radioactive decay of certain heavy isotopes but to produce energy requires a readily available source of thermal neutrons to destabilize the nuclei of heavy elements. It also requires the presence of other heavy nuclei to sustain a chain reaction. In other words, fission is unlikely to produce significant amounts of energy unless we take pains to assemble a substantial amount of heavy metal, confine it, and provide a bevy of neutrons to start the reaction. Hence, the Manhattan Project, perhaps the greatest technological achievement in history. Many of the scientists who worked in Los Alamos, most notably Hungarian expatriate Edward Teller, realized the complementary nature of fission and fusion: if one could fission heavy nuclei, one could generate enough heat to fuse lighter nuclei. Teller, only mildly interested in the fission bomb, went to New Mexico to work on “the Super.”25 And it was the super—a fusion bomb with a fission trigger—that excited Bennie Schriever’s imagination.
Von Neumann told Schriever that fusion weapons with yields of several hundred kilotons were possible in a warhead that weighed less than half a ton—a payload within the capability of a V-2-like rocket. Schriever realized almost immediately the strategic implications of such a device. It could hold cities—nay, nations—hostage to the intentions of its possessor. The pressure to produce a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) came from knowing that the Soviet Union had detonated a fission device in 1949 and was thus capable of producing a thermonuclear fusion device. The Soviets were also familiar with rocketry, by virtue of having expropriated several members of von Braun’s team at the end of the war. Hence, Schriever set about forming the Western Development Corporation in Los Angeles for the express purpose of building ICBMs. By so doing he avoided the bureaucratic politics of the Pentagon, while securing the support of Undersecretary of Defense Trevor Gardner to keep Curtis LeMay and the bomber barons of the Strategic Air Command at bay. Schriever was tall, handsome, and a consummate golfer. All three attributes aided his cause in the heterogeneous engineering of the Atlas and Minuteman missile systems.26
The notion of “systems” is vitally important to technical imperatives for strategic innovation. Absent an efficient steam engine, the railroad is not possible. Without cartridges, breechloading rifles and artillery are much less efficient. Absent fission, fusion is not possible. Absent fusion, guidance systems, and ablative shielding, the ICBM is not possible. Strategic innovators must command a sense of context and of what is possible. Thermonuclear weapons were nine years, an ocean, and ideological light-years removed from the Third Reich. (Fifty percent of the key scientists working on the Manhattan Project were Jews.) Fusion weapons were, however, well within the grasp of Joseph Stalin, as were ICBMs, as was painfully demonstrated to the West by Sputnik in 1957. It turns out that the guidance system required to put a satellite in orbit is of the same caliber as that necessary to hit a city at intercontinental distances. (If von Braun had missed the stars for London, Stalin had missed by even more, aiming for New York and hitting outer space.)
Regardless of aim, strategists must seize upon the advantages of complementary technologies. In the end, it was the killing power of the breechloading rifle that consummated the strategic conveyance of the railroad in German unification. Similarly, it was the light and powerful thermonuclear device, the killing power of which is derived from lithium deuteride, a relatively common salt, that energized missiles as the dominant coercive force of the Cold War.
But thermonuclear weapons presented a threshold of violence that even the most ideologically strident leaders chose to avoid. And beneath this thermonuclear umbrella, limited conventional wars, often fought by proxies of the superpowers and under the scrutiny of mass media, continued. The wars that occurred in Korea and Vietnam, as well as twice in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, required the complement of mass destruction. They demanded precision and its somewhat unlikely partner, stealth. Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek recognized the potential that lay in a Klingon “bird of prey” equipped with the Romulan cloaking device. The real trick was firing phasers while cloaked. By the late 1980s, the Americans had made Roddenberry’s fiction real. They had developed laser-guided bombs to take out bridges during the Vietnam conflict, but these had demanded a steady platform to lase the target while the bomb was guided home. This need gave rise to the impetus for a stealthy platform that could evade detection and attack by the enemy’s integrated air-defense system. The F-117 and B-2 were designed for this purpose and were made more lethal by the development of satellite guidance for their bombs via the Global Positioning System.27 By the end of the twentieth century, American airmen had developed a set of complementary technologies that made them nearly invincible in conventional warfare, providing the opponent had no recourse to nuclear weapons. Often missing, however, was the strategic vision that rationalized the use of these clever weapons.
The wars in Yugoslavia, first Bosnia and later Kosovo, could be labeled as qualified successes. They were short and decisive, and they carried with them a clearly humanitarian imperative that played well to the media-savvy audiences of the information age. The first Gulf War was also a qualified success, but much like World War I it left the problem of dynamism in the region to be solved by a second. Both the second Iraq war and its partner in Afghanistan came in response to imaginative airborne attacks by jihadist terrorists on New York and Washington. Both also took on additional agendas of unfinished business in the Middle East region. Moreover, they represented reprehensible strategic thinking. The global Salafi jihadist movement was a symptom of the war within Islam. But neither the symptom of terrorist acts nor the disease of Islamic radicalism was likely to be cured by invading Muslim countries. Stealth, precision, rapid movement, and information dominance can afford a dramatic operational edge in the employment of military force, but no amount of technological proclivity can overcome bad strategy. If it hasn’t already, I suspect that the passage of time will confirm this for the most recent American military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Nonetheless, we can agree that a great deal of technical innovation has occurred in the military art since we started this discussion in the middle of the nineteenth century. Scholars differ, however, on the causes and methods of this innovation. Barry Posen has studied The Sources of Military Doctrine in European militaries during the interwar period. In his study, he pitted the assumed inertia of military organizations against imperatives for change stimulated by concerns over the balance of power. In Posen’s representation, these changes in the security environment of a nation were better sensed by politicians than generals. Civil leaders, however, lacked the knowledge—better, the language—of military organizations necessary to effect change. They consequently, according to Posen, had to rely on “mavericks” within the military to do their bidding. While the maverick with outside political support might fit the persona of William Mitchell in developing aviation for the U.S. Army, or Heinz Guderian in creating armored forces for the German Wehrmacht, the depiction works less well with figures like Hugh Dowding in building the integrated air-defense system for England in the late 1930s or William Moffett in building American carrier aviation during the same time period. Since Schriever married into the aristocracy of American airpower and had the patronage of Gen. “Hap” Arnold throughout much of his career, he could hardly be labeled a maverick. Hyman Rickover, who had much to do with the nuclear navy, comes closer to Posen’s depiction, since he would likely have never made flag rank without congressional help. Both he and Schriever recognized, however, that innovation in the form of nuclear-powered submarines and ships and of ICBMs, respectively, was unlikely to occur in the bureaucratic setting of the Pentagon and its specialized research-and-development organizations. Both Rickover and Schriever formed new organizations with built-in counters to the stifling influence of tradition and bureaucracy, and they ensured that their “development corporations” were supported by civil leaders with stakes in national security—to wit, the president, the Congress, and the secretary of defense. So Posen’s notion of civil influence is important but perhaps slightly miscast.28
His one-time student Stephen Rosen offers a refinement. In Rosen’s representation of military innovation it is military leaders, not politicians, who sense changes in the security environment and react to them by innovating doctrinally. Although Rosen chooses to deal with “technological innovation” separately, here he is talking about research-and-development programs. Most of his doctrinal innovation—and he offers a multitude of cases—occurs in response to technological stimuli. Rosen’s most important contribution is the realization of what is important to military men and women and their organizations: promotion (particularly, for individuals, to flag and general rank). Hence, Rosen contends, the success or failure of military innovations is played out as much in the arena of personnel as on the battlefield. Successful innovations may take a generation to mature, and a notable characteristic of their success is that the new way of doing business affords mainstream practitioners progression through the ranks to the grade of general or admiral. Rosen suggests that “seeding” new forms of endeavor with officers who are “fast movers” in other branches is yet another way of sustaining viability. In other words, the proper management of people is what assures the success of a new military technology.29
While it is possible to view Posen and Rosen as polar opposites in the way they represent military innovation, “complementary” may be the more applicable adjective. Posen appears to view the military in the manner of Samuel Huntington, as a bunch of hidebound men separated from American society as much by their own desires as by the norms of their profession.30 Eliot Cohen exhibits a similar view in Supreme Command, where military men, to be effective, need continual supervision and intervention by their civil masters. While Cohen admits to a civil-military dialogue, it is very unequal, with both power and knowledge slanted to the civil side.31 This Ivy League, ivory-tower view of the military is perhaps deserved on occasion, but it ignores the sensitivities, education, and imagination of military practitioners. Although the men and women on both sides of the Potomac are specialists, I will hazard to say that soldiers, sailors, and airmen are more aware of political affairs than are politicians of military art. That imbalance in knowledge and experience should serve to even out the dialogue a bit. There are indeed times when military people “stuck in old ways of doing business” need civil intervention to right their ships, dress their ranks, and trim their aircraft.32 But instances also exist when military people have sensed changes in the security environment and set about making the changes necessary for national defense.
So where does this leave us, and what does the future hold? Almost certain is the prospect that technology will continue to present opportunities for change. But will history treat twenty-first-century Americans with the same disdain it has for twentieth-century Germans? Will it view the United States as an unfortunate victim of its own technically induced hubris? Will the bankruptcy of ideas lead to the economic ruin some are so willing to forecast? I think not.
The same things that make Americans technologically savvy will make them politically wise. American technology grew from the scarcity of labor on the frontier. A scarcity of resources in the global economy will incentivize both technical and political ingenuity. Democracies are learning organisms, and ours will learn from its mistakes. To encourage both technical innovation and political moxie, we must address both of what C. P. Snow termed “the Two Cultures”—and we must do it through education.33 We need an efficient photovoltaic cell and a better way of placing payloads in orbit. Education in science, engineering, and mathematics will lead to solutions for these problems. We need better linkage between our foreign and domestic policies and better mechanisms for distributing wealth and stimulating economic growth—at the same time. Education in history, politics, and economics will lead to solutions here. Finally, we need better strategists, with one foot planted firmly in each culture, to orchestrate a second century of American leadership in the world.
Our strategists must understand the technical imperatives for strategic innovation, but they must also understand the political ramifications of using military force in the context of globalization. Our strategists must be “heterogenius engineers.” They must combine the grey art of systems engineering with the black art of military genius. They must at times possess iron will and use brute force in assembling relative advantage. They must understand the incentives of the merchant class and the role of private property, particularly as applied to ideas, in creating new and improved weapons. But they must also have the vision to foresee socioeconomic consequences and mitigate ill effects. They must, moreover, deal effectively with a conundrum that stems from the very definition of strategy employed here.
That is, nearly every advantage carries with it a disadvantage. Strategy exploits, and there is almost always a bill to pay for exploitation. No one enjoys being exploited, and payback runs the gamut from resentment to revolution. After the Prussians had won the battle of Königgrätz, Moltke wanted to parade his army through the streets of Vienna. But Bismarck, knowing he might need the Austrians to remain neutral in a potential fight with France, expressly forbade the insult. It was enough for him to know that the four southern German provinces would now form a defensive alliance with Prussia instead of with Austria.34 George H. W. Bush and his team of strategists viewed Iraq as an effective counterpoise to Iran in the Gulf and forbade the enlargement of coalition aims to take down the regime of Saddam Hussein after blitzing his forces out of Kuwait. Bismarck and Bush were both moderate in the advantages they sought, and this may be sound advice to all strategists: accrue only the advantage necessary in the moment. Long-term arrangements, no matter how easily secured with superior technology, must appear advantageous to both sides. American strategy must be good for not only the United States but also the rest of the world. One could argue that this was true in the twentieth century; keeping it true for the remainder of this century will be a tall order.
Some of the early historians of technology postulated Homo habilis—man the toolmaker. They contended it was technology that made us human. We know now that this is not true. What makes us human is sentience in the moment and the ability to move our minds in space and time—to foresee, to imagine, to dream, to plan. Technology merely makes us more human. It seeks a better way of managing the context we inhabit. If we are to succeed as a species, then, we must make technology humane. This includes the technology of making war. That was the idea held by Giulio Douhet and many of the early theorists of airpower, who were reacting to the dehumanizing carnage of World War I. Unfortunately, things did not work out as they planned—at least initially. The people of Guernica, Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and all the other “dead cities” of World War II would be unlikely to testify to the humanity of the new aerial weapon, any more than World War II residents of Kharkov and Budapest would extol the lifesaving virtues of invading armies. More recently, however, the inhabitants of Baghdad and Belgrade might have a different take on the issue. Modern conventional weapons can be employed with diminished collateral effects, and the impact of mass media and networked populations makes it imperative that they be so employed. Robotic developments also place combatants farther from harm’s way. So, elements of modern warfare point toward greater humanity. But others don’t. Thermonuclear weapons are still a significant threat, one that could possibly destroy the ecosphere that sustains human life on this planet, or at least the threads of social fabric that bind us together. The good news is that numbers are coming down, and with that reduction at least the environmental threat is somewhat diminished.
The desideratum of the twenty-first century may indeed then be a strategy problem. How well have we harmonized the resources of this planet and the objective of a flourishing species through the aegis of a plan? The problem is complex, perhaps even chaotic, and has a strong technological component, but it has a solution. And, as an educator, I can only hope our students will find it.
NOTES
1. Everett C. Dolman, Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Information Age (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 6.
2. Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist or Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes (London: F. Caldwell, 1661), 4.
3. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 34.
4. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 47.
5. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 28.
7. Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).
8. 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.: MIT Press, 1987), 12.
9. Ibid., 51–82.
10. Ibid., 111–34.
11. Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981)
12. William H. McNeill, Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 156.
13. Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1956).
14. Ferdinand Foch, The Principles of War, trans. Hilaire Belloc (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). See also Andre Beaufre, An Introduction to Strategy (New York: Praeger, 1965), 21–50.
15. Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660–1873 (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1890).
16. Halford Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History” (reprint of 1904 article), Geographical Journal 170, no. 4 (2004): 298–321.
17. Dennis Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975).
18. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961).
19. Bernard Brodie and Fawn M. Brodie, From Crossbow to H-Bomb: The Evolution of the Weapons and Tactics of Warfare (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 145.
20. William Green, Warplanes of the Third Reich (New York: Galahad Books, 1986), 619–38.
21. John Law, “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion,” in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social Construction of Technological Systems, 111–34.
22. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 110–12.
23. Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
24. John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974).
25. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 418–22.
26. Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (New York: Random House, 2009).
27. Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik, The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002); Paul G. Gillespie, Weapons of Choice: The Development of Precision Guided Munitions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006).
28. Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine.
29. Stephen P. Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
30. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Boston: Belknap, 1957).
31. Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).
32. The reference here is to a speech made by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base on 21 April 2008, just prior to sacking the Air Force Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Air Force.
33. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (London: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
34. Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany: The Period of Unification, 1815–1871 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 200–208.