By Dhatri Badri
How far will the military go with technology? The military, in most western societies, has frequently played an integral role as a leader in research and development. In the U.S., the military is often the testing ground for many new technologies; for example, medical technology has often seen its first test in battlefield hospitals. Due to the fact that the impact of technology is likely to become apparent in a military setting before its ripples are felt throughout society, the military provides an excellent arena for learning about the broad array of impacts of advanced technology. This article highlights how organizations arose before and after World War II to promote weapons innovation for military purposes in the U.S.
World War II marked the turning point in the relationship between militarism and science and technology. Before that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the military kept technology at a distance. Both the Navy and the Army led expeditions, including notable explorations by Lewis and Clark (1804-1806) and Charles Wilkes (1838-1842). During the Civil War, the National Academy of Sciences was formed to process the avalanche of research proposals that poured into Washington, many of which focused on military innovations. This flurry of scientific and technological activity resulted in the first ironclads and submarines. Later on, WWI saw important technological advances, particularly in the development of submarines and aircraft. Physicists laid the foundation for radar, sonar, and direction-finding through research in radio communications and sound-based methods of detecting submarines. However, scientists remained wary of cooperating with the government, fearful that military need would come to dominate research priorities. Their worst fear would come true not too long after WWI. Although none of these technological advancements had their roots in the military, all were shaped by military developments and, in turn, became indispensable elements of military might.
Their worst fear would come true not too long after WWI.
World War II produced a drastic change in the way scientists interacted with the military. Smit discusses the highly organized and concentrated effort to mobilize large numbers of scientists for weapons innovation. Although much technical work was accomplished in the traditional way—through contracts with industry and through research and testing in government laboratories and arsenals—the most innovative and essential research and development in World War II occurred via the newly constructed Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). The OSRD contributed to the development of a myriad of new technologies such as radar and the atomic bomb. The OSRD took shape as a powerhouse of scientific and technical talent, and the OSRD’s scientists’ pivotal contribution to the war efforts marked a fundamental shift in the role of science and technology in future military affairs. Consequently, the weapons deployed at the end of the war were significantly different from those that opened it. Many of the new advancements—the atomic bomb, ballistic missiles, jet propulsion, etc.—were invented largely or entirely during the course of the war. This required the mobilization of the full resources of the state, including, of course, its scientific and technological talent.
In the postwar world, the principles of the OSRD are the following: first, instead of conducting research all on its own, the government contracted scientists and engineers to perform some of it; second, instead of inducting them into service, as had been done during World War I, the government left its contractors in place, usually in university research laboratories; third, developments sprang from two different sources: military requests or proposals by the researchers themselves. From basic research through the development of working prototypes, scientists had the freedom to explore every possibility. The OSRD examined proposals from scientists and funded those with merit, and the office also took on problems from military services and sought out researchers and laboratories to work on them. For example, radar, the largest area of wartime research outside the atomic bomb project, was divided into more than 100 separate research undertakings and distributed to laboratories and test centers around the United States. OSRD scientists actually flew combat missions with prototype equipment to test it and bring field results back to the laboratory for further refinement.
From basic research through the development of working prototypes, scientists had the freedom to explore every possibility.
The OSRD as a small, independent branch of government constitutes the brainchild of Vannevar Bush, an inventor and former dean of engineering at MIT. Bush believed that continued government funding for the sciences after the war was vital, to the point that he wrote a report to President Roosevelt titled “Science: The Endless Frontier” which called on the government to perpetuate the wartime experience of OSRD in a national research establishment. By keeping its scientific and technical talent funded and focused on projects of national interest, the OSRD would guarantee the economic and military security of the country. In 1950, this led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) as an alternative civilian source of government money. Nevertheless, the interconnectedness and mutual dependence of science and technology and the military has remained powerful.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Armed Forces—the Army, Navy, and Air Force—independently institutionalized the scientific and technical assistance that had proved so critical in World War II. The Armed Forces empaneled their own technical consultants, such as the Scientific Advisory Board of the Air Force; created or continued their own research laboratories, such as the Naval Research Laboratory; and supported research arms at universities around the country, such as the Army's Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. The world wars may have been wars of industrial production, but the dramatic weapons innovations of the latter conflict, culminating in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, led many to believe that quality would displace quantity as the determinant of victory in the future. The developments flowing from organizations that were created due to the wars resulted in new weapons that succeeded each other in the nation's arsenal at a rate never witnessed in peacetime.
Military funding of science and technology caused a shift in direction toward applied research and inevitably affected the focus of basic science. However, military funding has also dramatically expanded opportunities for research without seriously undermining the autonomy and independence of scientists. Furthermore, the U.S. defense establishment touts the civilian benefits of military research: everything from Velcro to the Internet. Nevertheless, democratic politics and demands for transparency should be utilized to rein in the reckless proliferation of weapons and contain rampant militarism. With that in mind, President Eisenhower proclaimed the Atoms for Peace program to assure the world that the United States would not use atomic knowledge for global military conquest. While it is important to be critical of militarism and its inadvertent influence on civilian technology, it would be naive to think that the two entities could ever be independent of each other, especially because of the ancient alliance between science, technology, and war.
Dhatri Badri is a GW Scope staff writer for the George Washington Undergraduate Review. She is a junior majoring in Biology with a concentration in Cell and Molecular Biology and is minoring in Bioinformatics and STEM Teaching. She is currently working for the Crandall lab in the Computational Biology department. Her most recent research project involved finding potential epitopes sites in the COVID-19 spike protein. When she is not busy in the lab, she loves giving back to the community with her sisters from Epsilon Sigma Alpha.
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