History of military technology

[1] Physicists also contributed to the war effort, developing wireless communication technologies and sound-based methods of detecting U-boats, resulting in the first tenuous long-term connections between academic science and the military.

Mathematical cryptography, meteorology, and rocket science were also central to the war effort, with military-funded wartime advances having a significant long-term effect on each discipline.

Following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, military funding of science has decreased substantially, but much of the American military-scientific complex remains in place.

During the Revolution, even natural scientists participated directly, attempting to create “weapons more powerful than any we possess” to aid the cause of the new French Republic, though there were no means for the revolutionary army to fund such work.

Still, independent inventors, scientists and engineers were largely responsible for these drastic changes in military technology (with the exception of the development of battleships, which could only have been created through organized large-scale effort).

Prior to the war, the American military ran a few small laboratories as well as the Bureau of Standards, but independent inventors and industrial firms predominated.

The powerful new technologies that led to trench warfare, however, reversed the traditional advantage of fast-moving offensive tactics; fortified positions supported by machine guns and artillery resulted in high attrition but strategic stalemate.

A wide array of research was conducted on the physiological effects of other gases, such and hydrogen cyanide, arsenic compounds, and a host of complex organic chemicals.

In fact, every effort was made to create an attractive research environment for top scientists, and chemical weapons development continued apace—though in secret—through the interwar years and into World War II.

In the United States, the established tradition of engineering was explicitly competing with the rising discipline of physics for World War I military largess.

Submarine detection was the most important problem that both the physicists and inventors hoped to solve, as German U-boats were decimating the crucial naval supply lines from the U.S. to England.

The introduction of military aircraft during the war as well as the role of wind and weather in the success or failure of gas attacks meant meteorological advice was in high demand.

German and Allied investigations of the possibility of a nuclear bomb began in 1939 at the initiative of civilian scientists, but by 1942 the respective militaries were heavily involved.

After Japan's surrender immediately following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many scientists returned to academia or industry, but the Manhattan Project infrastructure was too large—and too effective—to be dismantled wholesale; it became the model for future military-scientific work, in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In the years immediately following World War II, the military was by far the most significant patron of university science research in the U.S., and the national labs also continued to flourish.

[20] After two years in political limbo (but with work on nuclear power and bomb manufacture continuing apace) the Manhattan Project became a permanent arm of the government as the Atomic Energy Commission.

The need to keep up with corporate technology research (which was receiving the lion's share of defense contracts) also prompted many science labs to establish close relationships with industry.

Virtually unlimited funds enabled two decades of research that only began producing useful technologies by the end of the 50s; even the final version of the SAGE command and control system had only marginal military utility.

American geodesy, oceanography, and seismology grew from small sub-disciplines in into full-fledged independent disciplines as for several decades, virtually all funding in these fields came from the Department of Defense.

Even for geodetic data, new secrecy guidelines worked to restrict collaboration in a field that had formerly been fundamentally international; the Figure of the Earth had geopolitical significance beyond questions of pure geoscience.

Still, geodesists were able to retain enough autonomy and subvert secrecy limitations enough to make use of the findings of their military research to overturn some of the fundamental theories of geodesy.

[29] Historian Paul Forman, in his seminal 1987 article, proposed that not only had military funding of science greatly expanded the scope and significance of American physics, it also initiated "a qualitative change in its purposes and character.

In turn, critics of the distortionist thesis, beginning with Daniel Kevles, deny that the military "seduced American physicists from, so to speak, a 'true basic physics'.

[33] Most recent scholarship has moved toward a tempered version of Forman's thesis, in which scientists retained significant autonomy despite the radical changes brought about by military funding.