may become an octogenarian, remaining on alert while its replacement fluxes in a turbulent context. In 2014, the Research and Development Corporation (RAND) reported that a new ICBM would cost billions of dollars more than sustaining the Minuteman III.19 Yet, as Air Force general Bernard Schriever understood, cost is a contextual factor, but its importance waxes and wanes. The situation, the context, has something to say, as do the human actors on all sides. American strategists and technologists have previously walked this path.
Over the past four years, the author has received telephone calls and other messages asking about the old mobile ICBM programs. The calling agencies included the Joint Chiefs of Staff Nuclear Operations Division, defense contractor Booz, Allen, Hamilton, and the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. They were working on future ICBM concepts, as was RAND. As they researched alternatives, they decided to walk again down the road of mobility. The Air Force plans to replace Minuteman III by 2030, possibly with a mobile system. This will be the first new American ICBM since Peacekeeper (formerly MX) attained initial capability in 1986. The public and those involved in the coming debate will serve themselves well by studying what happened during mobility’s heyday. Whether a mobile ICBM is a satisfactory technical means consistent with policy ways of achieving strategic objectives in the current American and global context remains an open question. This book contributes to those contemporary and historical debates by revealing a previously unknown discourse within American nuclear strategy and technology, that concerning the mobile ICBM. The lessons and framework apply to any national strategic and technological endeavor.
History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.
RANDOLPH S. BOURNE1
This chapter presents a midlevel schema of technological change tailored for a military context.2 With modifications, one may apply it to other contexts. Some might call it a theory, but that goes too far. As physicist Stephen Hawking has explained, a “theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.”3 Herein lays the rub. The presented schema, at best a framework, is not a theory because it does not predict. It is a guideline for understanding. This does not lessen its value. Many social science theories are similarly limited because they lack the verifiability of repeated and controlled scientific experimentation. Predicting from them only makes the user feel better about having made what is ultimately a qualitative or intuitive decision. The framework presented here fulfills a need historian Alex Roland identified: blending the methods of social science and history to promote “rigorous and impartial historical investigation informed by concepts of how other similar processes have evolved.”4 The schema borrows concepts the author has found usefully generalizable to explain technological change and innovation in a variety of times and contexts.
Important to understanding military technological change is the relationship between strategy and technology; therefore, the discussion first defines strategy and technology. It relates context with technology’s internal and external elements. This establishes a broad framework based upon the history of technology. Next, the argument unifies informal and formal reasoning as they pertain to strategy and technology. This portion of the chapter attunes with the intellectual terrain of Cold War strategists, providing background for understanding the strategic debates that swirled around the mobile ICBM. Lastly, the framework introduces concepts from military innovation studies. This synthesis completes the terminological and conceptual basis used to study the mobile ICBM as an alternative course of action.
Along with other nuclear force elements, the mobile ICBM was one system component within a larger set of mental architectures linking means and ways. These formed a solution set for multiple strategic problems focused on deterring, and if that failed, winning a nuclear war. Developing this network of components and concepts required decades of experimentation, false starts, failures, and successes. As the introduction notes, the historical worth of a road not taken arises from the fact that the actors actually walked the road. For their own reasons, the historical actors elected not to finish their journeys down such paths, but they went far enough to decide the technologies’ feasibility. The historically significant road not taken, therefore, was not a “pie in the sky” solution, interesting only to antiquarians. Furthermore, the technological road not taken did not require construction of a full-scale technological system for the actors to realize, “No. This does not work. It is not the right means.” Resource and other contextual constraints prohibited it. This is why the ICBM system builders, comprising individuals from government, militaries, industries, universities, and other sources, accomplished so many staff studies, tests, and simulations. These represented intellectually serious investigations of alternative technological paths, what political and military leaders termed “alternative courses of action.” These were foundational to Cold War planning processes and remain so today. To the participants, these debates were vital, and they influenced their decisions.
Throughout the history of technology’s disciplinary development, many have called for studying unwalked roads. In 1967, a little-remembered cry came from two of the discipline’s founders, historians Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr. They warned, “Let us not fall into the error of equating technology only with successful technology. The past abounds with failures—schemes that went awry, machines that wouldn’t work, processes that proved inapplicable—yet these failures form part of the story of man’s attempts to control his environment. Albeit unsuccessful, many of these failures were necessary preliminaries toward the successes in technology.”5 Some successful failures exist.
By 1985, untaken roads largely remained unstudied, and historian John Staudenmaier has noted that such failure results in a Whiggish narrative of technological progress.6 The danger is the validation of technological determinism and a false conception of technology development. Accepting a determinist narrative leads one to think that large-scale technologies were developed with the pathway already in mind and without conflict or false starts, because those involved already knew how to develop the final product. Later practitioners deciding the fates of programs would possess fantasy-like expectations of innovators, the resultant technologies, and program management. Contemporary actors, unprepared for reality, might apply the wrong historical lessons or “theories” and inappropriately lead and manage promising programs. Such leaders might also dream up “antigravity” technological programs with no hope of fulfillment.7 Readers who follow the evolution of and reporting on major defense programs have encountered these phenomena.
Strategy and Context
Some scholars limit strategy to a politico-military context, but that view is too narrow.8 Government leaders and military officers certainly strategize, but so do homemakers, doctors, lawyers, industrialists, and the rest of us. In its simplest form, strategy is the integration of ends, ways, and means suffused within a context. The historical agents act within a context of interrelated conditions and phenomena pertinent to them. Context includes time, money, people, resources, geography, and more. Within their context, the actors identify goals (ends) they wish to achieve, and strategy is a tool with which to attain their ends. Sound strategy clarifies specific objectives (another word for “ends,” which this study uses synonymously). “We will build the bridge and open it no later than September 15, 2020,” represents a specific objective. Poorly specified objectives include statements of desired conditions. For example, “We will depart the host country when we have won sufficient hearts and minds to ensure the populace’s
