An Untaken Road. Steven A. Pomeroy
of reports. The first, Where We Stand, assessed American and British aerospace technology vis-à-vis the Axis. While technical components, particularly Germany’s supersonic wind tunnels, impressed the team, it was the associated mental architectures of managing technological development that impressed von Karman most.16 He wrote the German V-2 was “the most outstanding technical achievement” of wartime aeronautics. He identified management and organization as key reasons for this. The German system had provided “under a single leadership in one organization, experts in aerodynamics, structural design, electronics, servomechanisms, gyros and control devices, and propulsion; in fact, every group required for the development of a complete missile.” Arnold and von Karman appreciated the German innovation, and a decade later in 1954, this description fit the American ICBM effort.
While the mental achievement of organizing such work impressed him, von Karman felt that “the most important result of the German effort in this field [rocketry] was to show that winged missiles are superior in performance to finned missiles,” a conclusion consistent with wartime American efforts to develop glide and cruise missiles but ignore ballistic missiles. As political scientists Emily Goldman and Andrew Ross have noted, the amount of cultural compatibility between the transmitter and receiver of transferred technology determines how closely the receiver adopts the technology.17 The Americans and Germans differed politically, but they were science and engineering cousins. The Germans’ lessons nestled comfortably in the American bosom, particularly within an air force built upon long-range, winged strike platforms. They affected the trajectory of American missile research for years. Until the initiation of a crash program to build the Atlas ICBM, the United States dithered with ballistic missiles. Americans concentrated their missile research and development on cruise missiles, but once they accepted the necessity of a long-range ballistic missile, they developed management techniques consistent with von Karman’s observations.18
By the end of World War II, the United States had duplicated the German V-1 cruise missile, but von Karman cautioned Arnold, “The task is far beyond the scope of inventing gadgets and trying to make them work.” Von Karman thought it was insufficient to copy Nazi technology without serious contemplation of future wartime requirements. He understood the importance of a coherent mental architecture for military means, and he accelerated the development of new technical components. He saw an “urgent need of a systematic analysis of the various tasks which manned airplanes equipped with bombs, guns, and rockets perform, and which now may be performed by pilotless craft,” a description of technical means decades in the future. For future long-range strategic bombers, he envisaged “two types of pilotless aircraft, both with wings, one with a high trajectory reaching far into the outer atmosphere, and the other designed for level flight at high altitudes.” He envisaged the first weapon as a multiple-stage rocket that lifted an aircraft-like vehicle into space to conduct long-range bombing missions. He foresaw as the second weapon “a supersonic pilotless aircraft flying at altitudes of from 20,000 to say, 60,000 feet” but believed an achievable “intermediate step might be a pilotless aircraft traveling at high subsonic speeds . . . about 600 miles per hour at 40,000 feet.” Those parameters matched the capabilities of the first American intercontinental cruise missile.19
Funding and acquiring such weapons required public support. Arnold understood how to win the discourse from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. In a February 1946 piece written for National Geographic Magazine, he explained his ideas to the American public. Stressing the importance of the long-range ground-to-ground ballistic missile, he was certain it would become “the strategic long-range bombardment airplane of the future.” Arnold’s thought was an Air Forces heresy. Although he never said the day of the manned bomber was over, he recognized the inherent offensive aspects of the ballistic missile. He commented the V-2 was “ideally suited to deliver atomic explosives because effective defense against it is extremely difficult. Now and for the moment, the only defense seen for the future is its destruction prior to launching.” He foresaw extending the range of missiles from the V-2’s 250 miles to over three thousand miles and assigning them a polar trajectory, because that was the shortest path to Soviet targets. Arnold believed the United States had to have such offensive weapons, and he stressed that protecting them against enemy attack required the Army Air Forces to “make them harder to detect and destroy.” He envisioned the nuclear-armed ICBM, although neither he nor von Karman specified whether mobility was a useful operational concept.20
A Road Abandoned
Economic restraints and an anticipated development period of no less than ten years doomed any prospect of ballistic missiles in immediate military use. Meanwhile, in September 1947, the Army Air Forces became a separate service, the United States Air Force, which held continued faith in the bomber, a familiar and proven technology. Simply, the winged bomber possessed technological momentum no other military means could arrest. It had advanced to the final stage, phase four—stability. The money the Air Force spent on missiles went into winged cruise missiles such as von Karman detailed. Historian Edmund Beard contends that something beyond budget and technical limitations was at work. Believing the Air Force culturally preferred winged vehicles, he notes how during World War II the Army Air Forces emphasized strategic bombing. Its basic doctrine stressed the indivisibility of airpower to exploit massing many attacking aircraft and using their inherent maneuverability to destroy and demoralize the enemy. Bombing from winged aircraft was central to the Air Force’s bureaucratic existence. Missiles might augment the bomber, but they would not yet replace it.21
In his classic analysis of Air Force culture, The Icarus Syndrome, historian Carl Builder comments, “The Air Force’s love of technology is the result of the technological era that crested around 1950 and dominated the decades on each side of that peak.”22 Winged vehicles starred in this era, but, Builder contends, “Arnold’s love for technology and his devotion to the ends of air power theory” outweighed his love for the traditional manned aircraft.23 Arnold had pursued his vision of unmanned aircraft as missiles since his earliest officer days, and his realistic review of missile development illustrates the technical reasons why Arnold, von Karman, and the Air Force believed winged cruise missiles represented a better technical road than ICBMs. Unlike cruise missiles, rockets attained speeds far greater than aircraft, and they did not rely on aerodynamic lift. Ranges of thousands of miles demanded powerful engines to carry massive amounts of fuel and oxidizer. The day’s ballistic missile propelled and guided itself only during the first portions of powered flight; the era’s guidance, navigation, and control systems were too inaccurate, unreliable, and heavy. They were unsuited for the dynamics of long ballistic flights. Once the re-entry vehicle (a heat-resistant, aerodynamic casing that enclosed the explosive warhead) released, it travelled a free and uncontrolled trajectory. The laws of Kepler and Newton commanded it. Winged vehicles did not share these problems. Bombers and cruise missiles were similar, and until later in the 1950s the sizes and masses of the available atomic and nuclear weapons outstripped the ballistic missile’s ability to deliver them. Culturally comfortable, intercontinental and medium-range cruise missiles were sustaining innovations of the bomber. They fit the Air Force’s context.
The Air Force excelled at re-deploying aircraft across globe and battlefield. Inherently flexible once airborne, their launch bases were immobile and inflexible. Scattering forces required a network of bases. To disperse airplanes, pilots could take off and land at another base. Officers wanting to disperse ground-launched cruise missiles, however, had to move each missile’s launch base. They could not fly the cruise missiles to another base; the weapons only flew when launched against a target. Worse yet, the capability to transport a missile lessened operational responsiveness, meaning the time required to deploy, set up, and respond to a launch order. The Matador cruise missile sent to Europe in 1954 provides an example. Costing only a quarter of the price of a 1950s fighter aircraft (which it looked like), it was used by the Air Force in place of manned aircraft to attack heavily defended targets. Matador was a tactical weapon ranging seven hundred miles, much less than an ICBM. It was a transportable but unresponsive system, in that Matadors did not travel to their field launch sites in a ready-to-launch configuration. Crews towed them in four pieces to a field site; once there, ten people using a crane needed ninety minutes to assemble the fuselage, wings, warhead, and booster. Upon launch, the guidance system required