Air University Review, September-October 1986

In Search of the Unicorn:
Military Innovation and the
American Temperament

Dr. Donald J. Mrozek

General Joseph W. Stilwell wrote his description of our nation's capital soon after his arrival in Washington in December 1941. But Stilwell might just as well have sought the mythical unicorn in some fabled mist or magical wood as seek silence, clarity, and order in American institutions. Simple lines of authority have always had attraction for those Americans most likely to control them; however, in other quarters, the virtues of a "checks and balances" system have usually held sway. Thus, even allowing for the special confusion after Pearl Harbor and for "Vinegar Joe's" acid tongue, his portrayal of wartime Washington was sadly true.

Even more troubling, some would say that the confusion which Stilwell observed was inevitable and that nothing has changed since he pronounced his judgment on the War Department's "ants"––at least nothing sufficient to remedy the underlying problems. The gist of Stilwell's view would have applied to three centuries of experience before World War II as well as to the four decades after it.

The hyperactive disarray that troubled Stilwell was not new. The American military has typically had trouble focusing on action and operational goals early in wartime, largely because these concerns are merely theoretical in peacetime. When a war is not under way, military officers and civilian defense officials have traditionally been absorbed in arguing over assets and command responsibilities. The motivation for these debates has been more than greed or pursuit of power but, more important, an effort to find order and coherence. But, perhaps inevitably, the results favored institutional stability (or, pejoratively, inertia) and sharpened skepticism about prospects for organizational innovation. Although sometimes reformers could overhaul institutions meaningfully, any new arrangements exerted dogmatic force once they were in place, and military and civilian constituencies benefiting from them rallied to ensure their permanence.

At the same time, the military's special place in American society and culture has constrained its capacity to innovate, whether in technology, strategy and tactics, or organization. The military's instinct for order and its bias toward scientific predictability have reflected the traditions and concerns generic among military professionals irrespective of national origin. But in the American context these inclinations have often been frustrated––victims of the society's complexity, of a seeming incoherence born of pragmatism, and of experimentalist opportunism. In this sense, the American military's experience with technological, doctrinal, and organizational innovation has inevitably been a story of tension and conflict, pitting the supposedly "absolute" concerns of the military professional against the clearly "relative" and specific characteristics of American society and culture.

Special Demands on
a Special Institution

The special need for the armed forces to remain as innovative as possible––and at least to be receptive to relevant innovations fathered elsewhere––follows from the special duties of the military establishment. The devastating consequences of a major military failure either in deterrence or in combat have sharpened contemporary awareness of the military's role. Yet this imperative has always existed. Its importance simply has become easier for laymen and professionals to see during the past half-century of rapid technological change. In an exact sense, then, the dilemmas of adaptation and innovation do not originate in technology. Rather, they come from organizational ethos.

Although the military's need for innovation has special features, the circumstances needed to encourage an innovative disposition are generic, applying to civilian as well as to military institutions and their personnel. Venture capitalist Don Valentine bluntly named the key ingredient in operating anything big, whether a company or a church or an army. "The key ingredient is obedience," he told an interviewer for Inc. magazine in 1985. "Anything big requires people performing and acting in conventional, predictable ways––within the rules."¹ Yet a key to the innovative and venturesome spirit is the willingness to rewrite the rules. But the "nonconventional person who's going to do it differently" becomes "a flatout pain in the ass" for the guardians of institutional order, hierarchy and deference, and the status quo.²

One feature of large institutions, which has special force within the military, is the pressure for close accounting. This, too, stems from the particular evolution of the American military, the distinctive importance of civilian and congressional oversight over military policy and spending, and the Madisonian view that tension among large institutions is a key to individual freedom. Despite skepticism about defense spending and the many episodes that foster it, the desire for standardized management and detailed accounting threatens innovation more than would an absence of controls. But given the constitutional provision for congressional oversight of military spending, the armed services inevitably live a life of endless institutional accountability. One can hardly imagine a senior officer testifying before a congressional committee without a legislative aide armed with an explanatory justification for every program under his or her authority: a lack of such information might well be taken as proof of incompetence or as dereliction of duty. Yet the hypothetical case of a senior officer who was frankly unaware of certain programs often ostensibly under his authority––and proud of his lack of detailed knowledge––might better exemplify the kind of tolerance in which innovation can thrive. As investor Valentine put it, the accounting mentality "is to control things, to homogenize things. That's what control is: sameness, predictability."³ But even if uniformity, compliance, accountability, and predictability are the essence of control, they are nearly the antithesis of innovation. Now, as in the past, the dilemma is to reconcile the prerequisites of military order, with the demands of military progress.

Institutional Reform as
a Problem of Innovation

Innovation in institutional structure––as in doctrine, with which structure is in constant interplay––has drawn on two quite distinct sources. One is the nature of the American political system and of the society as a whole; the other is the course of military thought. and technology. From the outset of the American experience, these two sources have typically been tied to different aspects of civil-military affairs. Some military theorists have emphasized special features of American life, which, in their view, should substantially shape the American military system. Departing from this theme of "American exceptionalism," others have underscored the "objective" conditions of warfare, emphasizing military science over military art. The former long supported the militia concept and the principle of military service as a universal civic duty, while the latter consistently proposed military specialization and professionalism, advocating a smaller but more efficient and capable standing armed force.

Sometimes reduced to the simplicism of "militia versus regular," these opposing forces actually reflected a most basic tension in American political life––its tenuousness, its contingency, its open-endedness. The impassioned arguments over military policy in the Federalist period embodied this tension. For the most part, political leaders recognized a long list of objective military "facts"––affiliation with Federalist or Republican faction made little difference on this score. But what they did not agree on was the nature of the American experiment itself and the proper dimensions of its results. As Richard Kohn has demonstrated in his study of the debate over military policy in the Federalist era, the problem was not ignorance in technical military matters but a difference of vision over the future of America in general and of the nation's civil-military relations in particular.⁴ Determining an "effective" structure hinged on agreement as to the structure's purposes. Failing such agreement, compromise and half-measures were inevitable. Once set in motion, such compromises could themselves be "innovatively" modified only to the extent that some new consensus was generated. To be sure, the forces sufficient to create such a consensus rarely developed and rarely converged.

Still, change was possible, driven by the policies of a new presidential administration or by periodic bipartisan action. Jeffersonian military policy, often vilified by those misinterpreting his gunboat force, clearly diverged from that of John Adams and entailed technical and institutional innovation (such as the idea of a naval militia). But such changes often proved to be scandalously deficient. In other matters, Jeffersonian undertakings were, if anything, "conservative" in the sense that they imitated European developments. The establishment of West Point and the enshrinement of the expert engineer exemplify this bias.⁵

As historical experience has demonstrated, even military catastrophe may fail to bring institutional change. In the aftermath of conflict, Americans adopting a critical stance have argued that the existing structure and doctrine had failed catastrophically. Yet others have looked at the same evidence and come to a different conclusion, basically because they used different standards. After the War of 1812, for example, the Army and its civilian leaders––notably Secretary of War John C. Calhoun––sought to reorganize the armed forces, hoping to capitalize on memories of battlefield defeat and on the humiliation of the burning of Washington.⁶ Calhoun wanted to maintain the skeleton of a large army, retaining a large cadre of officers and a small force of enlisted personnel. Thus, the full skeleton of a wartime army would exist in peacetime, to be "fleshed out" when needed. Meanwhile, it would have ready the expertise that could not be raised overnight, embodied in the officers and in the "leaven" of trained enlisted men. Calhoun regarded such an "expansible army" as a bridge between military professionalism and expert authority on the one hand and democratic equalitarianism and military voluntarism on the other.

How was it possible for Congress to reject the "expansible army"––much to Calhoun's distress––especially so soon after the many failures of the War of 1812? For all the moments of heroism in the conflict, there had been years of confusion spiked with reports of fresh disasters. Clearly, Calhoun had hoped that something like "threat analysis" would fuel the engines of institutional change. Just as clearly, he was wrong. Calhoun's own passion for military reform grew partly from his a priori idea of what an army should look like.⁷ At least some congressmen wanted an armed force that (supposedly) better suited the American democratic character. But there was more. Congress understood America's vital interests as posing fewer objective demands on military forces than if the nation were more deeply committed to involvements overseas: a threat was real only if hostility of some foreign powers toward the United States existed. Yet a simplistic isolationism was not anyone's rationale, as Jefferson's wars against the Barbary pirates were not disputed. But Congress was not about to pay good money to meet threats of low likelihood. Thus, the miseries of the War of 1812 gave no blueprint for military reform because they created no consensus on American interests (and therefore no consensus on how to protect them).

The proponents of a "strong" or "standing" army during the nineteenth century hoped to follow European models––either German or French––to create a disciplined and responsive American military. Approaching the problem of form in this fashion revealed the military theorists' supposition that military knowledge, as a kind of science, was an absolute-pertinent and suitable to all societies. Yet the U.S. political system and American culture more broadly were far more eclectic-shaped by the "checks and balances" of the constitutional system. Calhoun's problems have often been blamed on false popular confidence and the absence of a sense of threat among civilian elected officials. Although true in detail, the assertion is misleading and perhaps irrelevant. The proponents of a "strong" army implicitly meant one along European lines, but they ran headlong against the widespread desire of Americans to create a special and separate way of life.⁸

The costs sustained by the United States during the War of 1812 were great enough to give pause to many thoughtful observers and sufficed to persuade Calhoun. But the events of the war bore another lesson as well––one more subtle but no less influential than the delusion that mere amateurs had won the Battle of New Orleans and redeemed the militia concept. A more basic political relationship had been sustained during the war, even though it had contributed to military failures: in some cases, state governments had reserved control of their militias in order to defy the will of President Madison. In the Federalist papers, Alexander Hamilton had suggested that maintaining state militias and restricting the size of federal forces would permit the state governments to be a "check and balance" on federal power. Tested by Hamilton's defense of the rights of states, the military system had actually performed brilliantly during the War of 1812––precisely because the federal government could not launch expeditions effectively and because President Madison never won control over the militia units near the war zones. The militia was, in a way, the states' army against the federal government.

That this balance among the states and between the states and the federal government survived the War of 1812 is further supported by the novelties to which President James K. Polk resorted in the Mexican War, such as the fiction of "group volunteering" under which state militia units actually mobilized under presidential authority without forcing Polk to invoke constitutional provisions that would have fueled fierce political battles with dissident governors.⁹ Suffice it to say that the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century was neither France nor Prussia. Objectively, this was simply a fact. Subjectively, it was a "problem" if one wished matters were otherwise––as Calhoun did while Secretary of War. The reforms that Calhoun sought, as well as the ambitious goals of Dennis Hart Mahan or Emory Upton, presupposed something more like a unitary state than the United States would be for some time to come. Ironically, by the time that nationalist transformation occurred and brought a strong impulse toward institutional reform, the Army itself had become rather set in its ways, reluctant to change, and alienated from civilian institutional innovators. Having fought hard to build something of an Army during the nineteenth century, the service's leaders turned reluctant to risk it by seeking something more.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Army consisted of a set of "component commands" operating parallel to one another and owing only limited obedience to the Commanding General. As senior officer of the service, the Commanding General had an acknowledged right to "preside" and to inspect. (The latter function made the Inspector General one of the few high-ranking officers who were clearly his inferiors.) All other functions of the Army were conducted with what now seems a remarkable degree of autonomy. The various "bureaus," such as Ordnance or Quartermaster, typically ran well. But there was question about how well the bureaus meshed. A Quartermaster officer stationed at a frontier post in the trans-Mississippi West was responsible, above all, to the chief of the Quartermaster Corps back in Washington, not to the commander of the post where he was stationed. In addition, bureau chiefs developed their own political allies in Congress, aided by long tenure and by promotion within the lines of their own bureaus and not across the entire service. Therefore, the coordination that the Army might achieve depended on the sufferance and cooperation of the bureau chiefs. Clearly, this arrangement fell far short of deserving such adjectives as "integrated," "cohesive," "responsive," or "centralized." In fact, given the sharp limits on what he controlled directly and the jealousy with which Secretaries of War guarded access to the President, the Commanding General was perhaps "the least among equals." In one sense, then, the system worked––but not if one expected the Army to respond unquestioningly to orders from on high. Thus, the reforms engineered by Elihu Root actually dealt with issues of authority to control staff and line operations more than with the alleged practical shortcomings so much overstated during the Spanish-American War.¹⁰

The lessons of Army reform during the era of Elihu Root are many, but what one learns depends on what one seeks. Oddly, though, the experiences of the Root years did not quite prove that the Army was incapable of changing itself. Instead, they suggested that the Army was unlikely to perceive the need for change. The Army had settled into institutional forms and traditional ways of behaving that clearly had drawbacks, but at least they existed, were in place, and functioned. For the sake of an uncertain measure of progress, it seemed to some officers that a flawed but operable system was being put needlessly at risk. A brief review of a key scandal that hastened the reform process in the Root era offers illustration.

In general, the alleged inefficiencies and scandals of the Spanish-American War served as a rallying point for those seeking structural reform of the Army; but the specific claims that the army had sent rotten and "embalmed beef" proved particularly heated. Critics asserted that either certain Army officers had conspired in buying rotten meat chemically adulterated to make its taste and smell less offensive or they had been guilty of dereliction of duty in failing to oversee the purchases with sufficient diligence. In fact, allegations of "sweetheart deals" between Army officers and packing houses were unfair and inaccurate. They also ignored the fact that chemical adulteration of canned meat products was commonplace and that formaldehyde was a preservative of choice. In the era before the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Army might very well buy "embalmed beef," but it was only about as likely to do so as any other volume buyer. Nevertheless, the charges tended to stick even when the evidence fell far short of the mark. High-ranking Army officers, including Generals Stephen Young and Nelson Miles (who were to be early "beneficiaries" of the Root reforms as Chiefs of Staff), defended their service's operations, felt maligned, and thought the idea of fundamental transformation of the Army debased by the false charges that they had suffered.¹¹

What the Army missed, after all, was the underlying real reason why some civilians agitated so persistently for reform. It was not really the "embalmed beef" as much as it was the changing role and responsibility of the United States in the world. The United States was increasingly likely to be involved in overseas activity and in occasional expeditions in foreign lands.¹² As Graham Cosmas has noted, Root (and Theodore Roosevelt) wanted not only a functioning army but an "army for empire." To overstate slightly for the sake of contrast, the uniformed leaders of the Army were interested in what the Army was and how it was managed; Root and Roosevelt were far more interested in what the Army could do. Put in later terms, it was a conflict between traditional management and aggressive leadership.

In a legal sense, whether the Army could be changed was settled with the passage of the Root reforms in 1903. But the notorious resistance of Adjutant General Fred Ainsworth to the implementation of the law showed that bureaucratic stonewalling could not be prevented by law alone. The case is an ambivalent one. Ainsworth cared deeply about the future of the Army and its ability to serve the nation. But he cared so much that he could not compromise with a system that he considered suspect. Nor were the Chief of Staff and Secretary of War seeking compromise. Simplicity, clear control, centralization of authority––these were the objectives. Not the first time that the quest for decisiveness and direction ran counter to vested interest and the tradition of dissent, the Ainsworth affair would have many successors as well.¹³

Tellingly, innovation came most promptly when it took an entirely new institutional form instead of seeking to recompose and redirect old ones. Even as the Chief of Staff and the Adjutant General fell into a long war, the Army and the Navy entered into close cooperation in the Joint Board with stunning speed. Under its secretary, Admiral George Dewey, the board sought a single vision of national strategy in which the services maintained separate but consistent roles. The essence of this accommodation was developed in little more than a year. Swiftly as this arrangement was made, however, it left little room for an air service; and a herald of innovation soon became a bastion of the status quo. To seek reform exclusively through existing institutional arms was to court intense resistance. Meanwhile, seeking reform by developing new institutional units increased chances for prompt change, but it also created new layers of vested interest and new sources of inertia.

The difficulties that proponents of air power encountered in seeking institutional change and coequal status for an air service illustrate the point. The Army and Navy had finally concluded tortuous processes of change and had even established a working interservice relationship. To upset these arrangements so soon after their creation was to ask too much of mere human beings. Faced by military theorists whose claims depended largely on technologies not yet developed, the Army and Navy tended to explain away the occasional challenges of the airmen, seeking to control circumstances rather than change in accordance with them.

What the Root reforms did was to establish a structure, a model, a paradigm of "proper" and "efficient" military organization. But a paradigm is both a tool and a barrier. As Thomas Kuhn has suggested, a paradigm provides a framework of understanding the overwhelming bulk of what is known when the paradigm itself is articulated; at the same time, it allows for new developments and discoveries. Among the new findings and behaviors, however, are anomalies that cannot be explained by the paradigm which facilitated their discovery. Only when the psychic and practical burden of explaining away all the anomalies exceeds the psychic and practical challenge of dismissing the entire paradigm does a new conceptual breakthrough become possible; and only then does a new paradigm emerge.¹⁴

In a similar fashion, the most up-to-date scheme of military organization begins its rapid slide into obsolescence as soon as it is accepted. The culprit is not bad faith but the resilience of the paradigm already in place. Thus, after World War I, the priority of ensuring cooperation between the Army and the Navy led to a conservative view that military air forces required gradual, cautious development. In part, this conclusion would prevent unproven technological claims for exerting undue control on present strategy. But it also meant that the demands of the airmen would not outstrip the institutional needs of the ground and sea officers. The Army and Navy set limits on who could develop torpedo bombs and to what level, lest the flyers from the ground service have a "naval" weapon. So, too, limits on aircraft range appeared, lest the ground service's air arm have too much influence in the air space over water. These decisions were not mere acts of foolishness, although they have been often dismissed as such; nor were they mere acts of petulance. Rather, they were efforts to preserve the old paradigm.¹⁵

The reorganization after World War II richly illustrates the difficulty in making fundamental changes within the existing bureaucracy and in radically cutting the roles and missions of institutions already in existence. As a corollary, it shows the strength of the American tendency to reform by adding rather than dismantling institutional components. Stripped of its nuances, the Truman administration's plan for defense reorganization aimed at a single military service, unified and simplified, in which strategic priority was given to a strategic nuclear force administered principally by air officers. Duplication and redundancy were the avowed enemy of proper military organization. The centralizing clarity that Truman sought is made all the more evident by the counterclaims of the Navy, which opposed the President and called instead for "coordination" among quasi-autonomous services. Even so, no service could admit that it rejected the principle of simplicity, nor could any espouse duplication as a desirable course for the nation and its military. But reality plays tricks with rhetoric. The Navy developed nuclear-capable aircraft for its flush-deck carriers, defending them as "long-range artillery" rather than a nuclear strategic force. Its quest for missile-carrying submarines began in earnest. Soon, the Army experimented with field use of tactical nuclear weapons; and, soon after that, it was well along in an impressive program of missile development. The guardians of these programs later admitted their pride in defending technologically innovative programs against their superiors, and they won much applause for building weapons that became important elements in the U.S. force structure. On the other hand, seen structurally, they were being praised for subverting central authority. They had taken a lesson from Fred Ainsworth and gone him one better; they survived and prevailed.¹⁶

Curiously, the external Soviet threat that was expected to justify a large standing military proved insufficient to make the military services defer to a centralized organizational scheme when their own vested interests and strategic visions were put at risk. The threat from one's own sister services was a clear and most "present" danger in another ring of the Pentagon. The solution to the reorganizational dilemma, then, arose in response to U.S. bureaucratic needs rather than global operational demands. So, too, the "unification" desired by Truman took the two services of the pre-World War II era and made them three––or even four, if one allowed for legislative riders ensuring the Marines.

The Soviet threat did serve as a useful means for explaining away the failure to develop a unified military system in the United States. Each service had its own reason for seeking autonomy––often through the development of a distinct nuclear capability. But the final excuse for keeping all these "in-house" forces was the growth of Soviet military power. Thus, the world situation and growing Soviet ability to hit selected U.S. targets took redundancy and blessed it as the strategic triad. Indeed, the triad is a splendid example of the traditional American love of "checks and balances," lest any one force or faction gain too much power. But it would have been politically inept to admit wanting a nuclear force because another service had one, especially while the Soviet Union provided such a ready justification to keep one's eggs in more than one basket. Thus, redundancy became a virtue, even though it has been vigorously opposed by both Democratic and Republican presidents for years. What ought to have been an embarrassing demonstration of failure became sudden brilliance, albeit by sleight of hand, when retroactive approval descended on precisely the sort of scheme that had long been seen as the path to military inefficiency and strategic bankruptcy.

Things Versus Ideas:
Management Versus Operations

Americans often seem to have had greater success in making new military hardware than in organizing military manpower or developing coherent command arrangements and strategy. This characteristic appears to run parallel to the American predisposition for "trial and error" and pragmatic action over conscious ideology. (It recalls Alexis de Tocqueville's attribution of Americans' rush to law courts at virtually the slightest provocation to the absence of a deep and preexisting traditional culture.) Specific decisions and concrete things thus become experimental steps into one's own future. In the military realm, this propensity toward specifics and tangibles showed itself in the endless debates as to who won or lost key battles in past American wars. Clearly, choosing between the militia and the regulars as the backbone of the American military was an ideological matter, even if unconsciously so. Nevertheless, it was a choice and a debate pursued in tortured argument over Lundy's Lane, New Orleans, Monterrey, Vera Cruz, Bull Run, and the western wilderness.¹⁷ In the end, Americans could do specific things, but they had grave difficulty agreeing on how they had achieved their successes.

As a result of such proclivities, an American military could say that "clear and present danger" required making a great many guns; and, in this way, immediate problems justified a contract to Eli Whitney to mass-produce weapons for the War of 1812. (The theoretical implications of mass production and "interchangeable parts" have clearly proved to be the more intriguing long-term questions; but such grandiose matters are for the most part retrospective.) ¹⁸ In the Spanish-American War, too, U.S. authorities authorized lightweight uniforms and issuance of 45-caliber handguns without pursuing the more theoretical questions of "counterinsurgency" forces––and, tellingly, forgot with equal promptness what little had been learned.¹⁹ In World War II, the advocates of the atomic bomb project did not begin by predicting a revolution in military theory and strategy. They simply argued that they might be able to produce a very big blast. When general issues became too complicated, Americans took to the specific. When strategic debate seemed abstract, they clutched at the specific.

The common element in such successful instances appears to be clarity of purpose and simplicity of execution. The dedication of a team to a transcendent goal––some single weapon that this committed group perceives as central to the national interest––provides some criterion against which the value of personal sacrifice and institutional deference can be judged. Yet, unless it is inescapably clear that one bureaucratic unit must defer to another, it will not do so. Unless the individual knows why he ought to submit himself to an administrative abstraction, he might well refrain. But clear purpose provides some basis for buffing off the "frictions" so prevalent in military matters, especially in peacetime.

Examples of purposefulness are numerous, and successes have been impressive. The development of the atomic bomb exemplified the rapidity with which scientific search could be undertaken when the weapon sought might be the "ultimate" one, the enemy being fought the most villainous, and the stakes of defeat unconditional. The concern to avoid suffering a technological "Pearl Harbor" that would jeopardize national security by making defenses obsolete has been especially strong for many Americans, hinting at the priority accorded the tangible (hardware) and the secondary place of the intangible (operational organization and strategic thought). The fear that an enemy might gain first access to an "ultimate weapon"––a fear which itself reveals the predisposition to expect such "ultimate weapons" to appear––encourages the quest for hardware over strategy, partly because it presupposes that the latter is driven by technology. A strong example of this assumption was the development of weapons and strategic thought after the invention of the atomic bomb. That a single bomb could devastate an entire city was misinterpreted to mean that the principles of war had also been obliterated.²⁰ Moreover, the driving force for the shaping of military strategy in the nuclear age was not the community of military professionals, whose thrust was more operational, but the coterie of physical and political scientists, whose penchant for models and theoretical structures was far stronger. The development of the specific weapon was, in a sense, easier than the creation of justifications for its use.

Even more, the pursuit of the hydrogen bomb reveals the critical role of "monomaniacal" focus, such as that attributed to Dr. Edward Teller.²¹ Seen negatively, it was the unquestioning clarity of the zealot and the "true believer." Seen positively, it was the diamond-like hardness capable of overcoming bureaucratic inertia. Similarly, when programs were entrusted to single-purpose agencies, they were often headed for a more certain development than when enmeshed in larger institutional bodies where they were only one of many mouths chirping to be fed. The successes of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the swift development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS) demonstrated that great strides could be made, even in time of relative peace, despite bureaucratic drags, and in the face of stunning technological demands.²² The "black budget" advanced aircraft, such as the U-2 and the SR-71, similarly showed that superbly capable weapons and systems could be developed rapidly and efficiently, provided an overriding singleness of purpose prevailed.²³

At the same time, however, the primacy of the specific new things over the operational system in which such things are employed had its own implications: first, that creating new military hardware would prove less difficult than carrying out innovative schemes for military reorganization; second, that the things themselves would be easier to produce than a system for using them. Thus, this fundamental question remains unaddressed: Although organizations might build weapons, how could one guarantee that these weapons would be used coherently and purposefully? The focus on things––to the extent that it becomes a matter of creating a product and developing inventories in the form of force structure––can become an obsession with management, at the expense of leadership and operational art. As has very often been illustrated, the variables are many.

The relationship of institutional organization, technological innovation, and human adaptability in the twentieth-century American military resembles the "uncertainty principle" in physics.²⁴ Although the reality in physics is that the weight, speed, mass, and size of subatomic participles are varying continuously in reference to one another, the scientist, in order to measure any one feature, must imagine that it is actually constant. Although technically false, this premise is a convenient and useful compromise. Similarly, in the American military experience, the priority that one gives to any one objective––institutional order or predictability, for example––necessitates that other considerations, such as innovation and flexibility, fall to secondary status.²⁵

Certain changes in the structure of scientific research and development in the twentieth century contributed to this subordination of other objectives to the quest for order and stability. As experimental projects consumed more and more resources, they came to require ever greater corporate or public investment. This increasing investment, in turn, invited the creation of greater oversight and bureaucratic mechanisms through which accountability to stockholders or citizenry might be ensured.²⁶ In some cases, great achievements still proved possible; but other cases indicate that many sources of friction remained. Experimentation with unusual aircraft design suggested that the desire for major breakthroughs still lived and that some "end runs" around the developing bureaucracy remained possible. But the historian of the radical B-49 " Flying Wing," Edward T. Maloney, has claimed that the difficulty in getting sufficient support for the aircraft lay not in the B-49's performance but in its being "before its time." Even more, he alleges that cancellation of the B-49 and commitment to the B-36 came about because of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson's ties with Convair, the B-36's builder and a key competitor of Northrop, builder of the B-49. According to Maloney, Johnson would have accepted the B-49 on condition that Convair build it, but John Northrop refused.²⁷ To be sure, the details of the B-36 decision have been much debated. But the entanglement of political and corporate intrigue with technological breakthrough was not a new phenomenon at the time of the B-36 decision and continues today. (Moreover, those knowledgeable about organizational systems and processes recognize that covert experimentation has the virtue of cutting down the number of forces competing for control of research and development funds, while open programs invite endless scrutiny and a functionally infinite number of hungry mouths waiting to be fed.)

Despite the many frustrations, serious efforts to capitalize on scientific breakthroughs still abound. Typical is anticipation of the impact of artificial intelligence, clearly a potential "force multiplier" in defense- and combat-related electronics.²⁸ How such research is handled, however, appears to depend on the clarity with which it can be ordered. Generalized research is appealing to the scientists' disposition of earnest inquiry, but to the budget planner, it sounds suspiciously like the fictional horse that "rode off in all directions."

During the Vietnam War, the United States took great pains to make its technological prowess produce a victory. Manifestly, the purpose was frustrated, even though innovations were generated. Among the most widely mentioned were defoliation campaigns, the "McNamara Wall" of electronic sensors across the demilitarized zone (DMZ), fixed-wing gunships, and "smart bombs."²⁹ Innovations were tried, and new weapons were used. Still, they gave only limited benefit. Obviously, if winning the war is the test, the efforts were a failure.

If one wanted to find the most prompt innovation during the Vietnam War, one would do better to look north of the DMZ or even out into the jungles where the Vietcong proved indomitable. Americans thought, debated, experimented, tested, and deployed––often with ambiguous purpose. To a remarkable degree, the Americans made use of the full apparatus for overseeing new developments. Their opponents were comparatively more direct: they saw a means of killing or disabling the enemy, and they used it. Their clarity may have been their most awesome power; and its effects remain etched in the political map of the post-Vietnam War era.

To be sure, the Hanoi regime had its problems––"drags" on how it did business. One was ideological debate and conflict.³⁰ Yet there was an intrinsic benefit in this sort of debate, which made clear that one's own thinking was the key to one's actions and that, even when you could not control your enemy, you could still control yourself. This kind of focus among North Vietnamese leaders––and its absence among American officials––helps to account for the war's outcome. The strategic battle in Hanoi was admitted, fought, and determined. The strategic battle in Washington was concealed, muddled, and ultimately lost in a wash of Orwellian "newspeak" in which giving up was called "Vietnamization" and the recovery of a large percentage of American POWs was treated as if it had been victory.³¹

The success of Hanoi, despite the U.S. government's enormous efforts to frustrate it, helps also to explain why threat assessment is not nearly enough to support military reform in general, let alone outline it in specifics. "Scare hell out of the country" was Senator Arthur Vandenberg's advice in touting the Truman Doctrine, military containment, NATO and "entangling alliance" (a massive innovation, in one sense)––but generating fears about threats is not a reliable tool.³² It gives too much control to the "other side" and too much force to their actions and opinions. Meanwhile, it yields too little attention to the warps and pressures from within the military institutions that have nothing whatever to do with a threat posed by an external power.

Like many another product, military reform in the United States is "made the American way," inspired by peculiarly American concerns and seeking objectives that have had traditional appeal here. Distressingly, one main feature in the American temperament has been the desire for "checks and balances"––a desire that runs directly counter to the demands of clarity which would make technological innovation, strategic inventiveness, and structural reform much more acceptable. In the end, resistance to innovation does not stem from some technical shortcoming but from long-standing traditions and from a questioning strain bred into the American temperament.

Perhaps military institutions (and the civilian view of them) need something like the "uncertainty principle" in modern physics. We need to pretend that the many variables in the real world can be reduced to only a few and thus can be managed. Whatever the mechanism, the challenge is to establish a sense of clear priority. Such a talent for setting priorities may have been the only way in which America's adversaries in Vietnam enjoyed superiority. But given the outcome, other forms of superiority may have been futile when shorn of a rock-steady purpose and a crystalline focus.

Recognizing the volume of clarity and focus, along with the memory that Americans truly were their own worst enemy, may have been the only military "lessons of Vietnam" that really matter. The ultimate enemy in the Vietnam War was the American disposition on how to fight it, especially since this disposition, inspired with the spirit of "checks and balances," usually lay unattended. Even when Americans observed the special confusions of their war, they failed to see these as the natural outcroppings of bedrock traditions. Thus, in the prosecution of war, the great barrier may be the American instinct toward organizing for a war rather than waging it. So, too, the ultimate barrier to military innovation may be the American inclination on how to manage it and, indeed, the belief that it can be managed to suit the needs of cost accountancy.

Kansas State University, Manhattan

Notes

1. "Peaks and Valleys" (Interview with Don Valentine), Inc., May 1985, p. 32.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Richard Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in American, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975).

5. See Sidney Forman, "Why the United States Military Academy Was Established in 1802," Military Affairs, Spring 1965, pp. 16-29.

6. See, for example, Russell F. Weigley, Towards an American Army: Military Thought from Washington to Marshall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). Calhoun was appointed Secretary of War by James Monroe, who had served as President Madison's Secretary of War during the conflict with Britain and who had firsthand experience with the failings of the American military system. Also see Harry L. Coles, The War of 1812 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1972). For information about the military policies of the Monroe administration, see Carlton B. Smith, "Congressional Attitudes toward Military Preparedness during the Monroe Administration," Military Affairs, February 1976, pp. 22-25.

7. This sort of thinking was usual for Calhoun––starting with a principle and deductively determining how people should behave and how institutions should be organized. At times, it threw him into rigid, mechanistic thinking that made him seem great as a logician but deficient as a human being. Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun's mind "an intellectual black mass" for this reason. See Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948).

8. See Weigley, particularly concerning the observations made of the armies of Europe and Asia.

9. See K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846-1848 (New York: Macmillan, 1974).

10. See Robert F. Stohlman, Jr., "The Powerless Position: The Commanding General of the Army of the United States, 1864-1903," Master's thesis, Kansas State University, 1975.

11. See Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971); also see Cosmas, "From Order to Chaos: The War Department, the National Guard and Military Policy, 1898," Military Affairs, Fall 1965, pp. 105-21. Overall, Cosmas denies allegations that War Department personnel were either derelict or incompetent.

12. In his Master's thesis, Marc B. Powe has observed that Army intelligence personnel had to use the Encyclopedia Britannica to provide information on the Philippines to plan the campaigns in 1898. The "failure," if one would call it such, resulted from the seeming improbability that the United States would actually send units of its own Army to such a remote place. See Marc B. Powe, "The Emergence of the War Department Intelligence Agency; 1885-1918," Master's thesis, Kansas State University, 1974, p. 32.

13. For additional information on the resistance of Fred Ainsworth, see Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1966), especially "Data Processing in a Bureau Drawer."

14. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

15. For additional information on the difficulties in determining military aviation policy in the interwar years, see Paul Y. Hammond, Organizing for Defense (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961).

16. See Donald J. Mrozek, "Peace through Strength," Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1971.

17. Russell Weigley traces this tension between militia and regular factions in Towards an American Army. Also see Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968).

18. Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, editors, Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufacturers (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).

19. An excellent study of the war, which gives a positive judgment of U.S. efforts in the Philippines, is David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981).

20. Harry G. Summers, in On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1982), argues that the excessive deference to civilian strategists resulted largely from the mythology of the uniqueness of war in the era of nuclear weapons. The consequences of this error abounded in the confusions of Vietnam. Among the works useful in approaching the issue of civilian engagement in developing strategy are Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New York: Praeger, 1965); and Roy E. Licklider, The Private Nuclear Strategists (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971).

21. For additional information on the development of the hydrogen bomb, see Norman Moss, Men Who Play God (New York: Harper and Row, 1969); and George Fielding Eliot, editor, The H-Bomb (New York: Didier, 1950).

22. To be sure, there was argument over how to proceed with the ICBM. The point here, however, is that progress was largely a function of decision. In the end, choice is essential. See Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); and Frederick J. Ordway and Mitchell R. Sharpe, The Rocket Team (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979). Also see Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program, A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982).

23. See, for example, Thomas J. Peters, "The Mythology of Innovation, or a Skunkworks Tale, Part I," Stanford Magazine, Summer 1983, pp. 12-21; and "The Mythology of Innovation …Part II," Stanford Magazine, Fall 1983, pp. 11-19.

24. See Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers, translated by Peter Heath (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); and Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (New York: Morrow, 1979).

25. The search for institutional stability and predictability was not confined to the military. Indeed, it permeated American life in the late nineteenth century and after. See, for example, Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Compatible with this objective, the appointment of Elihu Root as Secretary of War was justified by Root's organizational skills and his experience in corporate law and business structure. Root was expected to apply this experience and the principles on which it was based to the Army and the War Department's administration.

26. Elting E. Morison has observed that U.S. companies that produced important scientific breakthroughs did so by allowing some fraction of research time to proceed virtually without company control. Such "unaccountability" may produce genuine innovation, but it does not necessarily produce near-term or mid-term contributions to corporate profit. See Elting E. Morison, From Know-How to Nowhere (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Similarly, such scientific research in the military sector would not show immediate results. However, it is intriguing to see that the equivalent of corporate "free" or "unaccounted" research does exist in the military sector through research sponsored in universities and elsewhere. Given this fact, the confusion too often seen in developing new weapons––that is, in applying the basic research to practical uses––is even more striking.

27. Edward T. Maloney, Northrop Flying Wings (Buena Park, California: World War II Publications, 1975), especially pp. 1, 31. An important essay concerning Johnson's approach to the issue is Paul Hammond, "Super Carriers and B-36 Bombers" in American Civil-Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies, edited by Harold Stein (University: University of Alabama Press, 1963).

28. See, for example, Rear Admiral Albert J. Baciocco, Jr., "Artificial Intelligence and C ³I," Signal, September 1981, pp. 23, 25-28. Also see Defense Science 2000, August 1983, especially Richard G. Naedel, "Intelligent Associative Memory (IAM): An Overview," pp. 61-68.

29. See Jack S. Ballard, Development and Employment of Fixed-Wing Gunships (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1982); William A. Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand: The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia, 1961-1971 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1982); Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia, 1961-1975 (Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1980); and Paul Dickson, The Electronic Battlefield (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).

30. See Vo Nguyen Giap, Great Victory, Great Task (New York: Praeger, 1968) and People's War, People's Army (New York: Praeger, 1962); Jay Mallin, editor, Strategy for Conquest, Communist Documents on Guerilla Warfare (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1970); Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1966).

31. The literature concerning U.S. policy in the Vietnam War is already plentiful. Indicative of the wide-ranging opinions of the war and suggesting the ambivalence of U.S. policy are: Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); Leslie Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1979); George Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Washington, 1950-1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Daniel S. Papp, Vietnam: The View from Moscow, Peking, Washington (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1981).

32. The incident involving Vandenberg and others at a White House meeting on 27 February 1947 is recounted in Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 218. For accounts concerning NATO, see Lawrence S. Kaplan, A Community of Interests: NATO and the Military Assistance Program, 1948-1951 (Washington: Office of Secretary of Defense, 1980); and Kaplan and Robert W. Clawson, editors, NATO after Thirty Years (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1980).

Contributor

Donald J. Mrozek (A.B., Georgetown University; M.A. and Ph.D, Rutgers University) is Professor of History, Kansas State University, Manhattan. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow, Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education (CADRE), Maxwell AFB, Alabama, and was recipient in 1980-81 of a fellowship with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Mrozek is coeditor of A Guide to the Sources of U.S. Military History (1981, 1986).

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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