McBride W.M. Technological change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945

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a military presumptive anomaly, the ultimate audit is war. In peacetime,

quantitative evaluation typically occurs in war games and operational

exercises. Robert L. O’Connell argued that late-nineteenth-century war

games at the Naval War College were self-referencing and stacked to favor

the battleship status quo. An operational exercise or ﬂeet exercise, akin to

a ﬁeld experiment, often had similar biases built in.

Experimental rigor

was lacking during most of the interwar ﬂeet exercises, which led to results

based on selective data or arbitrary assessments of damage. This certainly

seemed the case in my own experience with the supercarrier Enterprise

during the mid-1970s.

In the military arts, a presumptive anomaly has usually required a

wartime framework to demonstrate its value. This is due to technological

momentum, technological trajectory, and inherent paradigmatic inertia.

During the late 1930s, there was increasing professional awareness of the

presumptive anomaly posed by naval aviation. However, the shift to an avi-

ation-based technological paradigm required clear demonstrations of naval

aviation’s superiority in combat during World War II.

In addition to technological paradigms, technological change has also

been analyzed within social constructivist, system, and network models.

During a recent seminar on the history of technology, my students mini-

mized the conceptual and semantic differences of these approaches. In

contrast to my students, I prefer to echo Calvin Coolidge’s last will and tes-

tament. I remain “mindful” of these frameworks, their contributions to the

history of technology, and their applicability to this study.

Social constructivists, such as Wiebe Bijker, have been interested in the

artifacts that social groups both identify with and champion. Social con-

structivists refer to ascendancy of one artifact over its rivals, or “stabiliza-

tion” of a hierarchy of artifacts, as “closure.” This results in relative social

tranquility regarding that area of technology and society. For social con-

structivists, social issues, which tend to be stable rather than revolutionary,

are most important. Bijker’s concept of normal sociotechnology, in which

a dominant group is able “to insist upon its deﬁnition of both problems and

appropriate solutions,” is especially resonant with the naval profession.

The systems approach, typiﬁed by the work of Thomas Hughes, relates

technology to “social, economic, political and scientiﬁc factors.” Techno-

logical innovators juggle various problems relating to these factors as they

build a functioning technological system.

For system builders, social

values are variable but no more important than other factors. Network pro-

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234

ponents, such as Michel Callon and John Law, perceive the “stability and

form of artifacts” as “a function of the interaction of heterogeneous ele-

ments as these are shaped and assimilated into a network.” Unlike the sys-

tems approach, network advocates emphasize conﬂict.

An analysis of the history of U.S. naval technology since the Civil War

indicates periods during which each of these models, as well as “soft” tech-

nological determinism based in military utility, has been more valid. The

ascension of steam propulsion beginning during the Civil War, the re-

placement of turboelectric propulsion by gear reduction during the 1930s,

and the aircraft carrier’s suppression of the battleship all typify technolo-

gies that overcame the social forces trying to shape them. Conversely, the

development and adoption of the turboelectric drive embodies the power

of contextual, or social forces, to shape technology. Additional examples

can be found in the case of the interwar submarine, forced to serve guerre

d’escadre, the airplane and its service to the battleship technological para-

digm, and the postwar suppression of cruise missiles.

In a technology-based society such as the navy, new technologies have

often been trouble. As Merritt Roe Smith observed, “No matter how in-

nocuous new technologies seem to be, they challenge old values.”

Inno-

vation leads to questioning of the social, professional, and technological

status quo and may pose a valid anomaly that threatens the dominant the-

oretical paradigm. To preserve “normal sociotechnics,” to borrow from

Bijker, technological innovation must be strictly controlled.

This can be

as simple as ignoring new technologies. This was easier for the naval pro-

fession before World War II since most naval technologies, such as turbo-

electric propulsion, were developed in the private sector. Their incorpora-

tion into the navy was subject to paradigm-based ﬁlters.

Retarding or managing technological innovation often involved control

of “engineer-sociologists” within the navy, those engineers capable of up-

setting the technology-based status quo.

The long, post–Civil War cam-

paign by the line to control naval engineers culminated in the facade of

the warrior-engineer amalgamated line in 1899. The warrior-engineer be-

came more of a reality with the accession of a younger generation of ofﬁ-

cers to the middle ranks of the profession prior to World War I.

For a competitive technological society such as the navy, repression of

a new technology is a path fraught with hazards if an anomalous technol-

ogy is not adopted or co-opted and ﬁnds sponsors elsewhere. Co-optation

of new technology can be part of the “barrier” Howard Margolis based in

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235

the “habits of mind.” This is akin to the “sociotechnical ensemble”which

supports Bijker’s “obdurate boundary artifact”—a perfect characterization

of the battleship—and also the trajectories related to technological para-

digms.

These concepts are relevant to the introduction and evolution of the air-

plane and submarine in the early twentieth century. “Normal” practition-

ers of the battleship technological paradigm viewed aviation as a technol-

ogy that supported, rather than challenged, the battleship. In fact, the

number one acquisition priority of the staff of the chief of naval operations

in 1920 was aircraft carriers. In keeping with the battleship thought style,

airplanes were “a new form of projectile.”

The limited capabilities of

emergent 1920s aviation technology supported this commensurate view of

aviation. This occurred despite the claims of air power advocates, such as

Billy Mitchell, who advocated a new national strategic paradigm based on

military aircraft.

Although aviation technology advanced during the early 1930s, its pro-

ponents were unable to pose a viable presumptive anomaly to challenge

the existing battleship paradigm. By the mid-1930s, naval aviators formed a

strong thought collective within the naval profession. Nevertheless, they

were an entrenched but weaker “sociotechnical frame”—to use Bijker’s

term. Bijker correctly observed that arguments carry “little weight” in other

sociotechnical frames, and this was largely true in many respects for the

mainstream interaction between aviation and battleship ofﬁcers.

Merritt Roe Smith maintained that “a review of the relevant historical

literature” suggested that “technical creativity” within the military is de-

pendent upon “able personnel and institutional ﬂexibility, coupled with an

infectious enthusiasm for technological change.”

In the navy, untram-

meled enthusiasm for technological change has been rare. Battleship ad-

vocates were not ﬂexible—nor did they need to be as long as the battleship

technological paradigm was truly preeminent within the international

naval framework.

In contrast to aviators, interwar submarine ofﬁcers were not agitated by

externalist arguments similar to Mitchell’s for aviation. Submariners’ pro-

fessional survival lay within the battleship paradigm. The development of

the “ﬂeet” submarine in the interwar years reﬂected its subordinate role

within the technical hierarchy of the battle ﬂeet and the strategy of guerre

d’escadre. It also bore the imprint of the technological trajectory and mo-

mentum of the battleship technological paradigm. Ironically, the com-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

236

mencement of hostilities in the Paciﬁc in December 1941 resulted in ﬂeet

submarines being used in the strategy of guerre de course, resurrected as

the secondary task-oriented U.S. naval strategic mission in 1940.

Other people’s wars have been touchstones for modern military profes-

sionals. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 provided ammunition for com-

peting reﬁnements of the battleship paradigm. Later, the European War

between September 1939 and December 1941 provided the U.S. naval pro-

fession with empirical reinforcement of the battleship technological para-

digm. Britain’s pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941

dovetailed well with the belief that lesser technologies located and even

harassed enemy battleships. The coup de grace could only occur in a

battleship versus battleship slugfest. Apparent anomalies, such as the

British torpedo bomber attack on Italian battleships in Taranto Harbor in

1940, were dismissed by ethnic prejudice.

It was little wonder that the disastrous fate of the battleship force at Pearl

Harbor in December 1941 provoked such angst among most American

naval ofﬁcers. War, in the form of attacking Japanese naval aircraft, seemed

to many to be a ruthless agent of natural selection. The Pearl Harbor attack

shook the battleship technological paradigm by dramatically destroying

much of its technological foundation.

Popular culture holds Pearl Harbor as the demarcation between the old

battleship navy and the new, aviation-based navy. However, the beginning

of a paradigmatic shift cannot be placed earlier than July 1943, when Ad-

miral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations and commander-in-chief,

U.S. Fleet, canceled the Montana-class superbattleships. The industrial

and material resources they required could no longer be justiﬁed. Never-

theless, King’s action only occurred in the wake of the assessment that com-

pletion of four of the Iowa-class battleships would provide sufﬁcient fast

battleships to ensure victory.

During World War II, the fast aircraft carrier, developed at the end of

the 1930s, joined with the post-1937 fast battleships to dominate three-

dimensional naval warfare—above, on, and under the sea. One must re-

member that the extremely capable carrier task forces ﬁelded by the navy

during the war were ineffective at night and in bad weather. This was not

true for the battleship. The fast task force of battleship and carriers was an

interim step in the transition to the postwar naval aviation technological

paradigm capable of day and night combat operations and domination of

war at sea.

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237

World War II provided the venue for naval aviation to prove the superi-

ority of the aircraft carrier over the battleship. As Rear Admiral Fiske pre-

dicted in 1917, naval aviation could concentrate “mechanical power” at a

greater distance than the battleship.

Carrier aircraft also successfully

countered the submarine, something the battleship never did. The ascen-

sion of the aircraft carrier technological paradigm after World War II re-

ordered the naval profession. As a result, supporters of the naval aviation

technological paradigm—not all aviators—have dominated the naval pro-

fession for much of the past ﬁfty years.

“History Is Bunk”

Post-1945 American naval strategy has focused on conventional (non-

nuclear) war at sea, which maintains sea control in order to project power

ashore. The aircraft carrier dominated this version of naval warfare in the

same way the battleship ruled naval warfare before World War II. Like the

battleship ofﬁcers in the late 1930s, the naval aviators of the 1970–80s wist-

fully minimized the vulnerability of the modern supercarrier. Neverthe-

less, that vulnerability was rooted in the increased capabilities of nuclear-

powered submarines. The great difﬁculty in detecting and countering

them was a technological discontinuity of the cold war. Carrier aviators

minimized the submarine and considered the submarine problem solved

by strike-at-source operations. This echoed the post–World War I opinion

of Sims and many of his colleagues that the submarine was no longer a

threat thanks to the tactics and acoustic detection devices developed dur-

ing World War I.

The naval aviation technological paradigm remained unchallenged un-

til the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Then, senior military ofﬁcers, faced with a

sophisticated and difﬁcult air defense system within Iraq, decided to em-

ploy cruise missiles. This decision was critical in demonstrating and quan-

tifying the cruise missile presumptive anomaly—a technology carried by

surface ships and submarines controlled by nonaviators. The selection of

cruise missiles again in 1993, 1995, 1998, and 1999 has marked the crum-

bling of a signiﬁcant Margolian intellectual barrier among national secu-

rity ofﬁcials. Henry Kissinger’s earlier query amid international crises,

“Where are the carriers?” has been replaced by “Where are the cruise mis-

sile ships?” This shift has enfranchised SLCM-equipped surface ships and

Technological Change and the United States Navy

238

submarines and empowered their ofﬁcer-operators within the naval pro-

fession.

The mid-1992 reorganization of the ofﬁce of the chief of naval opera-

tions weakened the institutional status quo that supported the aviation

technological paradigm. The technology-speciﬁc deputy chiefs of naval op-

erations—the DCNOs for air, surface, and submarine warfare—ceased to

exist. According to former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ad-

miral William A. Owens (a submariner), the change occurred because of

the “awareness that if the Navy was going to go beyond the rhetoric of

change and actually incorporate the tenets of its new operational concept

into the size and structure of naval forces, the inﬂuence of those institu-

tions within the staff that had become the bastions of the older Maritime

Strategy had to be altered.”

Since 1992, the principal ofﬁcers of each tech-

nology-deﬁned warfare specialty (aviation, surface ships, and submarines)

now report to the vice admiral serving as deputy chief of staff for resources,

warfare requirements, and assessments (in staff terms, “N8”). Admiral

Owens, the ﬁrst N8, was optimistic about the ability to engender change.

Nevertheless, change can only occur if the admiral serving as N8, and the

N8 bureaucracy, is able to escape the inﬂuence and intellectual bound-

aries of past thought styles.

A subtle indication of paradigmatic uncertainty and a move toward the

ﬂexible “three-plane” navy Admiral William Fullam advocated in 1924 can

be found in the navy’s recent rhetoric. In 1997 the naval hierarchy started

talking about minimizing the importance of individual technologies (air-

craft carriers, cruisers, aircraft, or submarines)—termed “platform centric

warfare”—in favor of technologically diverse “network centric warfare.”

For the naval profession, in many ways, past is prologue. Just as World

War II was necessary for a paradigm shift from the battleship, the Persian

Gulf War provided a catalyst for a shift away from singular emphasis on the

aircraft carrier. The end of the 1990s was also much like the end of the

1930s, replete with a shifting strategic focus and a viable presumptive anom-

aly pressuring the navy’s dominant technological paradigm. In 1937 Admi-

ral William D. Leahy, chief of naval operations and battleship sailor, char-

acterized the battleship as “the backbone of naval power.”

Sixty years

later, Admiral Jay L. Johnson, chief of naval operations and ﬁghter pilot,

adamantly defended the “obvious” relevance of the aircraft carrier and its

role as “the right ship for the second half of the 21

Century.”

Such com-

ments are the late-term afﬁrmations of ancien regimes struggling to con-

Castles of Steel

239

trol technological change. Admiral Leahy’s opinion was overtaken by the

dynamics of World War II. Admiral Johnson’s prediction may well fall vic-

tim to the legacy of the Persian Gulf War, to the unacceptable political fall-

out from losing aircrews while projecting naval power ashore in operations

short of large-scale war, to the presumptive anomalies posed by new tech-

nologies, to an increasing political consensus that the aircraft carrier has

had its day, or to a genuine movement toward “network centric” warfare

with a deemphasis on the aircraft carrier.

American naval capabilities have come a long way since 1804, when

Commodore Edward Preble borrowed six gunboats and two bomb ketches

from the Neapolitan government to lob a few rounds into the walled

fortress at Tripoli.

The questions the American naval profession must an-

swer in the year 2000 are similar to those it faced in 1900: What type of navy

does the United States require? What is the proper measure of naval power?

What is the nature of war at sea? What is heroism and who is a warrior in

a modern, high-technology navy? How, and to what extent, can techno-

logical change be controlled? The answer to each of these questions has

been linked inextricably to the navy’s technological paradigms.

The intellectual, social, military, and political dynamics surrounding

these questions during the battleship era were complex. The dynamics of

twenty-ﬁrst-century American naval power will be just as convoluted and

bedeviling. However, a better understanding of the battleship era is in-

structive in the dynamics of technology selection, in general, and the spe-

ciﬁc decisions being made for the future of the U.S. Navy and the nation

it serves.

This study cautions against the use of social constructivism or techno-

logical determinism as monolithic explanatory frameworks for technolog-

ical change. Perhaps most important, this work illustrates an essential as-

pect of the nature of technological innovation and the evolution of the

modern military arts. Although this study focuses on the battleship, it is ap-

plicable to the postwar navy and, as a theoretical model, to other military

services.

I. B. Holley concluded his 1953 seminal study, Ideas and Weapons, by

observing that “to exist in a warring world the nation must pick winning

weapons; if military analysts will distill every possible lesson from the his-

tory of two world wars such weapons will be easier to ﬁnd and the odds on

national survival will go up.”

Holley assumed that senior military ofﬁcers

are receptive to potentially destabilizing intellectual analyses. The irony is

Technological Change and the United States Navy

240

that the modern U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force cultivate intellectual growth

within their ofﬁcer corps, especially in history, more than the U.S. Navy.

Yet the army and air force seem more restrictive in their internal dialectics.

The U.S. Navy has tolerated broad debate within its ofﬁcer corps, yet today

does little to encourage historical thinking.

Almost ﬁfty years after Hol-

ley, it seems a broad spectrum of dynamics—from thought styles and pro-

fessional rivalry to the defense of the dominant technological paradigm

from competing technologies—have clouded naval perceptions of which

technology is a “winner.”

A century after the heyday of its historical prophet, Alfred Thayer Ma-

han, the American naval profession, always technically oriented, has be-

come increasingly a technocracy in which historical analysis has been

pushed to the far periphery. Chief of Naval Operations Johnson has stated

repeatedly that the navy cannot steer by its wake into the next century. One

can compare Johnson’s pronouncement with the progressivism of auto-

mobile pioneer Charles Kettering, who often said, “You never get any-

where looking in your rearview mirror.” Kettering, however, was a techno-

logical innovator, not the guardian of an established technological

paradigm. Many ofﬁcers of the modern naval profession confuse technical

competence with an understanding of technology, embodying Henry

Ford’s dictum “history is bunk.” Modern naval leaders routinely tout

“thinking outside the box,” but the absence of historical understanding

of the dynamics of technology and change merely reinforces their self-

referential thinking and their allegiance to their current castles of steel.

During the twenty-ﬁrst century many developing countries will acquire

sophisticated weapons. They will be least able to afford them and most

likely to use them in conﬂicts exacerbated by their hypernationalism. The

U.S. Navy will often be involved either as peacekeeper or enforcer, oper-

ating “from the sea.” If the American naval profession refuses to pay atten-

tion to its wake—as any competent deck ofﬁcer does—its members may

ﬁnd the U.S. Navy steaming full circle, like the doomed battleship Bis-

marck, and falling victim to someone else’s ability to perceive and exploit

an effective presumptive anomaly.

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241

Notes

Introduction

1. When surprised by a superior Japanese force of battleships and cruisers dur-

ing the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Rear Admiral C. A. F. Sprague ordered his escorting

destroyers and destroyer escorts to attack. The Japanese sank two destroyers and

one destroyer escort, and 526 American destroyer sailors died before noon. See

Theodore Roscoe, United States Destroyer Operations in World War II (Annapolis:

Naval Institute Press, 1953), chap. 33.

2. British admiral’s quote from Robert L. O’Connell, Sacred Vessels: The Cult

of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,

1991), 149.

3. “2. Of a discarded type; out of date; an obsolete battleship.” The American Col-

lege Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1965), 837.

4. H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagina-

tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

5. Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New

York: The Free Press, 1989). Conversely, a solid attempt to escape technological

determinism and to address the social, intellectual, and institutional context of the

evolution of war and strategic thought is Tools of War: Instruments, Ideas, and In-

stitutions of Warfare, 1445–1871, ed. John A. Lynn (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1990). Lynn’s volume ends at 1871, prior to the explosion of scientiﬁc engi-

neering, the rapid increase in military-industrial relations, and the creation of the

modern command economies described by William H. McNeill in The Pursuit of

Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1982). A technologically determinist treatment of naval history is

Karl Lautenschlager, “Technology and the Evolution of Naval Warfare,” in Naval

Strategy and National Security, ed. Steven E. Miller and Stephen Van Evera