An Untaken Road. Steven A. Pomeroy
the negative ramifications of technological momentum as the overvaluing of a trajectory of warfare.57 At some point, the resources applied to sustaining the existing mental architecture and technical means outweigh the benefits of the technology for solving problems. What has happened? The system has reached the point of diminishing returns. Context, including the technological ambient, has changed, and the original strategic or operational problems no longer exist, or opportunities exist to solve them via new and better ways and means. As any astute follower of military affairs realizes, service attempts to shed older but major weapons systems demonstrate that technological momentum is a force to consider once a technology attains stability. Imagine the uproar if the United States Navy decided to discard its aircraft carrier fleet, the Army its tanks, or the Air Force its manned fighter planes.
To summarize, this book’s technology development phases include (1) invention and development, (2) transfer and diffusion, (3) bureaucratic security, and (4) stability. Momentum bridges all phases. My revisions to Professor Hughes’ model convert momentum from a phase to an ongoing phenomenon. I redefine his third phase as “bureaucratic security” and refer to the final phase, “system stability,” as phase four, not phase five. As the technological system evolves through the phases, its homogeneity, specialization, and conservatism toward outside technologies increases. Those operating, maintaining, and sustaining the system must be doubly aware of rigidity and the misuse of evidence. The innovation becomes a dominant paradigm, but it will remain so only insofar as it fits the context and solves the specific problems that enabled its development. Once the context changes, including the disappearance of the original problem set or the lack of a comparable substitute, it has outlived its usefulness. It must then re-generate sufficient momentum to address whatever new problems exist or suffer death, unless its old momentum is strong enough to guarantee an unjustified existence.
Embarking on the Road Not Taken
The framework assembled within the previous sections provides a mental architecture within which to interpret technological roads not taken. It does not replace the historian’s tool kit but adds to it; therefore, it is a sustaining innovation. It shortens Hughes’ model of technological change from five phases to four and includes terminology from innovation studies. It expands technology’s definition to emphasize its mental aspect, and it defines strategy. The discussion now incorporates the road not taken. As noted, strategy and technology require mental architectures. Within the military context, theory and planning develop these. Military planning—any sentient planning—reflects these architectures. Some forms of planning are exact, particularly the time-phasing of forces into a theater of operations or the assignment of weapons to destroy certain targets. Other forms are less quantified and more qualified. These become roads not taken. As Andrew Krepinevich, a defense analyst and current president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has explained, developing alternative courses of action helps actors to avoid ignoring “risks in the hopes of muddling through . . . to take uncertainty into account to identify areas of potential risk, and to employ planning tools, like scenarios, to narrow the range of uncertainty.”58 His description reifies the blended social science/humanities architecture detailed earlier within this chapter’s Brodie-Clausewitz discussion.
In all its forms, planning generates many potential scenarios and outcomes, some more notable than others. Planners study and account for internal elements as well as for the external elements. At its heart, planning is the intellectual consideration of the pertinent factors, the forming of a hypothesis, and the testing of that hypothesis via simulation, experiment, or other available means. Each of these is a road not taken and provides evidence with which to conduct historical analysis. The steps parallel this book’s revisions to Hughes’ model. Professionals invent, develop, diffuse, and test new ways and means. Those that survive, grow. Seeing the mistakes helps historians and contemporary strategists.
In military planning, the mounds of staff studies, scenarios, and potential alternative courses of action represent Staudenmaier’s road not taken. Untaken roads were potential options that actors studied and eventually disregarded. If the planners worked carefully, the untaken roads represented critical decision points within an actor’s thinking. They shaped the actors’ contextual ambient. Studying the full range of options available to actors allows the historian to improve his or her analysis to answer, “Why did they do what they did? What considerations influenced the various constituencies? How did inertia develop? Who gained, lost? Why? And, so what?” By implication, the road not taken illustrates the relationship between strategy, technology, and innovation. It is a worthy way to study the mobile ICBM or any technology.
The Soviet Army today possesses such armaments and such firepower as no Army has ever had. I want to re-emphasize that we already have such an amount of nuclear weapons—atomic and hydrogen weapons and an appropriate number of rockets to deliver them to the territory of a potential aggressor—that if some madman were to provoke an attack on our country or on other socialist countries, we could literally wipe the country or countries attacking us off the face of the earth.
NIKITA S. KHRUSHCHEV, 19601
Nikita Khrushchev bluffed. In 1960, the Soviet Union had two ICBMs, and each of those carried one warhead. He did have sixty-three SLBM launchers and warheads, but the best of these missiles ranged no more than six hundred kilometers. His bomber force had 138 aircraft and 239 weapons, not insignificant numbers but small when compared to those of its American counterpart. The American air force’s Strategic Air Command possessed 1,735 long-range bombers, including 1,178 sleek but soon-to-be-retired B-47 Stratojets and 538 new B-52 Stratofortress heavy bombers, accompanied by nineteen supersonic B-58 Hustlers. Additional B-52s and B-58s were coming. To top off bomber fuel tanks for long flights to the Soviet Union and other targets, 689 KC-97 and 405 KC-135 aerial tankers stood ready. The bomber was the primary U.S. long-range nuclear attack weapon, but in a sign that times were changing, SAC also owned twelve Atlas ICBMs and by year’s end had five on alert and expected delivery of more, along with its Titan and upcoming Minuteman ICBMs. It anticipated a portion of its Minuteman force roaming the national rail network. At sea, the American navy did not yet have Polaris sea-launched ballistic missile submarines prowling, but they were heading to operational capability. The United States had been a nation slow to develop ballistic missiles, but American strategists now sought to deploy missiles in the air, on the land, and under the sea. Sun Tzu may have counseled the wisdom of deceiving one’s enemy, but Khrushchev’s lies played with fire.2
Khrushchev knew he was bluffing, but the Americans perceived Soviet power through the lenses of propaganda and technological achievements such as Sputnik. Technology and rhetoric led American leaders to believe the Soviet Union could threaten the United States with a nuclear attack. To a limited extent it could, but the American counterpunch would have devastated Mother Russia. As the Soviets sought their security ends via a strong strategic nuclear force, particularly ICBMs, the United States terminated its failed intercontinental cruise-missile programs and initiated a crash ballistic-missile program. Khrushchev’s bluster and Soviet technical achievements provided the American missile community an opportunity for which it was prepared.3
Remarkable—at the end of World War II, large parts of the Soviet Union had stood ruined, but the Soviets possessed powerful armed forces. For many years, the Soviets had faced Hitler’s worst, as well as the depredations of their own national leaders. At war’s end, the Red Army provided unsurpassed land power and hosted devastating ground support air forces, but Russia had much to rebuild. In contrast, the United States, virtually untouched by enemy arms, had begun the war as a global industrial and economic power. It ended as a victorious superpower.
American technological, industrial, and economic hubris swelled. It possessed uncontested naval superiority, a victorious army (if smaller than that of the Soviet Union), and the only long-range air force capable of delivering atomic