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Embarking on the Road Untaken

History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.

RANDOLPH S. BOURNE¹

This chapter presents a midlevel schema of technological change tailored for a military context.² With modifications, one may apply it to other contexts. Some might call it a theory, but that goes too far. As physicist Stephen Hawking has explained, a “theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.”³ Herein lays the rub. The presented schema, at best a framework, is not a theory because it does not predict. It is a guideline for understanding. This does not lessen its value. Many social science theories are similarly limited because they lack the verifiability of repeated and controlled scientific experimentation. Predicting from them only makes the user feel better about having made what is ultimately a qualitative or intuitive decision. The framework presented here fulfills a need historian Alex Roland identified: blending the methods of social science and history to promote “rigorous and impartial historical investigation informed by concepts of how other similar processes have evolved.”⁴ The schema borrows concepts the author has found usefully generalizable to explain technological change and innovation in a variety of times and contexts.

Important to understanding military technological change is the relationship between strategy and technology; therefore, the discussion first defines strategy and technology. It relates context with technology’s internal and external elements. This establishes a broad framework based upon the history of technology. Next, the argument unifies informal and formal reasoning as they pertain to strategy and technology. This portion of the chapter attunes with the intellectual terrain of Cold War strategists, providing background for understanding the strategic debates that swirled around the mobile ICBM. Lastly, the framework introduces concepts from military innovation studies. This synthesis completes the terminological and conceptual basis used to study the mobile ICBM as an alternative course of action.

Along with other nuclear force elements, the mobile ICBM was one system component within a larger set of mental architectures linking means and ways. These formed a solution set for multiple strategic problems focused on deterring, and if that failed, winning a nuclear war. Developing this network of components and concepts required decades of experimentation, false starts, failures, and successes. As the introduction notes, the historical worth of a road not taken arises from the fact that the actors actually walked the road. For their own reasons, the historical actors elected not to finish their journeys down such paths, but they went far enough to decide the technologies’ feasibility. The historically significant road not taken, therefore, was not a “pie in the sky” solution, interesting only to antiquarians. Furthermore, the technological road not taken did not require construction of a full-scale technological system for the actors to realize, “No. This does not work. It is not the right means.” Resource and other contextual constraints prohibited it. This is why the ICBM system builders, comprising individuals from government, militaries, industries, universities, and other sources, accomplished so many staff studies, tests, and simulations. These represented intellectually serious investigations of alternative technological paths, what political and military leaders termed “alternative courses of action.” These were foundational to Cold War planning processes and remain so today. To the participants, these debates were vital, and they influenced their decisions.

Throughout the history of technology’s disciplinary development, many have called for studying unwalked roads. In 1967, a little-remembered cry came from two of the discipline’s founders, historians Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr. They warned, “Let us not fall into the error of equating technology only with successful technology. The past abounds with failures—schemes that went awry, machines that wouldn’t work, processes that proved inapplicable—yet these failures form part of the story of man’s attempts to control his environment. Albeit unsuccessful, many of these failures were necessary preliminaries toward the successes in technology.”⁵ Some successful failures exist.

By 1985, untaken roads largely remained unstudied, and historian John Staudenmaier has noted that such failure results in a Whiggish narrative of technological progress.⁶ The danger is the validation of technological determinism and a false conception of technology development. Accepting a determinist narrative leads one to think that large-scale technologies were developed with the pathway already in mind and without conflict or false starts, because those involved already knew how to develop the final product. Later practitioners deciding the fates of programs would possess fantasy-like expectations of innovators, the resultant technologies, and program management. Contemporary actors, unprepared for reality, might apply the wrong historical lessons or “theories” and inappropriately lead and manage promising programs. Such leaders might also dream up “antigravity” technological programs with no hope of fulfillment.⁷ Readers who follow the evolution of and reporting on major defense programs have encountered these phenomena.

Strategy and Context

Some scholars limit strategy to a politico-military context, but that view is too narrow.⁸ Government leaders and military officers certainly strategize, but so do homemakers, doctors, lawyers, industrialists, and the rest of us. In its simplest form, strategy is the integration of ends, ways, and means suffused within a context. The historical agents act within a context of interrelated conditions and phenomena pertinent to them. Context includes time, money, people, resources, geography, and more. Within their context, the actors identify goals (ends) they wish to achieve, and strategy is a tool with which to attain their ends. Sound strategy clarifies specific objectives (another word for “ends,” which this study uses synonymously). “We will build the bridge and open it no later than September 15, 2020,” represents a specific objective. Poorly specified objectives include statements of desired conditions. For example, “We will depart the host country when we have won sufficient hearts and minds to ensure the populace’s acceptance of the political leadership’s legitimacy” is vague. What do “sufficient” and “legitimacy” mean? Clarity matters. It saves lives and resources.

Students often illustrate strategy as a simple word equation. Strategy manipulates the interaction of the following:

Ends = ways + means (as suffused within a context).

The solution must respect the context. The Prussian theorist and practitioner of war Carl von Clausewitz recognized this, contending, “The first, the supreme, the most far reaching act of judgment that the statesman [stateswoman] and commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”⁹ Clausewitz’s dictum stressed the importance of matching ways, means, and ends with the context.

Military technologies, whether past, present, or future, ultimately serve as means to fulfill strategic objectives. If the technology does not fit the context into which it will deploy, it is not the proper means with which to achieve the objective. When military force, actual or threatened, becomes the means, the same technologies fulfill objectives at conflict’s multiple levels. At each level of war, including the tactical, operational, and strategic, there exist ends, ways, and means, each within local and broader contexts.¹⁰ A successful military technology is one that fulfills the objectives necessitating its design within the desired context and operates successfully at all three levels of war. As time passes, historical actors may adapt a military technology as a means to serve an objective in a context for which its builders never intended. When conducting such technological transfer and diffusion, the human actors must then adapt the technology to the new objective and context or risk failure. Alternatively, the actors could change the objective so available means and ways can fulfill it, develop new means and ways, or abandon the effort. Failure to adjust is foolish.

Policy describes the ways people get things done. It is only a way to shape peoples’ efforts to achieve objectives. Policy orchestrates the efforts of large numbers of people to accomplish work. At its broadest level, this meaning parallels historian and social critic Lewis Mumford’s “megamachine,” as he illustrated via the pharaohs’ ways of organizing, training, and equipping workers to build the pyramids.¹¹ Policy, therefore, should never be an end unto itself. It is a way to use means to achieve the ends. Consistency in policy helps avoid confusion, but policy makers must remain flexible to shifting objectives, contexts, and situations. To get results, the people doing the work need means, including money, time, staff, weapons, oratory, propaganda, fuel, food, etc. Over time, contexts may change. The harmony between ends, ways, and means fluctuates. It is not rigid, although those professing to practice strategy and technology may be. People develop ends, ways, and means in a context. To adapt Clausewitz’s allusion of war as an object suspended between the forces of reason, passion, and chance, strategy is a lump of iron suspended freely between the interacting forces of ends, ways, and means, subject to shifting contexts.¹²

These four elements interact. Historian-philosopher Robin George Collingwood eloquently described context’s role:

For a man [or woman] about to act, the situation is the master, the oracle, the god. Whether your action is to prove successful or not depends on whether you grasp the situation rightly or not. If you are wise, it is not until you have consulted your oracle, done everything in your power to find out what the situation is, that you will make even the most trivial plan. And, if you neglect the situation, the situation will not neglect you. It is not one of those gods that leave an insult unpunished. The freedom that there is . . . consists in the fact that this compulsion is imposed upon the activity of human reason not by anything else but by itself. The situation, its master, its oracle, and god is a situation it has itself created.¹³

Clausewitz and Collingwood cautioned actors to respect context, but how does the historian of technology understand it? In the mid-1980s, historian Glenn Porter explained that contextualism interpreted “technology’s impact on the human beings who employed and operated it . . . its connections with the history of business, religion, politics, popular culture, and so on. . . . They [the historians] are concerned much more with the adoption and impact of new technology than with their invention.”¹⁴ Historians and strategists study similar relationships. Understanding context, what military strategists term “the character of war,” requires reflecting on many factors—time, history, culture, religion, race, politics, economics, gender, class, kin networks, and more. Failure to match ends, ways, and means with a conflict’s character conflict is fatal. A variety of contexts, including those of each antagonist, suffuses ends, ways, and means to contribute to the discourse over the technological system.

Cold War Strategy and Context

The mobile ICBM was a Cold War strategy/technology debate. In Cold War America, tension between the scientific and humanities disciplines flared into hostility. In his 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” politician, author, and critic C. P. Snow lamented, “The intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.”¹⁵ Snow placed scientists at one pole and “literary intellectuals” at the other. Some of Snow’s contemporaries had little use for his thesis, including fellow literary critic F. R. Leavis, but Snow was on to something. (In addition to his political career, he was a chemist and a novelist.) Cold War social scientists had assumed a “holier than thou” attitude. Consider the following statement from the “American Clausewitz,” strategist and economist Bernard Brodie: “Each generation of military planners is certain that it will not make the same kinds of mistakes as its forebears, not least because it feels it has profited from their example. Our own generation is convinced it has an additional and quite special reason for being sure of itself: it is more scientific than its predecessors.”¹⁶ A leading Cold War proponent of this position, Brodie believed the scientific method was a powerful strategy development tool. He thought it would lessen nonlinearity’s (Clausewitz’s chance, fog, and friction) influence. He remarked:

The universe of data out of which reasonable military decisions have to be made is a vast, chaotic mass of technological, economic, and political facts and predictions. To bring order out of the chaos demands the use of scientific method in systematically exploring and comparing alternative courses of action. When the method is true to its own scientific tenets, it is bound to be more reliable by far than the traditional alternative method, which is to solicit a consensus of essentially intuitive judgments among experienced commanders.¹⁷

Note Brodie’s emphasis on exploring and comparing alternative courses of action—that is, roads not taken. The intellectual processes of Cold War strategists incorporated roads not taken, making them important for historical understanding.

When American leaders sought to build an ICBM fleet as a means to ensure national survival against a nuclear-equipped Soviet rival of unknown capabilities, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his “whiz kids” epitomized this mind-set.¹⁸ A wartime Army Air Forces lieutenant colonel, later an industrialist and statistical analyst, McNamara possessed a mind-set that matched Lewis Mumford’s 1934 anticipatory declaration, “The Army has usually been the refuge of third-rate minds,” a scathing indictment of the military’s value in strategic decision making, including technological development.¹⁹ McNamara and others disparaged “intuitive judgments among experienced commanders.” Such judgments were alien to strategy gestated within the social scientist’s scientific reasoning. McNamara had no appreciation for the Clausewitzian concept of “military genius.”²⁰ Readers familiar with Clausewitz will recall his listing of traits and emphasis on “coup d’oeil,” the intuitive, resolute, and creative insight permitting one to pierce the fog of war, if only for a moment. Coup d’oeil parallels historian Peter Jakab’s “mind’s eye,” the mental stamina to visualize a deductive framework surrounding the development of technical means or the uncanny insight to solve thorny problems via unexpected adaptations.²¹ Brodie’s formulation expressed the importance of informal reasoning, judgment, and intuition in the strategy and conduct of military operations, and Jakab saw the same within technological development. Military leaders, not necessarily trained in McNamara’s methods, contended that an overly rational approach ignored the human element of conflict, whether political or military. These perceptual differences shaped mobile ICBM development.

Brodie, himself an economist and certainly no fool, warned

insensitive to and often intolerant of political considerations that get in the way of his [or her] theory of calculations. He [or she] is normally extremely weak in either diplomatic or military history or even in contemporary politics, and is rarely aware of how important a deficiency this is for strategic insight. . . . The devotees of a science like economics, which is clearly the most impressive of the social sciences in terms of theoretical structure, tend to develop a certain disdain and even arrogance concerning other social science fields, which seem to them primitive in their techniques and intellectually unworthy.²²

Brodie clamored for scientific rigor in national security strategy and technology development but saw that history and the rest of the humanities mattered for the perspective they provided. He lamented these lacunae in Cold War strategy: “Thus, where the great strategic writers and teachers of the past . . . based the development of their art almost entirely on a broad and perceptive reading of history, in the case of Clausewitz and Jomini mostly recent history but exceptionally rich for their needs, the present generation of ‘civilian strategists’ are with markedly few exceptions singularly devoid of history.”²³ The mobile ICBM’s history reflects the intellectual tension between coup d’oeil and formal reasoning.

Though preaching the importance of a scientific approach to solving strategic problems, Brodie admitted that “our experience thus far with scientific preparations for military decision-making warns us to appreciate how imperfect is even the best we can do. . . . We are dealing always with large admixtures of pure chance.”²⁴ The Brodie-Clausewitz commentary sums the intellectual tension within the bureaucracies deciding the mobile ICBM’s fate. Many Cold War actors needed to synthesize the social sciences and humanities, but few could unify these two intellectual hemispheres. Rare was the technological innovator capable of thinking both ways.

Understanding Technology

Technology is difficult to define. Understanding technology depends on knowing the relationship between complementary variables, the mental and the physical, but as physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle reminds us, there are limits to which an observer may know complementary variables. The word “technology” emphasizes the mental element but implies a physical artifact. The word’s roots are tekhne and logos. Tekhne means an art, a skill, “engineering in the mind’s eye.”²⁵ According to Mumford, tekhne made “no distinction between industrial production and ‘fine’ or symbolic art.”²⁶ This perspective admitted the possibility of symbolism and its nonmaterial character as products of tekhne. Therefore, technology may be abstract. The second root, logos, represents reason as a controlling force, which implies discourse, discussion, and study.²⁷ Each root focuses on the historical actor’s intellectual efforts, but today most citizens regard technology first as an artifact (an iPhone, perhaps?) rather than considering the mental activity subsuming the artifact.²⁸ At times, historians struggle with this Janus-like feature of technology. Mumford disliked the word, contending it overly emphasized “an abstract, rational pursuit.”²⁹ He preferred the term “technics,” by which he meant “an umbrella category of tools and utensils that figure in all of recorded history.” Technics are tools. Creating and using tools, utensils, and machines demand specialized “technique”—that is, proven ways of creating and using them. Historians accept the concepts of tools, machines, and technique, but they debate whether a mental schema of organization (like government or large-scale “ways” of doing work) is a technology. Each element’s weighting varies with the historian’s contextual interpretation.³⁰ In this study, technology comprises physical and mental elements, a point requiring further discussion.

Historians Kranzberg and Pursell highlighted the mental aspect but respected the physical. They considered technology “much more than tools and artifacts, machines and processes. It deals with human work, with man’s attempts to satisfy his wants by human action on physical objects.”³¹ Later, historian Alex Roland defined technology as the “systematic, purposeful manipulation of the material world.”³² As he explained, technology has, “four components: materials, technique, power, and tools or machines. Thus, technology is the process of applying power by some technique through the medium of some tool or machine to alter some material in a useful way. These components are necessary and sufficient to describe any technology at any time, but they are static; they do not address technological change.”³³ By including technique, this definition incorporated the mental but emphasized the material components through which technique channeled. Roland emphasized the material world. To him, mental constructs, including government, were not technology.

The boundary remains debatable, particularly when one’s means and ways exist to influence the mental states, thoughts, and emotions of others (the effects of Al Qaeda or Islamic State Internet videos of beheadings or human immolations, for example). In the application of military technologies, the mental orchestration of the technical means is often more important than the physical tools. The broad term for this is “doctrine,” or even “theory of warfare,” which at its best guides military operations to achieve objectives. Neither doctrine nor warfighting theory should be rigid, because they significantly influence the development of military technology. Roland’s definition rejects as “technology” the broad human intellectual and organizational schemas needed to fight wars, but they are the techniques of warfare and its preparations. This history modifies Roland’s definition by including mental architectures as technique.

As with strategy, a word equation helps illustrate technology:

Technology = mental architecture + components.

Components are the equipment, tools, and machines needed to do the work, what Mumford termed technics. It does not matter whether they have a physical manifestation visible to humans. The “plus sign” within the equation represents technique relating the tools and the human understanding of how and why to use them best.³⁴ The checklists that ICBM operators used to launch their missiles represented technique at the tactical, or lowest, level of war. The SAC operational plans that integrated aerial tankers, reconnaissance, bombers, and missiles represented operational-level technique, and the overall integration of all American nuclear forces represented strategic-level technique. The term “mental architecture” parallels the historian’s understanding of technology as artifact, meaning, and use. It encompasses the unified intellectual coherence behind, within, and around the component, technique, discourse, and theory that allows the whole to obtain results, be they physical, mental, or both. The body of knowledge developed around ICBMs, including their use in wartime, represented mental architectures instrumental to the ICBM innovation.³⁵

Strategy, Technology, and Innovation

Innovation scholar Stephen P. Rosen defined three pathways for innovation. Each employed the concept of a “combat arm.” As Rosen defined it, “A combat arm is a functional division within the military in which one weapon system dominates the way in which its units fight.” Combat arms represent technological systems. In the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, U.S. Air Force fighters, bombers, transports, and eventually missiles, particularly ICBMs, represented combat arms (as did other families of systems). The creation of a new combat arm is a major technological innovation. The new combat arm does not simply do an existing task set better. It creates a new task set (technique, mental architecture) of at least operational-level importance.³⁶ A major military innovation represents a historically significant technological development comparable to the spread of electrical generating systems or global communications. Despite the rhetoric of defense contractors and others, major military innovations are rare.

A second type of innovation is “a change in one of the primary combat arms of a service in the way it fights.” Rosen allowed that a new mental architecture using existing components in novel ways to alter strategic and operational contexts represented a historically significant change.³⁷ For example, prior to World War II, many nations possessed tanks, airplanes, trucks, and radios, but during the interwar years the Wehrmacht developed an intellectually coherent architecture to integrate these technological systems. This restored rapid mobility and heavy thrust to the Germans. They called it “blitzkrieg,” and we know the results. Blitzkrieg created new combat arms, disrupted existing relations between combat arms, forced existing branches to change, and eliminated others. It then guided the development of improved components.³⁸ A third form of innovation “involves a change in the relation of a combat arm to other combat arms and a downgrading or abandoning of older concepts of operation and possibly of a formerly dominant weapon.”³⁹ For example, the first American ICBM stood its first nuclear alert in late 1959. By the midsixties, there were more American ICBMs on nuclear alert than long-range bombers. Since 1991, no bombers have stood daily nuclear alerts. The ICBM has provided the bulk of the American nuclear deterrent able to fire an immediate response to an attack. The relationship between the combat arms of bomber fleets and ICBMs had changed, meaning the ICBM was a major military innovation.

Two additional terms usefully describe technological change. Innovation scholar Terry Pierce distinguished between “disruptive” innovations and “sustaining” innovations. A disruptive innovation equates to Rosen’s new combat arm. A disruptive innovation may or may not have new technical components, but its mental architecture is novel.⁴⁰ A disruptive innovation when first developed, blitzkrieg was refined by the Germans for years before it stunned Europe. The Germans used the same means as other armies, but they used them better. ICBMs were new technical components, and they had a new mental architecture. They were a disruptive innovation. Pierce considered that an incremental or modular change that improved performance but left “the essential workings of that organization unaltered” a “sustaining innovation.”⁴¹ Rosen called this “reform.”⁴² Such change is a limited form of innovation in which an organization realizes it is not performing as it should and adjusts to improve. Sustaining innovations are incremental or modular.⁴³ An incremental innovation might add a better engine to a rocket or a more powerful radio repeater to a satellite. Taking an existing family of missiles and updating several subsystems and adding new capabilities, such as going from the Minuteman I missile to the Minuteman II and then III, represented modular sustaining innovations. Air Force general Bernard Schriever created a unique paradigm to guide missile technology development, acquisition, and procurement, and he then worked to improve and reform it. He performed sustaining innovations on his original disruptive innovation. Overall, the ICBM was a new combat arm, a major military innovation, a disruptive innovation. Once Schriever secured its bureaucratic existence, its creators accomplished sustaining innovations to ensure its longevity.

System builders may enable or inhibit technological change. Military innovation scholars point to the importance of “specificity” as an enabler of these processes. As historian Williamson Murray defined it, specificity is the identification of a clearly stated problem or problem set requiring a solution.⁴⁴ Consensus on the problem must exist; otherwise, Lincoln’s “divided house” metaphor applies. The specific problem for the ICBM builders was to create a reliable, accurate, survivable, and affordable ballistic-missile force capable of achieving national strategic objectives, namely deterring and winning a nuclear war.⁴⁵ As system builders develop potential solutions (i.e., means and ways), they must respect the evidence they compile; otherwise, self-deception will inhibit the innovation. Murray described this risk as the “misuse of history” or evidence.⁴⁶ An organizational culture open to new ideas and honest evaluation of the evidence is necessary. This culture must possess an attitude of open learning.⁴⁷ Thoughtless adherence to “our way” represents rigidity.

Rosen, Pierce, and Murray can be integrated with historian Thomas P. Hughes’ five-phase model of technological innovation. Their concepts apply to each of Hughes’ phases, including (1) invention and development, (2) transfer and diffusion, (3) system growth, (4) technological momentum, and (5) stability.⁴⁸ As Hughes understood, within one overarching national program, the multitude of subprograms will be at different phases. Any historical description necessarily reduces and simplifies this messy reality. The phases overlap, and as failures arise, internal feedback loops return portions of the system’s development to an earlier phase.

Within each phase, Hughes emphasized the role of different actors, including inventors, engineers, financiers, and managers.⁴⁹ This book does not assign primacy to any actors’ specific roles within given phases. Such distinctions depend upon the context, which determines what human skills predominate at different times, settings, and places. Some inventors were outstanding managers and engineers. Some were not. Few were Wall Street financiers. This book also recognizes an important distinction regarding military and government technology development. Presidents and congresses deciding the fates of ICBM programs did not fit any single occupational category. Leaders such as General Schriever were more than inventor or engineers. The contextual differences of national technological systems necessitated that the key decision makers and problem solvers work within many realms.

This book also revises Hughes’ developmental phases from five to four: (1) invention and development, (2) transfer and diffusion, (3) bureaucratic security, and (4) stability. My model considers momentum a force that bridges all phases. It is no longer an independent phase (it was Hughes’ fourth phase). In addition, phase three now reads “bureaucratic security.” A technology that achieves this has generated sufficient momentum to secure its bureaucratic existence. Other combat arms may threaten it, but the newcomer has reached adulthood and can defend itself. As the years pass and sustaining innovations occur, it becomes a stable member of the “old guard” (phase four).

Invention and development remain phase one. This is the infancy stage. All sustaining and disruptive innovations begin here. A problem exists. People try to understand it and want to solve it. Agents explore, test, and debate many roads not taken. No single paradigm dominates, and multiple mental architectures form. During the early era of ICBM invention and development, a number of competing deployment modes existed, including stationary above- and below-ground launch facilities and a variety of air-, sea-, and land-mobile modes. The silo was not preordained, and the mobile ICBM was a legitimate contender. The American nuclear triad could have become a dyad.⁵⁰

Technological transfer and diffusion begin during phase one but increase dramatically during phase two. Adolescence and the teen years equate to this phase. Like academics debating new ideas, technological innovators share knowledge via many means—staff studies, reports, simulations, military exercises, experiments, colloquia, journals, and the like. In the Pentagon’s internal battle for control of the ICBM mission, the antagonists had to share knowledge. Whether Air Force, Army, or Navy, they depended upon the same academic and industrial experts. General Schriever’s management system of concurrent and parallel development speeded transfer and diffusion within the American military, industrial, and academic bases. A similar scenario unfolded in the nuclear Navy. The success of transfer depends upon how successfully the technology and its cultural artifacts adapt to their new contexts.⁵¹

As noted, Hughes termed phase three “system growth.”⁵² During this phase, a technology overcomes “reverse salients.” A reverse salient is a critical problem that prevents progress in a portion of a technology’s development and thereby inhibits further growth of the overall system. Some problems are functional, such as an insufficiently powerful engine or a weak metal alloy. Some problems are theoretical, such as that the speed of light bounds travel times. Whether termed a reverse salient, functional failure, an anomaly, or critical problem, such a problem requires intense effort to solve.⁵³ Conflict and resolution occur, and some potential technological roads end. The survivor develops “momentum,” which Hughes describes as the fourth stage of technology development.⁵⁴ But momentum is a phenomenon, not a phase. It commences, if only minutely, when a potential technological solution emerges in phase one. Whether it grows depends upon many contextual factors, but as proponents solve reverse salients, they squeeze competitors. If skilled in the halls of bureaucracy, they may well eliminate their rivals, thereby attaining bureaucratic security. There-fore, this study revises Hughes’ model by dropping momentum as an independent phase and renaming his phase three as “bureaucratic security” (formerly it was “system growth”). The mobile ICBM competed well as a ballistic-missile operational concept through phases one and two; however, it failed twice to advance past phase three. Retaining funds and political capital for complex national-level technocratic programs such as the ICBM demands great skill within the halls of bureaucracy, laboratory, and factory. Large-scale military technological systems are political projects, and growth depends upon the innovator’s ability to secure political and financial support. As Kranzberg summed it up, “although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.”⁵⁵ During each phase, the agents of change must master and shape their contexts.

In this book’s third phase, bureaucratic security, the traditional combat arms accept the new technology as a peer partner, even if they do not like it. Imagine the new technology has become a young adult, college educated but still new to life’s big games. Typically, reaching this level takes at least ten years, and the demarcation between phases two and three is amorphous. Opponents simply have stopped their attempts to kill the newcomer, although they may try to contain it, to prevent further growth and the loss of their own favored technological systems. They may imagine re-absorbing the interloper at some future opportunity. A political agreement may exist to keep bureaucratic peace, or competing systems may have died. The original disruptive innovation or new combat arm transitions to a context comprising sustaining innovations. Sources of momentum include the aggregate of invested manufacturers, educational institutions teaching the new science and technology (and seeking new streams of student and research revenue to pay their bills), research institutions, and the growing body of support experts. Many agents have staked heavy capital investments (emotional, intellectual, physical, financial, etc.) to invent, develop, diffuse, and secure the technology.

The new technology then enters the fourth and final phase, stability. Survivors of the battles for supportive legislation and funding have “skin” in the sociotechnical system’s continued existence. They and their technical means become homogenized and specialized. Further specialization of knowledge, organization, and skill occurs.⁵⁶ This is the era of long-term sustaining innovations, incremental and modular. The human equivalent is the experienced professional man or woman, well established and respected in a career. The technological system now belongs to the old guard. Terry Pierce described the negative ramifications of technological momentum as the overvaluing of a trajectory of warfare.⁵⁷ At some point, the resources applied to sustaining the existing mental architecture and technical means outweigh the benefits of the technology for solving problems. What has happened? The system has reached the point of diminishing returns. Context, including the technological ambient, has changed, and the original strategic or operational problems no longer exist, or opportunities exist to solve them via new and better ways and means. As any astute follower of military affairs realizes, service attempts to shed older but major weapons systems demonstrate that technological momentum is a force to consider once a technology attains stability. Imagine the uproar if the United States Navy decided to discard its aircraft carrier fleet, the Army its tanks, or the Air Force its manned fighter planes.

To summarize, this book’s technology development phases include (1) invention and development, (2) transfer and diffusion, (3) bureaucratic security, and (4) stability. Momentum bridges all phases. My revisions to Professor Hughes’ model convert momentum from a phase to an ongoing phenomenon. I redefine his third phase as “bureaucratic security” and refer to the final phase, “system stability,” as phase four, not phase five. As the technological system evolves through the phases, its homogeneity, specialization, and conservatism toward outside technologies increases. Those operating, maintaining, and sustaining the system must be doubly aware of rigidity and the misuse of evidence. The innovation becomes a dominant paradigm, but it will remain so only insofar as it fits the context and solves the specific problems that enabled its development. Once the context changes, including the disappearance of the original problem set or the lack of a comparable substitute, it has outlived its usefulness. It must then re-generate sufficient momentum to address whatever new problems exist or suffer death, unless its old momentum is strong enough to guarantee an unjustified existence.

Embarking on the Road Not Taken

The framework assembled within the previous sections provides a mental architecture within which to interpret technological roads not taken. It does not replace the historian’s tool kit but adds to it; therefore, it is a sustaining innovation. It shortens Hughes’ model of technological change from five phases to four and includes terminology from innovation studies. It expands technology’s definition to emphasize its mental aspect, and it defines strategy. The discussion now incorporates the road not taken. As noted, strategy and technology require mental architectures. Within the military context, theory and planning develop these. Military planning—any sentient planning—reflects these architectures. Some forms of planning are exact, particularly the time-phasing of forces into a theater of operations or the assignment of weapons to destroy certain targets. Other forms are less quantified and more qualified. These become roads not taken. As Andrew Krepinevich, a defense analyst and current president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has explained, developing alternative courses of action helps actors to avoid ignoring “risks in the hopes of muddling through . . . to take uncertainty into account to identify areas of potential risk, and to employ planning tools, like scenarios, to narrow the range of uncertainty.”⁵⁸ His description reifies the blended social science/humanities architecture detailed earlier within this chapter’s Brodie-Clausewitz discussion.

In all its forms, planning generates many potential scenarios and outcomes, some more notable than others. Planners study and account for internal elements as well as for the external elements. At its heart, planning is the intellectual consideration of the pertinent factors, the forming of a hypothesis, and the testing of that hypothesis via simulation, experiment, or other available means. Each of these is a road not taken and provides evidence with which to conduct historical analysis. The steps parallel this book’s revisions to Hughes’ model. Professionals invent, develop, diffuse, and test new ways and means. Those that survive, grow. Seeing the mistakes helps historians and contemporary strategists.

In military planning, the mounds of staff studies, scenarios, and potential alternative courses of action represent Staudenmaier’s road not taken. Untaken roads were potential options that actors studied and eventually disregarded. If the planners worked carefully, the untaken roads represented critical decision points within an actor’s thinking. They shaped the actors’ contextual ambient. Studying the full range of options available to actors allows the historian to improve his or her analysis to answer, “Why did they do what they did? What considerations influenced the various constituencies? How did inertia develop? Who gained, lost? Why? And, so what?” By implication, the road not taken illustrates the relationship between strategy, technology, and innovation. It is a worthy way to study the mobile ICBM or any technology.