An Untaken Road. Steven A. Pomeroy
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