Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945

Thomas G. Mahnken

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231517881
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

No nation in recent history has placed greater emphasis on the role of technology in planning and waging war than the United States. In World War II the wholesale mobilization of American science and technology culminated in the detonation of the atomic bomb. Competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, combined with the U.S. Navy's culture of distributed command and the rapid growth of information technology, spawned the concept of network-centric warfare. And America's post-Cold War conflicts in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan have highlighted America's edge.

From the atom bomb to the spy satellites of the Cold War, the strategic limitations of the Vietnam War, and the technological triumphs of the Gulf war, Thomas G. Mahnken follows the development and integration of new technologies into the military and emphasizes their influence on the organization, mission, and culture of the armed services. In some cases, advancements in technology have forced different branches of the military to develop competing or superior weaponry, but more often than not the armed services have molded technology to suit their own purposes, remaining resilient in the face of technological challenges.

Mahnken concludes with an examination of the reemergence of the traditional American way of war, which uses massive force to engage the enemy. Tying together six decades of debate concerning U.S. military affairs, he discusses how the armed forces might exploit the unique opportunities of the information revolution in the future.

1

The Nuclear Revolution, 1945–1960

THE END OF World War II and the onset of the Cold War presented American soldiers and statesmen with a series of challenges. Perhaps the greatest was the need to craft a strategy and develop forces in response to a new security environment characterized by competition with the Soviet Union. At the same time, the U.S. military confronted the imperative of adapting to the advent of nuclear weapons. These dual challenges drove the U.S. armed forces to implement sweeping changes in the period from 1945 to 1960.

Nuclear weapons were Janus-faced, offering both opportunity and challenge. On one hand, the United States possessed first a monopoly, then a commanding lead, in nuclear weapons. The atomic bomb seemingly offered Washington the ability to counterbalance Moscow’s large conventional ground forces. On the other hand, the Soviet Union’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1949 and of long-range delivery means soon thereafter rendered the United States vulnerable to attack. The nuclear competition with the Soviet Union pushed the United States to invest in a vast air and space reconnaissance effort. Even more dramatically, the need to take advantage of the nuclear revolution, while also dealing with the vulnerability it created, led to a wholesale change in the way the United States organized, trained, and equipped its armed forces.

The nuclear revolution challenged the identity of each of the services. Should the Air Force be organized around manned bombers, or missiles? Would the ballistic-missile submarine supplant the aircraft carrier as the central component of the Navy? It also called into question the utility of traditional land campaigns and large-scale amphibious operations and—by extension—the very existence of the Army and Marine Corps. Nuclear weapons offered the armed services the opportunity to develop new capabilities and triggered a vigorous competition over new missions, including long-range missiles, space reconnaissance, and continental air defense. The nuclear age witnessed the rise of new elites within the services, such as missile operators in the Air Force and nuclear submariners within the Navy. By embracing the nuclear attack mission, the Air Force garnered the lion’s share of defense resources. By contrast, the Navy and, particularly, the Army were forced to justify their existence in nuclear terms.

Of course, not all innovations proved successful. Some, such as the Air Force’s development of a nuclear-powered aircraft and the Army’s pursuit of the pentomic division, led to dead ends. Other innovations—such as the strategic cruise missile—were failures in the 1950s but successes in later years.

In the end, the services proved resilient in the face of the nuclear challenge to their identity, structure and mission. Not only did technology influence the culture of the services, but the ethos of a service also shaped the technologies it pursued. For example, the Air Force and Navy preferred manned aircraft to missiles. The Army, for its part, tended to view nuclear weapons as highly effective artillery. Thus, although each of the services changed markedly in the decade and a half after World War II, in the end their prenuclear identities proved more resilient than technological enthusiasts would have predicted.

The Birth of the U.S.–Soviet Competition

The U.S. military entered the Cold War with a sense of confidence. Many defense experts felt that the United States would enjoy a monopoly on atomic weaponry for some time to come. General Leslie Groves, the former head of the Manhattan Project, which had produced the atomic bomb, believed that the Soviets would be unable to break the American atomic monopoly for two decades.¹ Vannevar Bush, the former chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under Franklin D. Roosevelt, agreed that the American nuclear monopoly was durable. As he wrote in 1949, “To build a large stock of atomic bombs is an undertaking that will strain the resources of any highly industrialized nation.”² The general belief among experts was that the threat of nuclear devastation would be so effective as to deter virtually all military challenges.

In fact, the American monopoly would last less than five years. On September 3, 1949, an Air Force WB-29 aircraft, flying between Japan and Alaska as part of the Air Force’s nuclear reconnaissance program, detected an unusual amount of radioactive particles in the atmosphere.³ This debris came from the Soviet Union’s first atomic test, which had occurred on August 29. Intelligence analysts rapidly understood the significance of the discovery.

Technology for Strategic Reconnaissance

The birth of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear competition, the secretive nature of the Soviet regime, the geographic depth of the Soviet Union, and the U.S. technological base all spurred the United States to pursue air and space reconnaissance technology. Reconnaissance aircraft and satellites helped the United States determine the size and composition of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and would also warn of impending attack.

The U.S. air and space reconnaissance program pushed the realm of technological possibility. It resulted in aircraft able to fly higher and faster than previous models. It spawned the ability not only to put a satellite in orbit, but also to photograph specific points on the ground and return the film safely to Earth. It also laid the groundwork for a technical collection infrastructure that continues to provide the bulk of U.S. intelligence more than a decade and a half after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The U.S. strategic reconnaissance program was a response to the U.S. government’s lack of information on the size and characteristics of the Soviet atomic program during the early years of the Cold War. Most intelligence on Soviet industry came from captured German aerial photographs and old maps. Such sources were of limited value in uncovering evidence of Soviet atomic research and development. Somewhat more helpful were debriefings of German scientists whom the Soviets captured at the end of World War II and later repatriated.⁴ Despite such tidbits, the United States entered its nuclear competition with the Soviet Union essentially blind.

Understanding Soviet nuclear research and development required the ability to overfly the Soviet Union. Early efforts included the Air Force’s Genetrix (WS-119L) program, which beginning in 1956 sent high-altitude balloons equipped with cameras drifting across Soviet territory. The program yielded meager results, however: the Air Force launched 516 balloons but was able to recover only 44 of them. Moreover, the U.S. violations of Soviet airspace sparked strong Soviet protests.⁵

Manned aircraft, and then unmanned satellites, would yield more useful information on Soviet military developments. Beginning in 1948, RB-29 reconnaissance aircraft assigned to the Air Force’s 72nd Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron carried out a series of photographic and electronic reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Arctic and Far East. Although their cameras allowed them to photograph Soviet territory from international airspace, flights along the Soviet periphery revealed little. With presidential approval, in early August the squadron began flying over Soviet territory. The first such mission, on August 5, lasted more than nineteen hours. Flying at altitudes of 35,000 feet or more, such aircraft used onboard instruments to identify and exploit gaps in the Soviet radar coverage and penetrate Soviet airspace. Although the Soviets sometimes detected the missions and scrambled fighters to intercept them, it was not until 1949 with the appearance of the MiG-15 Fagot that Moscow possessed an aircraft capable of intercepting the RB-29.⁶

During the early 1950s the Air Force used the RB-50 (a modification of the RB-29), the RB-45 Tornado, and later the RB-47 Stratojet to fly electronic intelligence (ELINT) missions over the Soviet Union. During these missions, aircraft would identify potential targets through their electronic emissions. They would also map Soviet radar coverage, giving SAC bombers the information they would need to penetrate Soviet air space in the event of nuclear war. Successful missions depended upon locating gaps in the Soviet radar network by monitoring Soviet radio and radar traffic. While such flights yielded valuable intelligence, they were extremely dangerous: between 1950 and 1959, the Air Force and Navy lost at least sixteen aircraft, with 164 crewmen killed on such missions.⁷

In order to reduce the risk to U.S. aircrews of such operations, the United States pursued space-based ELINT collection. Indeed, the first U.S. intelligence satellite was an ELINT satellite. The satellite, launched under the cover of the Galactic Radiation and Background (GRAB) project, was ostensibly designed to measure solar radiation. Its real purpose, known to fewer than two hundred people, was gathering signals from Soviet air defense radars that Navy and Air Force ELINT aircraft could not observe. The satellite, which orbited five hundred miles above the earth between July 1960 and August 1962, received radar signals and transmitted them to collection sites on the ground. Analysts on the ground recorded these transmissions and flew them to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where they were evaluated before being distributed to the National Security Agency.⁸ GRAB was followed by the Poppy satellite, which collected radar emissions from Soviet naval vessels from December 1962 to August 1977.⁹

The Bomber Gap and Strategic Air Reconnaissance

The need to determine the extent of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, as well as the size of the bomber force that would deliver it, drove the United States to develop innovative reconnaissance aircraft, such as the U-2 and A-12 Blackbird. The images these aircraft took helped deflate estimates of the Soviet bomber fleet.

The limited quantity and suspect quality of information on the Soviet nuclear buildup in the early 1950s led the U.S. intelligence community to overestimate the size of the Soviet bomber force. During the 1954 May Day parade the Soviet government for the first time revealed the existence of the M-4 Bison strategic bomber.¹⁰ That same year the jet-powered Tu-16 Badger appeared. The bomber’s emergence only a year after that of the first American jet bomber, the B-47, shocked U.S. intelligence analysts. A year later the Tu-95 Bear made its debut at the Tushino Air Show.

Western observers monitoring rehearsals for the 1955 Soviet Aviation Day parade reporte...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: The Nuclear Revolution, 1945–1960
• 2: Flexible Response, 1961–1975
• 3: Technology and the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975
• 4: Winning the Cold War, 1976–1990
• 5: The Gulf War and the Post–Cold War Era, 1991–2001
• 6: The Global War on Terrorism, 2001–2005
• Conclusion
• Index