Abstract
Emerging technology, military innovation, war fighting effectiveness—these phrases generate significant excitement among military professionals, defense analysts, and government policymakers alike. But what is the relationship between these phenomena? What can military organizations learn from more than a century of experiences wrestling with the implications of new technologies? Vincent O’Hara and Leonard Heinz offer a wide-ranging and structured examination of key naval technologies as they developed over the course of a century and across multiple armed conflicts. Their general argument is that learning about how best to use new technology in peacetime is almost always unreliable. Instead, navies learn through employing the technology in combat, and those navies that can adapt under fire are the ones that ultimately use new weapons, platforms, and tools to best effect.
Each of the book's six empirical chapters conducts a case study of a different technology: mines, torpedoes, radio, radar, submarines, and aircraft. O’Hara and Heinz describe each technology's basic elements and trace its development from earliest use through stages of discovery, evolution, and exploitation as navies employed the technology in various armed conflicts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They dedicate the bulk of their analyses to the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and World War II, and the interwar periods, but also include a postscript about military applications after the end of World War II.
These chapters have several strengths. They offer an appropriate level of technical detail to familiarize non-specialist readers with the fundamental principles of how these technologies work. They survey how different countries—specifically Germany, Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Russia/USSR, and Japan—developed and used the technologies in often divergent ways. Moreover, countermeasures are also given substantial treatment. But perhaps the most significant contribution is how each study pays close attention to contemporary expectations about the technology's war fighting potential. The overall effect is a useful introduction to these technologies that synthesizes several dimensions of analysis into a single easy-to-read narrative.
The case studies, however, do not always fit well with the book's title. The three wars mentioned in the title are the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and World War II. But the authors only explicitly trace three of the six technologies (mines, torpedoes, and radio) through each of these conflicts. Submarines and aircraft played minimal role in the Russo-Japanese War; and naval professionals had little interest in radar until after World War I. The relationship between innovation and victory is also ambiguous. The phrase “war-winning potential” appears throughout the book, but the authors do not explain whether a technology's potential was real and waiting to be exploited or merely imagined. In fact, in the case of radar, they assess that it helped Allied surface forces win naval battles but was not a war-winning technology.
For each case, O’Hara and Heinz propose discovery, evolution, and exploitation as a three-staged process through which navies determine the best uses for a technology and best practices for effectiveness. While these concepts are useful signposts for structuring the chapter narratives, they are not fully leveraged for analytical purposes and therefore raise several questions. Do these phases require different conditions to succeed? For example, why did mine technology evolve in wartime (World War I), but torpedo technology evolve in peacetime (interwar period)? Is it an iterative process or a linear one? For instance, why did radio technology, in their telling, move back-and-forth between evolution and exploitation before and during World War I and II, whereas the other five technologies follow a simpler path from discovery to evolution to exploitation? The three-stage framework is underdeveloped and leaves open multiple avenues for future inquiry.
These quibbles aside, the important lessons drawn from these cases constitute the book's strongest contributions. Three stand out. First, O’Hara and Heinz observe persistent problems in anticipating how best to make military use of new technology. Some technologies are overhyped (e.g. torpedoes, aircraft) while others are underappreciated (e.g. mines). Perceived and actual need can be different, which can then become liabilities, as in the case of searchlights. Some technologies can meet unanticipated needs. For example, the Royal Navy did not anticipate needing to create mine barrages to block German submarines. Initial skepticism can be transformed into unwarranted enthusiasm after a single demonstration of success, as in the case of the German U-9 submarine sinking three British armored cruisers in September 1914. Also, overestimating capabilities can be as harmful as underestimating them, as US “radar-picket” destroyers learned at the Battle of Savo Island when Japanese warships successfully evaded them and surprised Allied forces off Guadalcanal.
Secondly, Innovating Victory illustrates how difficult it is to shepherd the process of technological development and to use technology for combat advantage. The factors are myriad. Some may be obvious but worth restating. Weapons must have suitable targets, platforms suitable weapons, and tools suitable uses. The submarine, for instance, truly matured as a war fighting technology when equipped with torpedoes and given warships as targets. New technology then must be employed in ways that maximize the desired effect; that is, navies must establish doctrine to leverage technology.
Other factors are less recognized but just as important. A technology can take a long time to mature, so it requires dedicated and sustained resourcing, which in turn requires a demonstrated need for it like a salient mission. Some technological advantages such as radio intelligence cannot be overexploited lest they lose their effectiveness. Specialization is also critical. Specialized organizations are often required for information management and specialized infrastructure for sustaining production and maintenance. Personnel must be trained in specialized skills and technologies tailored to the special requirements of different services and domains (e.g. carrier versus land-based aircraft).
Thirdly, the book challenges popular understandings of the nature of conservativism in naval organizations. Resistance to innovation stems less from vested interests in the status quo and more from lacking systems to decipher strategic uncertainty and make difficult choices among a confusing and wide range of alternatives. This is understandable. There can be an inherent contradiction between what a navy needs right now and the technologies it needs later but that have long gestation periods. Moreover, technologies such as searchlights, shipborne rockets, and rams were dead ends. In addition, countermeasures can be relatively cheap and easily deployable against a now-promising technology. The simple fact that each of the book's case studies span more than a century of testing and development reinforces these intuitions. Since technological trajectories are so difficult to anticipate, prudent stewardship of national treasure and power demand prolonged testing and listening to feedback from users, especially as technical complexity intensifies.
Innovating Victory will appeal to several audiences. Historians of technology will appreciate the way each naval technology developed in relatively unpredictable ways under varying pressures ranging from strategic context to organizational culture. O’Hara and Heinz also consistently emphasize the importance of users and user innovation in determining technological trajectories—another significant theme in technology and culture studies. For political scientists, the case studies blend a mix of top-down and bottom-up innovation processes, a dominant approach in military innovation studies. Finally, for policymakers, the book can increase awareness that emerging technologies today will likely take decades to mature, and inevitably be used in unexpected ways to address unanticipated needs.