Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience.
Edited by Merritt Roe Smith. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Pp 1 - 380; figures, tables, notes, illustrations, index. $13.95 (paper).
Admitting your field is "viewed with some suspicion in academic circles...because it appears esoteric or antiquarian or trivial or all of the above," is not the best rhetorical strategy to adopt when introducing a potentially skeptical audience to revolutionary or even evolutionary ideas. Yet, Alex Roland makes this crucial mistake in the final essay of Merritt Roe Smith's Military Enterprise and Technological Change(p. 348), casting a shadow of doubt over a ground-breaking, but overly self-conscious, volume.
Nine prominent military and technological historians have combined efforts to argue, "that military enterprise has played a central role in America's rise as an industrial power and that since the early days of the republic, industrial might has been intimately connected with military might (p. 5)." Mumford and others have linked industry and the military before, as the authors clearly admit; but Smith and his colleagues--including David Noble, Susan Douglas, and David Hounshell--take the thesis further. They argue military influences on technology ultimately effected technological and social development in society-at-large: "Owing to its enduring character, its scale, and its demand for materiel of the highest quality, military enterprise has exerted a powerful influence in determining the institutional and technical dimensions of the modern industrial era (pp. 1-2)." Smith, in the introduction, documents at least five areas in which the military play a crucial role in the development of technology or the influence of social structures: design and dissemination of newtechnologies; management; testing instrumentation, and quality control; uniformity and order, and innovation. Each essay takes up the major thesis and its subdivisions 
and applies demonstrates them using varying perspectives on technological change--including technological determinist, and social force, social product, and social process arguments--with varying results.
One essay in particular provides an excellent conceptual framework for addressing the volume's effectiveness. Charles F. O'Connell, Jr.'s, "The Corps of Engineers and the Rise of Modern Management, 1827-1856," illustrates the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of the volume's argumentative style. O'Connell's essay exhibits boldness and certainty. Like the other essayists he presents a new thesis and provides some excellent evidence to support his conclusion. However, he tries to apply his thesis in too wide a context, and therein lies his--and the volume's--essential problem. He contends, "the organizational and administrative experience" brought by U.S. Army officers "to the railroads [1827-50] had a great influence on the early development of the art of management in the United States (p. 88). His contention intentioally refutes Alfred Chandler's well established thesis that the railroads themselves were responsible, as Smith writes, "for creating modern industrial management (p. 86)." O'Connell's argument is supportable in the limited context in which he applies it: a few groups of engineers and other army personnel and a few railroads. Claiming general national and temporal applicability, however, ignores the tremendous impact of commercial interests and private concerns in the development of American railroads.
The failed distinction between specific and general application is seen elsewhere in the volume. Smith writes in the introduction: "The fact that the great surge of the American steel industry to world leadership coincides with the American Naval Renaissance of the 1880's and 1890's is no accident. This is not to say, however, that military enterprise was the sole reason for the American steel industry's rise to preeminence during the late nineteenth century. But it was certainly a major factor (p. 20)." Jonathan Hughes has documented that the Bessemer steel-making process was only successfully introduced in the United States after the Civil War, and the open hearth method in the 1880's.1America only had the capability to make great quantities of steel by the time of the American Naval Renaissance. The Renaissance itself was not the cause. Furthermore, Fogel and North have shown the railroad "leading sector thesis" to be a myth,2and the railroad industry was a far larger enterprise than naval building in the 1880's and 1890's. The attempt to prove a dominant role for the Navy in steel making, or the Army in the railroads, must confront this obstacle. Smith, O'Connell, and the other authors attempt to go around it and this limits the effectiveness of their arguments.
The wide ranging assertions are a symptom of an overwrought desire to be original. The authors present a ground-breaking work, but at the same time they fear certain historians will dismiss their claims because of the work's character as a military and technological history. Self-consciousness, expressed so explicitly by Alex Roland, dominates the volume and weakens its argumentative strength. Despite this reservation, on the whole the volume contributes a great deal to an understanding of the role of the military, technology, and society, in the process of technological change. Susan Douglas's essay, "Technological Innovation and Organizational Change: The Navy's Adoption of Radio, 1899-1919," provides a clear example of exceptional historical writing and syncretic thought: a melding of technological determinism and social process. David Noble's "Command Performance: A Perspective on Military Enterprise and Technological Change," presents clear challenges to the idea that military influence in technology has been absolutely beneficial to society. Peter Buck's essay "Adjusting to Military Life: The Social Sciences Go to War, 1941-50," does not belong in the collection however. It is hardly related to theme of military enterprise and technological change. The reasons for its inclusion remain a mystery.
The essays are on the whole well written, informative, well-argued, and entertaining. However, the volume suffers from a cacophony of theories and opinions. Anyone looking for a well-oiled conceptual description of military-technology should look elsewhere. Anyone looking for an informative, if at times disordered, narrative of particular episodes in the history of military technology will be well served by the volume. In addition, all but Dr. Buck's essay hold to the general theme and argument of the book that "depicts the military in dynamic interaction with the business community (p. 11)" and society at large.
Military Enterprise and Technological Changeserves as an excellent introduction to the role of technology in the military, and the role of the military in creating or emulating social structures. Historians of technology, economic historians, military historians, will find this volume interesting and stimulating. Alex Roland's concluding bibliographic essay--"Technology and War"--can assist those who wish to pursue this field more deeply. Smith and his colleagues have succeeded in producing a very useful, if flawed, volume.
1Jonathan Hughes, American Economic History, United States: HarperCollins, 1990, p. 329.
2Ibid, 273.