Air University Review, January-February 1969
Human activities seldom slow their advance upon mankind to give observers time to prepare mentally to receive change. It frequently takes considerable time for man to realize that new fields of action have opened up for him and much longer for him to assess meanings and reach a conclusion regarding his attitudes toward the new phenomena. For this reason the discovery of a new technology, the birth of a scientific breakthrough, the exploration of an uncharted technical frontier—such seemingly abrupt expansions of man’s horizons are frequently accompanied by hesitation and at least a few false starts toward rationalizing the new situation or capitalizing on the new opportunities.
The rise of European nationalism out of the disorder of the Middle Ages, the discovery of the New World, the Industrial Revolution, the harnessing of electricity and the internal-combustion engine, and the control of atomic energy have all worked fundamental changes in the lives of great populations. Many men marked the events which signaled the dawn of the great movements which followed, and some debated their significance. But few were wholly aware of the vast implications of what was unfolding before their eyes—the dramatic implications of a technological breakthrough or a new discovery.
Today the world is caught up in a dynamic Scientific Revolution. The atom has been identified, captured, and put to man’s use. We have taken significant steps into outer space. The sciences of light and energy are finding new outlets in the laser, spectral photography, and diverse forms of radar. Electronic and computer sciences are revolutionizing business, education, communications, and engineering. A problem that only a generation ago required ten years for seventy skilled mathematicians to solve on calculators can now be performed by a computer, with greater accuracy, in less than an hour.
In terms of measuring progress, the decade has replaced the century. Whole “ages” are spanned in a single lifetime, and as a result scientific milestones are crowding closer together. Advances overlap, and the cascade effect of all this forward motion fosters still another consequence of the contemporary Scientific Revolution—the growing interdependence between the scientific and technical fraternities throughout the world.
Many Americans, living in an isolated and lethargic world of “status-quo-ism,” still believe that there is nothing new in the world anymore, that all the adventure is gone, that pioneering has all been done. As the articles by personnel of the Air Force Systems Command in this issue of the Air University Review demonstrate, we can still dream future adventures in space, challenges in aeronautics, opportunities in engineering, and new experiences in laboratories. Yesterday’s science fiction can be translated into today’s scientific reality and tomorrow’s scientific promise.
We in the Air Force Systems Command deal with technological accomplishment for the future, whether that future be ten seconds away, ten months away, or ten years away. In our focus on the future, we recognize no limits to the quickening march of human accomplishment and scientific adventurism. Human knowledge doubles every decade, and with this surge of knowledge comes dramatic opportunity for technological accomplishment. Just as surely as ignorance is the enemy of progress, so knowledge is power—power for good, or power for evil. Man’s competence in applying the full resources of modern technology may well determine human destiny.
No one in the Systems Command who is engaged in managing military technology can accept the concept of an intellectual or creative stalemate. There will always be a crying need for new ideas, for creativity, for intellectual breakthroughs and quantum jumps in our laboratories and on our drawing boards. It is the creative mind that moves ahead, that departs from the traditional ways of doing things, that uses science as a springboard to new horizons of opportunity. For us in the Air Force Systems Command, there is no technological peace or scientific security. Our continuing emphasis on managerial competence, improved technical facilities, the growing percentage of our military and civilian personnel with advanced academic training and technical skills--all testify to a restless and forward-looking spirit that is a prerequisite to national progress.
In 1933, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that “the time span of important change today is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions.” Professor Whitehead’s counsel was fair warning that a new standard had been imposed on our society. Change became a virtue, not a taboo; something to be sought, not avoided. Change has become the one constant in today’s society; and the most obvious aspects of contemporary life are the rapidity of change and the power that technology gives us over our life, our environment, and our future.
In this constantly changing world, the Air Force employs the tools of continually advancing technologies to become participants, not merely observers. The exciting challenges of tomorrow’s aerospace technology provide the Air Force with opportunities for our collective imaginations to look up and out into new worlds of aeronautics, electronics, space, propulsion, avionics, bioastronautics, materials, and weaponry. Our goal is an Air Force technology that moves forward in partnership with the civilian economy—not in fits and starts, but in orderly progressive fashion—always equal to any situation, always technologically responsive to any operational need or policy requirement.
In our day-to-day preoccupation with the details of funding, manpower and organization, systems management, weapons testing, and cost effectiveness, the Air Force must never lose sight of the creative process of scientific change—the need for a new useful idea. We will always need the thinking man who asks meaningful questions and seeks the uncommon solution in his areas of interest.
Professor Henry A. Kissinger, in his book The Necessity of Choice, underlines this point when he writes: “Creativity invariably involves doing the unfamiliar. It requires a willingness to leave behind what is generally understood. Our generation, it is clear, will live in the midst of change. Our ‘norm’ is the fact of upheaval.”
There are still many questions to be asked, new breakthroughs to be made, new dimensions for human progress to be achieved. From the expanding technology in Air Force laboratories, test facilities, and development centers and from our civilian associates in the nation’s universities, industrial plants, and research institutes must come the ideas of tomorrow, the technological advancements to insure our nation’s freedoms-freedom to grow and to be more creative--freedom to explore our universe--freedom to solve our social and economic problems and secure political understanding between the free nations of the world.
The science-industry-military-civilian team of the Air Force Systems Command has been given the prideful responsibility of providing operational Air Force commands with qualitatively superior weapons. Meaningful discharge of this responsibility can stimulate a great renascence of human creativity throughout all the known fields of technology and, indeed, can create new sciences along the way. It is a challenging opportunity for all Americans to use our democratic freedoms to plan and build a better, wiser civilization. The scientific ideas of today can determine the well-being in which man as an intelligent and conscious individual will be free to grow tomorrow, to learn and to apply new knowledge, to express himself creatively with self-respect and human dignity.
To be sure, every technical step forward opens the doors on new technological possibilities, to be used for us or against us. The discovery of gunpowder might be cited as a classic example of this observation. But there is no reason to fear an encounter with these new insecurities, to hesitate to depart from the unfamiliar. We must have confidence in the capacity of our vast natural resources to face up to problems and thereby turn stumbling blocks into stepping-stones, and convert millstones into milestones.
Ideas are the weapons with which the nation must wage its technological war in the cause of human progress. Americans have never been afraid to “dream the impossible dream” or try to “reach the unreachable stars.” We have often succeeded far beyond our expectations; and we have failed only when we lacked boldness of spirit or inspired purpose.
Our national thinking need not be limited by three-dimensional natural barriers. We need not be inhibited by traditional concepts, by textbook approaches, by orthodox methods, or by conventional ways of doing things. We must accept the challenge of the unknown with the confidence gained throughout a history of meeting and overcoming technological obstacles on land, on sea, and in the air. We see new limits or even a limitlessness of man’s intellectual capacity to grow.
The Air Force Systems Command issues an urgent challenge to the uncommon genius of man everywhere—Wanted: New Ideas.
Hq Air Force Systems Command
General James Ferguson is Commander, Air Force Systems Command, and Director, Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program. Commissioned from flying cadet in 1937, he organized the 405th Fighter-Bomber Group in 1943 and took it to the European Theater. He was Assistant Chief of Staff, 9th Fighter Command, during the Normandy invasion and its Chief of Staff when the war ended in Europe. He then served briefly with the 5th Fighter Command in the Philippines and Okinawa. Other assignments have been as instructor in tactical air operations, Air Command and Staff School; Chief of Staff, American Mission for Aid to Turkey; Assistant Deputy for Operations, Far East Air Forces; Vice Commander, Fifth Air Force; Deputy commander, Ninth Air Force, TAC; Director of Requirements, DCS/D, Hq USAF; Vice Commander, Air Research and Development Command; and Deputy Chief of Staff, Research and Development, Hq USAF, from 1961 until his present assignment in 1966.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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