An Untaken Road. Steven A. Pomeroy
is difficult to define. Understanding technology depends on knowing the relationship between complementary variables, the mental and the physical, but as physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle reminds us, there are limits to which an observer may know complementary variables. The word “technology” emphasizes the mental element but implies a physical artifact. The word’s roots are tekhne and logos. Tekhne means an art, a skill, “engineering in the mind’s eye.”25 According to Mumford, tekhne made “no distinction between industrial production and ‘fine’ or symbolic art.”26 This perspective admitted the possibility of symbolism and its nonmaterial character as products of tekhne. Therefore, technology may be abstract. The second root, logos, represents reason as a controlling force, which implies discourse, discussion, and study.27 Each root focuses on the historical actor’s intellectual efforts, but today most citizens regard technology first as an artifact (an iPhone, perhaps?) rather than considering the mental activity subsuming the artifact.28 At times, historians struggle with this Janus-like feature of technology. Mumford disliked the word, contending it overly emphasized “an abstract, rational pursuit.”29 He preferred the term “technics,” by which he meant “an umbrella category of tools and utensils that figure in all of recorded history.” Technics are tools. Creating and using tools, utensils, and machines demand specialized “technique”—that is, proven ways of creating and using them. Historians accept the concepts of tools, machines, and technique, but they debate whether a mental schema of organization (like government or large-scale “ways” of doing work) is a technology. Each element’s weighting varies with the historian’s contextual interpretation.30 In this study, technology comprises physical and mental elements, a point requiring further discussion.
Historians Kranzberg and Pursell highlighted the mental aspect but respected the physical. They considered technology “much more than tools and artifacts, machines and processes. It deals with human work, with man’s attempts to satisfy his wants by human action on physical objects.”31 Later, historian Alex Roland defined technology as the “systematic, purposeful manipulation of the material world.”32 As he explained, technology has, “four components: materials, technique, power, and tools or machines. Thus, technology is the process of applying power by some technique through the medium of some tool or machine to alter some material in a useful way. These components are necessary and sufficient to describe any technology at any time, but they are static; they do not address technological change.”33 By including technique, this definition incorporated the mental but emphasized the material components through which technique channeled. Roland emphasized the material world. To him, mental constructs, including government, were not technology.
The boundary remains debatable, particularly when one’s means and ways exist to influence the mental states, thoughts, and emotions of others (the effects of Al Qaeda or Islamic State Internet videos of beheadings or human immolations, for example). In the application of military technologies, the mental orchestration of the technical means is often more important than the physical tools. The broad term for this is “doctrine,” or even “theory of warfare,” which at its best guides military operations to achieve objectives. Neither doctrine nor warfighting theory should be rigid, because they significantly influence the development of military technology. Roland’s definition rejects as “technology” the broad human intellectual and organizational schemas needed to fight wars, but they are the techniques of warfare and its preparations. This history modifies Roland’s definition by including mental architectures as technique.
As with strategy, a word equation helps illustrate technology:
Technology = mental architecture + components.
Components are the equipment, tools, and machines needed to do the work, what Mumford termed technics. It does not matter whether they have a physical manifestation visible to humans. The “plus sign” within the equation represents technique relating the tools and the human understanding of how and why to use them best.34 The checklists that ICBM operators used to launch their missiles represented technique at the tactical, or lowest, level of war. The SAC operational plans that integrated aerial tankers, reconnaissance, bombers, and missiles represented operational-level technique, and the overall integration of all American nuclear forces represented strategic-level technique. The term “mental architecture” parallels the historian’s understanding of technology as artifact, meaning, and use. It encompasses the unified intellectual coherence behind, within, and around the component, technique, discourse, and theory that allows the whole to obtain results, be they physical, mental, or both. The body of knowledge developed around ICBMs, including their use in wartime, represented mental architectures instrumental to the ICBM innovation.35
Strategy, Technology, and Innovation
Innovation scholar Stephen P. Rosen defined three pathways for innovation. Each employed the concept of a “combat arm.” As Rosen defined it, “A combat arm is a functional division within the military in which one weapon system dominates the way in which its units fight.” Combat arms represent technological systems. In the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, U.S. Air Force fighters, bombers, transports, and eventually missiles, particularly ICBMs, represented combat arms (as did other families of systems). The creation of a new combat arm is a major technological innovation. The new combat arm does not simply do an existing task set better. It creates a new task set (technique, mental architecture) of at least operational-level importance.36 A major military innovation represents a historically significant technological development comparable to the spread of electrical generating systems or global communications. Despite the rhetoric of defense contractors and others, major military innovations are rare.
A second type of innovation is “a change in one of the primary combat arms of a service in the way it fights.” Rosen allowed that a new mental architecture using existing components in novel ways to alter strategic and operational contexts represented a historically significant change.37 For example, prior to World War II, many nations possessed tanks, airplanes, trucks, and radios, but during the interwar years the Wehrmacht developed an intellectually coherent architecture to integrate these technological systems. This restored rapid mobility and heavy thrust to the Germans. They called it “blitzkrieg,” and we know the results. Blitzkrieg created new combat arms, disrupted existing relations between combat arms, forced existing branches to change, and eliminated others. It then guided the development of improved components.38 A third form of innovation “involves a change in the relation of a combat arm to other combat arms and a downgrading or abandoning of older concepts of operation and possibly of a formerly dominant weapon.”39 For example, the first American ICBM stood its first nuclear alert in late 1959. By the midsixties, there were more American ICBMs on nuclear alert than long-range bombers. Since 1991, no bombers have stood daily nuclear alerts. The ICBM has provided the bulk of the American nuclear deterrent able to fire an immediate response to an attack. The relationship between the combat arms of bomber fleets and ICBMs had changed, meaning the ICBM was a major military innovation.
Two additional terms usefully describe technological change. Innovation scholar Terry Pierce distinguished between “disruptive” innovations and “sustaining” innovations. A disruptive innovation equates to Rosen’s new combat arm. A disruptive innovation may or may not have new technical components, but its mental architecture is novel.40 A disruptive innovation when first developed, blitzkrieg was refined by the Germans for years before it stunned Europe. The Germans used the same means as other armies, but they used them better. ICBMs were new technical components, and they had a new mental architecture. They were a disruptive innovation. Pierce considered that an incremental or modular change that improved performance but left “the essential workings of that organization unaltered” a “sustaining innovation.”41 Rosen called this “reform.”42 Such change is a limited form of innovation in which an organization realizes it is not performing as it should and adjusts to improve. Sustaining innovations are incremental or modular.43 An incremental innovation might add a better engine to a rocket or a more powerful radio repeater to a satellite. Taking an existing family of missiles and updating several subsystems and adding new capabilities,