This piece is dedicated to Patrick J. Garrity (1955-2021), the founder and first executive director of the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy project until his untimely passing, for his tireless efforts to keep current the classics of strategy and his enthusiasm and support for bringing Vannevar Bush into that conversation.
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In the aftermath of the Second World War, engineer and chief science advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Vannevar Bush wrote Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy.[1] The year was 1949 and the United States was at the beginning of its confrontation with the Soviet Union, the outlines of which were coming into view. Bush wanted to learn from the recent global clash between totalitarianism and democracy in order to inform national strategy and policy for the nascent Cold War. World War II had been marked by incredible technological innovations that changed the course of the war, culminating in the atom bomb. The lessons of that war, Bush hoped, would help chart a course for the United States through its new confrontation with its ally-turned-adversary, the Soviet Union.
Although Bush was an engineer by training and a famous tinkerer, he was deeply interested in politics, especially in the interactions between politics and scientific innovation—an often-fraught interaction that Bush had witnessed firsthand. Wholeheartedly committed to the preservation of democracy, Bush had a keen eye for how the combination of political, scientific, and military imperatives cooperated and clashed. Could a free society and its allies draw on their strengths to overcome yet another totalitarian challenge to their prosperity and freedom? Vannevar Bush had great faith in the ability of a democracy to produce technological innovation to secure itself and to preserve its freedom. His confidence emerged from his assessment of how democratic and totalitarian principles and practices had contributed to the Allied victory and to the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. However, assuring victory in this new struggle, in his estimation, would require the United States to counter the twin parochialisms of military and scientific bureaucracies, while harnessing and unifying their unique contributions to the innovations that made victory in WWII possible—and that would secure victory in the Cold War.
Born in 1890, Vannevar Bush spent his youth constantly tinkering with gadgets. A gifted mathematician, he became an electrical engineer, cofounding a radio-tube company while still a young professor. During the war, Bush was one of President Roosevelt’s closest advisers on science and technology; he helped organize the effort to design and build the atomic bomb.[2] John F. Kennedy’s science advisor, Jerome Wiesner, said of Bush’s influence on American science and engineering: “The 20th century may yet not produce his equal.”[3]
The collaboration among politicians, scientists, engineers, and the military that Bush helped to orchestrate was essential to Allied victory. It produced many of the technological innovations that turned the tide in both the European and Pacific theaters. Once the United States had emerged from the crucible of war, Bush was determined that the lessons learned at so high a price not be lost in the afterglow of victory and the ease of peace.
This essay follows Bush’s exploration of the political origins of scientific innovation and stagnation, with a specific focus on how democracy produces more innovations than autocratic political systems. I set out some of the key lessons that Bush extracted from World War II and their implications for the incipient Cold War, which he then laid out in Modern Arms and Free Men. The Allied development of the proximity fuse is the starting point from which this story flows, followed by Bush’s explanation of the Nazi failure to do the same—a failure that was not technical, but rather political. Some expected and unexpected obstacles to U.S. innovation in World War II are then considered, obstacles that Bush had to navigate personally. These considerations segue into a discussion of some nefarious influences of theories of future war, especially Giulio Douhet’s strategic bombing ideas.
Throughout his work, Bush expounds on his own broader assessment of the core struggle then animating the Cold War conflict, but that had also animated the struggle in the preceding war: the conflict between those who believe in human dignity and the “men of tooth and claw.” Bush concludes his argument by setting out recommendations for preserving innovation in planning for future war. In Modern Arms and Free Men, Bush discusses how he envisions the path to victory in the Cold War. From our contemporary vantage point on the other side of that conflict, we can see how prescient Bush’s predictions were, by how often they were borne out by actual events.
The Proximity Fuse, Radar, and Nazism
The Allied development of the proximity fuse was one of the most significant technological innovations of World War II. The proximity fuse used the same technology as radar to make a variety of munitions more effective. When placed in an explosive device like a torpedo or an artillery shell, the proximity fuse used radio waves to detect the proximity of a target and then to explode, maximizing the effect of such munitions. British anti-aircraft guns were equipped with proximity fuses and used—to devastating effect against Nazi bombers and even their terror weapons—the flying bombs. The proximity fuse “multiplied the effectiveness of large antiaircraft batteries by five or ten, and introduced about the same factor in artillery when it was substituted for timed fire.”[4] These fuses could be set to explode at a specific distance from the ground, increasing the lethality of every shell. As Bush recounts, the proximity fuse in artillery shells appeared in 1944, near the end of the war, and had a decisive effect on Allied operations to recapture France and invade Nazi Germany.
The Allies assumed that the Nazis would eventually discover that the new lethality of Allied shells was related to the same principles as radar and that they would produce countermeasures. In anticipation, Allied units fighting in France in 1944 were equipped with the anti-jamming devices that would be needed to interfere with German jamming of the signals emitted from Allied proximity fuses. To the surprise of Bush and other Allied scientists, these preparations were unnecessary. The Germans did not figure out the workings of the proximity fuse, never mind how it might be countered. Why, Bush wondered, did a technologically advanced society like Germany fail to develop radar and the related proximity fuse? As Bush related in Modern Arms and Free Men, the answer was politics.
The Germans knew, in theory, how the proximity fuse worked. They had even put a recess in their rockets for a proximity fuse when they finally developed one of their own.[5] But the failure to develop this technology for workable use, Bush argues, was rooted in Nazi politics and Nazi arrogance, which led them to underestimate their adversary. “[T]he Nazis lagged in radar throughout the war,” Bush observed, “largely because they expected a short war and were dominated by obtuse and dictatorial leaders who put their young scientists and technicians into the ranks.”[6] The young scientists and engineers who might have spearheaded German innovation were instead put at the head of the spear. By the time that the Nazis realized their mistake and tried to put their young technicians back to work in radar, “it was too late, so that they lagged in this field throughout the war.”[7] In addition, Bush determined, “The Nazis just could not believe that those verdammter Amerikaner, ‘damned Americans,’ had produced where the “ubermensch” had failed.”[8] The Nazis’ low opinion of the “damn Americans,” led them to underestimate American ingenuity; a misperception produced by their racial and anti-democratic ideology. It would cost them dearly. Bush concludes, “the techniques of this fuse were just too much for [the Nazis’] regimented science, and manufacture of a device as intricate as this was hardly a proper task for slave labor.”[9] Thus, German technological innovation, which excelled in a number of other areas, was hobbled by Nazi political ideology and misperception. One cannot also help but to think that the Nazis were more enamored with technologies that suited the image of the triumphant Nazi warrior, like the tank and the terror weapon, rather than something so seemingly mundane as radio waves. The glorification of the battlefield that was so central to Nazi ideology had led them to send their most promising scientists and engineers to die there.
Obstacles to Innovation on the Home Front
Foreign adversaries were not the only obstacles that Bush had to overcome in the pursuit of technological innovation, however. Although the Allies managed to shepherd many technological advancements from the drawing board to the battlefield, they often did so in the teeth of opposition from their own bureaucrats, politicians, and, surprisingly, sometimes even Bush’s fellow scientists. While the machinations and professional viewpoint—not to mention obtuseness—of the military bureaucracy often bore the lion’s share of criticism for stifling innovation, Bush showed that the military was not the sole offender. Scientists and engineers had their own shortcomings and blind spots.
Bush was no babe in the woods when it came to the machinations of military bureaucracy. Sometimes service parochialism, what Bush calls “service loyalties,” did indeed stall the innovation process.[10] And sometimes military officers’ own obtuseness could stifle the very military innovation from which they most stood to profit. For instance, the United States was not immune to the drive to press young scientists into combat. As Bush points out, there were those in the U.S. military “who thought in terms of masses of men and equipment rather than in terms of awakened invention and development.”[11] Such an awakening would be impossible without “keeping young scientists in the laboratories.” Bush’s fight to keep them there was one of the “toughest and most irritating” that he faced during the war. In the case of the “Donald Duck Tank”—the amphibious Duplex Drive tank so crucial to the success of allied amphibious landings—the military initially showed little interest. The DD tank program came to fruition only because civilian scientists (Bush among them) secretly provided pictures of the DD tank in action to President Roosevelt through Secretary Stimson.[12] In this instance, politics again played a key role. In the American political system, there were workable avenues for voicing dissent and bypassing hierarchical structures, unlike the regimented system of the Nazi regime. Bush could not have cleared these hurdles if it were not for “a group of enlightened military men with the strong support of Secretary Henry Stimson.”[13] In the final analysis, according to Bush “when it comes to tackling arduous and hazardous problems in a comprehensive and intelligent manner, there is [nothing] seriously wrong with the military mind or the military life that molds it.”[14]
While military officers were sometimes short sighted and parochial, scientists and civilian political leaders also helped stifle and sidetrack innovation. Real battlefield requirements and possibilities were often little understood by scientists. In addition, civilians often had fantastical notions of what could be achieved by science. There were those, Bush warned, who put too much faith in science to solve every difficulty. “[T]he notion that all things are possible to the scientist is amazing, and it produces foolish statements.”[15] “[T]here is no greater fallacy,” Bush warns, than that money is no object, and that given enough resources science can solve any problem. Nevertheless, during the war, Bush encountered numerous wild proposals for military innovations from scientists.
Bush points out that such fantasies about revolutionary weapons could lead to the serious misallocation of scarce resources that had alternative uses: the definition of economics gone wrong.[16] Bush points out that Hitler’s misplaced faith in the revolutionary power of his terror weapons, the buzz bombs, was an example of such a misallocation of resources. In their drive to perfect these weapons, the Nazis failed to make a proper scientific assessment of their impact, including the failure to account for likely obstacles and countermeasures, like the proximity fuse. “It is…fallacious to undertake a development without estimating [the] performance [of that development] in the light of conditions that will apply when it actually gets into use, allowing for development in other lines in the meantime.”[17] The Nazis failure in this case led to the misallocation of scarce resources that had alternative uses—to the benefit of the Allies. In contrast, in the case of the proximity fuse, the Allies began developing countermeasures to the countermeasures that they anticipated the Nazis would develop. Although the jamming of Nazi proximity fuse jammers was unnecessary in the end, the Allied preparations nicely illustrates how the process of innovation should proceed.
In Bush’s experience, within their areas of specialization scientists and engineers often thought that they already knew all the answers. This narrow outlook could and did undermine innovation as much as the peccadilloes of the military mind—witness the development of the torpedo. While military officers initially did not appreciate the potential for technological innovation in torpedo design, neither did the scientists who specialized in this area. These torpedo scientists would not tolerate outside interference in their “self-contained and self-perpetuating oligarchy.”[18] The torpedo oligarchs, Bush contends, were just as narrowminded about torpedo innovation as any military bureaucrat.
Bush’s pointing out of the often less appreciated blind spots of the scientific profession is central to his argument about technological innovation. Stultifying parochialism, Bush concluded, “can happen in the best of organizations, civilian or military, when they grow large and old.”[19] “Mistakes there were,” Bush assures us, but “they were the fault of military and civilians alike.”[20]
The solution, Bush argued, was to strike a balance between a purely military or purely scientific path toward technological innovation for defense. While service loyalties and other forms of military parochialism do exist, the solution is not to cut military professionals out of key deliberations on innovations. Bush witnessed firsthand this tendency in civilian authorities and argued against it: “As history has demonstrated,” he writes, we should never put “military decisions fully in the hands of brash amateurs overriding the judgement of [military] professionals.” To do so would be to follow the example of Hitler, “with his intuition and gyrations.”[21] Despite their parochial tendencies, military professionals could contribute a great deal to defense innovation.
President Truman presents Dr. James Conant with the Medal of Merit and Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster with Dr. Vannevar Bush
At the same time, Bush argued that giving military professionals absolute authority over weapons development was unwise. It makes little sense to leave decisions “on the employment of new means of combat…entirely in military hands,” he argued, when such new means result from “scientific and technical trends that they cannot fully understand.”[22] Nevertheless, the scientists who do understand these trends suffer from their own forms of parochialism. Cooperation among military officers, scientists, and engineers, overseen by political leaders, is therefore essential. Neither the military nor the scientific professions should dominate the process.
The remedy for this double parochialism, according to Bush, was a real partnership among scientists, engineers, and military officers. Only then could military officers, who “wrote the requirements and controlled the whole affair,” employ science and technology to solve practical military problems.[23] Whether such an arrangement could be made depended on political actors.
Politics had been the Achilles heel of the Nazi system for scientific and technological innovation and it was central to Allied success. Only political leaders had the authority to organize the structure for innovation that Bush recommended. Developing technologies that better serve battlefield requirements, but which challenge scientific orthodoxy and military parochialism in the process, requires political leaders to put in place the organizational arrangements that facilitate real collaboration and give and take. And it is democracy, Bush contends, that is better suited to adopting these necessary organizational changes to empower innovation. As I will discuss in more detail in the sections below, Bush considered the key characteristic of democracies to be their acceptance of freedom of inquiry, and the freedom with which ideas are allowed to percolate from the bottom up and penetrate the silos of military and scientific bureaucracies. Its resistance to rigid hierarchies gives a democratic system for technological innovation its vitality and flexibility. A key role for political leaders in democracies is oversight of these bureaucracies in order to ensure that they remain vital rather than becoming stagnant and impenetrable to outsiders.
Imagination vs. Reality: Douhet, Strategic Bombing, & the Nuclear Age
Despite their greater capacity for directing scientific innovation, democratic leaders can be prone to dangerous flights of fancy when gripped by fantastical theories of future war. Bush saw the consequences of such theories in the lead up to World War II and saw them rearing their head again in the nuclear age. In Modern Arms and Free Men Bush warns against giving in to grandiose theories of future war without verifying the assumptions that they are built on in the cold light of day. Douhet’s theory of strategic bombing was the object lesson here. Italian military thinker Giulio Douhet’s theory had been planted in fertile political and strategic ground in the leadup to World War II. Douhet’s argument was that future wars would be decided by massive air fleets attacking cities, bringing countries to their knees in weeks. As Bush sums up:
It was fear of this doctrine and of the air fleets being built by the Nazis that accounted principally for the terror that seized the rest of the world in the middle of the 1930’s and that accounted for appeasement. Unable to rally their own people to build air fleets of their own, with the United States far away and apparently indifferent, softened by the arguments of those who felt that any sort of submission was preferrable to war of that sort, nations were drawn into the fiascoes of Abyssinia, the Rhineland, and Munich and the inevitability of war. It was terror of the air fleets that weakened the will to resist.[24]
Although Douhet’s theory of future war was eventually proven false by the actual conduct of World War II, by then it had already played its role in helping to bring the war about. Despite Douhet’s dire predictions, the Allied strategic offensive produced no decisive victory in the war. On the contrary, the bombing of British, German, and Japanese cities proved beyond a doubt that “the spirit of a resolute people is not easily broken by all the terrors of conventional mass bombardment.” To Bush’s frustration, much of the evidence that was needed to come to this conclusion was already available before the first Allied bombers had even left the ground. Nevertheless, Douhet’s theory had captured the imagination of policy makers: its horrifying portents, along with the political and strategic conditions of the time, immunized it from clear-eyed examination. When the bomber wings were unleashed, they did not produce decisive results. Instead, “it was the great land armies,” Bush points out, “in a magnificent campaign that defeated Germany.”[25] For all of its promise, he insisted, “general bombing was not worth the extreme cost and effort it entailed.”[26]
Bush saw firsthand how erroneous theories of future war had paralyzed the democracies in the face of Hitler’s rise. He also saw how victory in that war did not drum this tendency out of peoples and leaders. At the beginning of the nuclear age, Bush saw the same kind of catastrophic thinking emerge. As Bush saw it, and as Bernard Brodie would point out a decade later,[27] the key to assessing the danger of the atomic bomb was to focus on the effectiveness of the means of delivery and not to allow oneself to be bewitched by the awesome power of the bombs themselves. Defense against the means of nuclear delivery, long-range bombers, had been developed during World War II and, Bush argued, would continue to be an effective defense, whether the bombers had a conventional or nuclear payload. What captured the imaginations of political leaders and their people was the enormous power of nuclear weapons, but the threat that those immensely destructive weapons could be delivered successfully was not nearly as great as perceived. In the face of technological innovation, Bush entreated, “we need to be alert and busy, but we need not be terrified, and we need to examine the trends with care.”[28]
Assessments of real and perceived threats must be realistic, for the fear produced by threat inflation makes war more likely because, as Bush warns, those “who fear do unreasonable things.” Based on the lessons of the just ended war, even when armed with atomic bombs, Bush argued, the role of air forces would still not be decisive in future war. Even so, Bush was not optimistic about the triumph of reason and hardnosed analysis in this space. Already at the time of Bush’s writing, the advocates of air power continued to sing its praises, especially when its planes were armed with atomic bombs. “Unfortunately, the enthusiasts of air power,” he lamented, “are often not stopped by such a minor obstacle as an obstinate fact.”[29]
Bush was not contending that nuclear weapons had changed nothing; this is an extreme position that “is certainly oblivious to cold facts.” We should not “gloss over the real dangers,” but “see them more clearly for what they are.”[30] Bush describes and refutes both extreme positions as follows: One extreme was arguing that at the outbreak of war “the principal cities of both belligerents will be promptly and utterly destroyed.” This position “completely ignore[s] the enormous strides being made in defense.” The other extreme was that nuclear weapons were just a very powerful explosive and changed nothing about war and national security. Bush rejected this view also. “In between,” Bush concludes, “lies reason.”[31]
Today, Bush’s advice applies even more than it did in the early days of the Cold War. We live in an age of rampant technological innovation, in which a new theory of future war seems to be born every day. We must hold on to reason and not allow ourselves to be “hypnotized by unreasoning fear.”[32] To quote a mantra from Frank Herbert’s Dune, a famous work of science fiction, “fear is the mind-killer.”[33] While Bush would agree with this mantra, he would advise that we carefully examine the military implications of scientific advances without slipping into science fiction.
Wartime vs. Peacetime Innovation
An important objection arises to Bush’s analysis, one that he anticipated. The story that Bush tells about the democracies innovating their way to victory in World War II is inspiring. However, that took place in the context of a global war that both infused new blood into the system for defense innovation and that also unleashed the vitality of the democratic scientific community. In contrast, innovations in the Cold War would have to be managed under peacetime conditions. Bush acknowledges that peacetime planning for defense innovation will always be less effective than wartime innovation.
According to Bush, there are three principal reasons for this disparity: the focus on the unknown future versus meeting the challenges of the present; the weakening in peacetime of bonds formed under the duress of war; and finally, politics.
“First, peacetime planning deals with the facilities and techniques of the future rather than the present.”[34] Simply put, in peacetime, the military—and specifically military officers—do not often have the required scientific knowledge to make accurate evaluations of the future military implications of contemporary technological trends. It is much easier to observe possible military implications of a novel device in the here and now than “the trends of science and the potential influence upon warfare of their future applications.” To be able to do that latter with any relevance, a partnership among the professions has to be in place. Only this type of partnership could produce worthwhile assessments of the trends in order to help guide the innovation planning for future wars. While undoubtedly the “military planning group will take the lead and the ultimate responsibility,” Bush argues that these must not override other professionals’ judgements in their respective profession’s area of expertise and hope to have any accuracy in their outcomes. Military officers lording it over such professionals in an authoritarian manner would only result in them presiding over a group of “second-raters and the mediocre,” because scientists doing the actual cutting-edge research would be repulsed (not to mention, their egos insulted).[35]
At the time of his writing, Bush notes that such a system was being implemented by “military men of vision,” but that it needed to be worked out more fully, so that those “little military men,” who would attempt to make scientists their subordinates, would be placed where they could do the least harm.[36] Bush was convinced that any accuracy of predictions about future war would depend on how effectively the military truly collaborated with those capable of seeing the real innovations and capabilities on the horizon—the scientists and engineers.
The second reason for the comparative difficulty of peacetime planning for innovation is fairly straightforward: “The bond that holds men in unison under the stress of war becomes largely dissolved when peace returns.” Without the unifying purpose of an enemy on their collective doorstep, the parties that produced technological innovation in wartime fracture and pursue their own interests.[37] In wartime, men “agree under stress in order to get on with the job.” In peacetime, the same men “argue interminably instead.”[38] Through the intervention of the U.S. President, his Secretary of Defense, or an authorized congressional committee, civilian authorities can be used to overcome the infighting that erupts in peacetime. This is made possible by the complete subordination of military to civilian authority in the United States, which Bush lauds as “honestly subscribed to and supported by all broad-gauge military men.”[39]
The third and final obstacle that Bush identifies to sound peacetime planning for defense innovation, is politics. Totalitarian politics hamstrung Nazi defense innovation; democratic politics proved that it could be a formidable obstacle for planning for defense innovation in peacetime. “Peacetime planning,” Bush notes, based on his postwar experience, “is done in a political atmosphere and arena.”[40] In wartime, democracies give extensive power to individual leaders, whether that be to its president or a field commander, so as not to undermine the war effort. In peacetime, however, democratic governments need and want to review and debate every major decision, and are typically legally constrained from and loath to hand over authority to any one person.
But even in peacetime, Bush argues, democracies can establish a defense innovation system that employs and honors expert opinion. The U.S. government both established and controls the funding for entities like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates the stock exchange. The president and/or Congress can oversee the operation of the commission and can fire or reorganize the commission if it makes poor decisions. Importantly, however, “neither the President nor Congress will interfere with their handling of specialized problems as long as they seem to be doing a good job.”[41]
Analogously, Bush argued, the U.S. government must set up an organization “for deliberate military planning in all aspects of modern war, not merely the strictly military part of a generation ago.” Political leaders would need to establish the limits of the organization’s responsibilities in terms of timetable, finances, and international political considerations. These same leaders would then provide oversight for the organization because its decisions would entail massive expenditures that could undermine the economic health of the country. What these leaders must not do, according to Bush, is to “substitute their own judgement for the judgement of professional men operating in a highly involved area of techniques and conditions.” If these leaders were to simply become military planners themselves, they would destroy the organization and replace it with “a game and a lottery, and the condition of the world is far too serious to tolerate any such luxury or diversion.”[42] While under congressional oversight, Bush argued that daily management of the organization should be entrusted to an “able group of military men.” Controversies would be resolved internally, and the lines of authority would be clearly defined and strictly enforced.[43]
In this regard, Bush was overly optimistic. He could not have foreseen the 21st-century expansion of the administrative state, but its emergence raises doubts about his prescriptions. As the defense establishment in the United States has expanded and increased in complexity, it has become more and more difficult to engage in the kind of political oversight that Bush advocates. It is conceivable that Bush would consider today’s administrative state as enervating the very strengths that keep democracies secure and free.
The Politics of Surprise Attack
Hyper-focusing on technological novelties can draw a strategist’s eye away from what Bush considered the most salient factor in innovating for ongoing or future war: politics. Bush believed that the political organization of a country—the regime—was often the deciding factor in that country’s outcome. And he also believed that democratic rather than totalitarian regimes were far more amenable to innovation. Democracy allows the kind of intellectual freedom that is required to produce innovation: The scientific pioneer must have the freedom to contradict established ideas and interact with the international community of scholars without fear of imprisonment or death. But the type of political regime matters for strategic planners, Bush argued, because democracies like dictatorships have particular habits and tendencies that those formulating plans for future war must take into account. Furthermore, some habits of dictatorships—like surprise attacks—can threaten democracies in ways that ought to shape how free peoples prepare for future war.
According to Bush, democratic peoples and institutions inhibit the launching of surprise attacks. Even if a free society could launch a splendid first strike with nuclear weapons, in “a prophylactic war” as Bush calls it, it would do no such thing. His explanation illuminates the link he sees between modern war and democracy:
A government truly responsible to the will of a genuinely free people would not [launch a surprise attack]. Certain it is, if we did thus embark on a prophylactic war, we should lose the very freedoms we cherish and for which we would be fighting. For freedom would have to be suppressed in some manner to cause us to embark on armed conquest of any comprehensive nature, and this would be armed conquest of the worst sort.[44]
Bush continues, “we would not strike, because we would sense that we would lose our birthright if we did.”[45]
Bush lists other obstacles to surprise attacks by democracies, such as an institutional constraint: “The ponderous machinery of democracy does not work in that manner.” In addition, democracies are too open for the machinations of surprise attack to remain concealed. Bush argues that Americans “live in a goldfish bowl… All our moods and passions are open for the world to see.” A democracy “cannot be taken into war by its elected representatives until the people at large are convinced that [they] must fight, that there is no other way out.” “Even a sudden blow by air fleets,” Bush contends, “is not started in a moment, and the preparations in a democracy would be obvious.”[46]
Here Bush is echoing much of the logic of the Democratic Peace Theory (DPT) as articulated by numerous scholars.[47] However, there is an important difference between Bush and these theoreticians. Bush was inside the halls of power of the world’s most powerful democracy as it prosecuted a world war. Bush’s perspective lends some credence, at least when it comes to surprise attack, to the notion that there are normative and institutional barriers to aggressive war for democracies.
However, Bush goes beyond the DPT when he argues that American national character, or culture as we might express it today, not only eliminates surprise attack from consideration but also produces a dangerous overconfidence. Speaking as an American, Bush contends that: “[I]f we arrived at a point where we fully believed we were in a position to strike and prevail quickly, we should also be fully convinced that we could easily retain the advantage and widen it, and so we would wait … we would not strike … because we would be just cocky enough to believe that we did not need to.”[48]Americans’ confidence in their country’s abilities can produce an overly optimistic assessment of the country’s relative capabilities. American analysts must be aware of this bias and combat it with the sober light of reason. A failure to do so could lead to threat deflation about the probability of a surprise attack and thus America’s capacity to withstand that attack. In discussing “our national characteristic,” Bush adds another layer of complexity to his account of the role of politics in national security affairs. National character is a part of the political regime of a country and must also be taken into account.
In contrast to democracies, dictatorships are prone to launching surprise attacks. The Cold War was a struggle between democracy and dictatorships. Bush argued that the great democracies must prepare accordingly, stating that:
[A] dictator, if his control were tight enough and his iron curtain utterly impenetrable, might stage a large surprise opening when he decided to go to war…He would mobilize in secret and set his armies in motion so that they would assault strong points before these could be fully manned, and would smash ahead by reason of their momentum…he would launch his air fleets [and] direct [atomic bombs] at key cities to obtain a paralyzing effect and a full use before attrition by the defense cut down their effectiveness.[49]
While the requisite transparency of democracies makes surprise attacks unworkable, the opacity of dictatorships facilitates them. Bush argues that the dictator’s tendency and capacity for surprise attack means that it is not enough for democracies to be just slightly stronger militarily than the dictator. For even if “the margin against him in normal strength” is “considerable,” he may “still feel he can conquer if the advantage of surprise is great enough to overcome this margin.”[50] Democracies must be sufficiently stronger militarily to offset the benefits of surprise, in order to deter the dictator from hazarding a sudden onslaught.
Democracies, however, because of their norms and institutions, are frequently loath to build overwhelming military capabilities. In America, the national character compounds the difficulty. Americans assume that they are superior in abilities and capabilities to their foes. This confidence can hinder clear-eyed assessment of the balance of forces. Although he sings the praises of democracy, in some instances, Bush argues that democracies must behave contrary to their inclinations to prepare for events such as the Cold War. Despite their many strengths, the disinclination of democracies to prepare for war and produce a surplus of military capabilities represents “a [severe] handicap we must face.”[51] During the Peloponnesian War, though the Spartans were ravaging the Athenians’ ancestral lands under their eyes, Pericles persuaded the (democratic) Athenians to stay behind their walls and not go out to engage the Spartans in traditional Greek warfare, a mode of fighting at which the Spartans excelled. Similarly, during the nascent Cold War, Vannevar Bush asks democracies to act contrary to their inclinations, and Americans to their national character, because of the nature of their adversary in the struggle.
Democratic Puritanism and Cold War Alliances
As much as Bush admired democratic regimes, he also thought that democratic puritanism in alliance formation would be a disadvantage in prosecuting the Cold War. In the Cold War it was inevitable, Bush contended, that the democracies would encounter dictatorships with which they might ally. If such an alliance served the vital interest of the United States and its allies, Bush approved of it. After all, it was a temporary alliance with Stalin’s USSR that had helped to secure victory in World War II. In something of an understatement, Bush notes: “If it had not been for Russia, we should have had a tough fight indeed.”[52] It was naïve, he argued, to believe that in a global struggle democracies could forego alliances with non-democratic regimes. “We can become a bit broader in our outlook as to who may be our friends.”[53] Nor could America and its allies afford to wait for the world to become democratic because democracy formation, according to Bush, is a slow process:
Democracy involves habits of restraint and tolerance and respect for other people’s rights, reverences and understandings and deep effective emotions about these things, which are arrived at only slowly. There are countries where true democracy is impossible and will be for a long time to come.[54]
Democracy does not simply emerge because people start voting in elections. On the contrary, it must emerge organically and slowly out of peoples’ experience and shared trust. Not surprisingly, then, Bush does not recommend the spreading of democracy as a means of winning the Cold War: The transition to democracy cannot be made rapidly or at the point of a gun.[55] Bush thought such attempts were misguided unless they included a type of stewardship force patient enough to husband a political change over the course of at least a generation.[56] This did not mean that Bush was opposed to regime change per se. Dictatorships could be toppled, if doing so served the vital security interests of the democracies, but their rapid transition to democracy should not be attempted or expected. Another dictatorship, whose interests and behavior align better with those of the United States, would be preferable to an infant democracy wracked by the incongruity between the regime type and the people’s political and historical experience. For Bush, a policy of openness to partnerships with authoritarian regimes served the interests of the free world and appreciated the gradual nature of democratic development. Recent history would appear to bear out Bush’s advice regarding democratic imposition and transitions.
Vannevar Bush and the End of the Cold War
In a highly prescient passage of Modern Arms, while assessing the consequences of the atomic bomb for the emerging Cold War, Bush set out how an aggressive, nuclear-armed state might self-destruct, bringing about the end of the conflict:
But if the cost of these preparations [for nuclear war] is beyond the resources of an aggressor nation, so that it would exhaust itself and collapse internally during the buildup process [and]…if the true nature and extent of the threat are accurately estimated by the world, this method of conquest will be ended.[57]
The downfall of the Soviet Union was due largely to the economic costs of keeping up with Reagan’s 1980s arms race.[58] Note, however, that for this process to be brought to a successful conclusion, Bush argues that the threat from the potential aggressor must be “accurately estimated.” In the 1930s, the inaccurate estimation of the threat from Nazi strategic bombers allowed Hitler to overcome his neighbors unmolested. Such erroneous estimations, this time inspired by hysteria over nuclear weapons, could lead to the rise of another aggressor “while the world stands by in fear.”[59]
Not surprisingly, Bush thought that politics had to be taken into account here, too: The Soviet Union was guided by communist political ideology. Bush argued that Soviet strategy was directed by its leaders’ faith in the truth of communism and in their own knowledge of how to exploit the weaknesses of capitalism, as set out by communist thinkers. The Soviet leaders believed in communism and made decisions based on their faith in its principles. An iron law of history, according to communism, is the eventual decline and destruction of capitalist regimes under their own weight. Here is Bush’s characterization of what this process looks like:
[T]hey believe fully that the capitalist system will crack, that it inevitably involves booms followed by severe depressions, that it will get itself all snarled up, and that this catastrophe will be their chance. When we are thoroughly in industrial and economic confusion, when we can no longer carry great national budgets without deficits that would wreck the stability of the dollar, then they can safely make the next conquest and move ahead. For this reason, the argument goes, they behave as abusively and disagreeably as possible, so that we will overreach ourselves, create great war machines that will never be used, exhaust ourselves in so doing, and hasten the inevitable collapse.[60]
Bush adds that the threat of capitalist decline is real, if the system does not limit its expansion and make decisions about military expenditures “with reason, and with careful logic, correlation, and economy.”[61] However, far from being the source of the destruction of free men, the capitalist economic system is a vital source of strength for the democracies involved, and a key to the struggle. “The most important thing for us to do,” against the communist narrative, Bush contends, is “to keep our industrial and economic health, keep the machine running at full blast without inflation or depression. Should we fail in so doing, the resulting distress in the world would play directly into the hands of those who would build on chaos.”[62] Even in his praise of the capitalist system, Bush offers a warning about it for the makers of American foreign and domestic policy.
Aggressive actions by a communist adversary could represent an attempt to tempt the democracies to overstretch themselves, resulting in unnecessary economic strain. Bush proposes that Soviet assertiveness may be an outgrowth of its leaders’ fervent belief in the truth of the theory of communism and their expectations for capitalist behavior and downfall. This assertiveness could be meant to tempt the United States to “overreach” in response to Soviet provocations. In short, the Soviets could be engaging in provocation, and then playing for the breaks that communist theory says must result.
The proximity fuse
In many ways Bush is providing another warning against threat inflation, especially regarding the potential economic consequences of an ill-considered response to the Soviet threat. It should be noted here that Bush is proposing that there is an unbreakable bond between the success of the democracies in the Cold War and their capitalist economic systems. For the United States, what this meant in Bush’s view, is that the competition with the Soviets could not be meaningfully isolated from its domestic and international economic policy. Government spending on social programs and infrastructure could not be seen as something disconnected or isolated from the Cold War struggle, as such programs represent alternative uses of scarce resources.
The coming Cold War, Bush predicted, would be “a long hard race.” It is “not a race of armaments alone, but a race in national strength from every aspect that contributes to the waging of war, and we must seek a substantial balance in favor of us and our allies.”[63] The essential elements of national “strength,” Bush argues later, are hope and courage. America must therefore be conscientious in spending its resources so as to increase the hope and courage of its people, its leaders, and those of its allies.[64] And because the coming conflict will be protracted, Bush predicts, he argues that it is even more important that Americans “settle into harness for the long pull and mark well how we use [our] resources.”[65]
The Essence of the Struggle: Two Philosophies of Life and Science
The Cold War, according to Bush, represents just the most recent instance of an interminable struggle between two elements within mankind. The struggle has always been between those who “believe in the freedom and dignity of man” and those who believe in the law of “tooth and claw,” in “a supreme conquering state to which all men would be enslaved.” In the 20th century this struggle between “men of good will” and the materialist men of “tooth and claw” played out in the rivalry between the Allies and Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The Cold War was but the next confrontation of these opposing philosophies.
These two perspectives can be understood, Bush argues, by examining their conception of science and its limits. The men of good will have a faith rooted in religion or in the hope that man can make a better world. The materialists put their faith in science to explain both the laws of physics and the laws of history and politics. They do not appreciate the limits of natural science, seeing it as an instrument for increasing the power of the “supreme conquering state.” However, Bush argues, these men of tooth and claw have a cramped view of science. No matter how deep scientists plumb the depths of the physical world or the human mind, they cannot alone discover the first causes of things, their meanings, or the origins of man’s faith. Answers to these permanent questions are “forever beyond [the] ken [of science.]”[66] For Bush, this is one of the central conclusions arrived at once one freely delves into the mysteries of nature and the universe. It is not the conclusion of science, Bush argues, that “mankind is engaged merely in a futile dance…with no more to life than a struggle for a seamy existence.” The “men of tooth and claw” mistakenly “conclude that the limited observation of our weak senses and their petty aids [encompass] all there is of reality.” Bush concludes that from this fallacy about the implications of science “come materialism and the new fatalism now built into a [communist] political system geared for conquest.”[67] Both Nazi and Soviet leaders held this narrow view of human existence and an instrumental view of science. Thus both regimes were interested only in how science could provide the tools to increase the coercive power of the state, over its own people and its adversaries.
A belief in a brute materialism is not derived from scientific investigation—quite the reverse. At its best, science inspires man to reach beyond science, when his scientific investigations bring him to the boundary beyond which science cannot speak. In this way scientific investigation can lead to wonder and to the realization that all that matters is not matter. Open scientific enquiry for its own sake is the opposite of a sterile, functional approach to scientific investigation.
Here Bush brings us to the very foundations of the struggle between liberal capitalist democracy and authoritarian communism. The dialectical materialism of the communist system is barren and cuts mankind off from whole aspects of reality about which science cannot speak. Science can tell us almost nothing about love, friendship, beauty, revelation, and the divine. It cannot even explain the human longing to know that is at the heart of scientific inquiry. These aspects of human experience, however, are what make life worth living. In essence, Bush is arguing that the communist system is at war with human nature properly understood. It is hardly surprising, then, that Bush argues that for scientists to be made good democratic citizens they must also have access to an education that deals with meaning and with ethics—to a liberal education that includes the humanities, and that feeds that part of the human person that longs precisely for the answers to questions that the natural sciences cannot provide.[68]
Totalitarianism and Scientific Discovery and Innovation
A narrow materialist view of science has important practical implications for a society—it inhibits scientific discovery and innovation. One of the key strengths of the democratic society when it comes to scientific innovations is its openness to scientific investigation for its own sake. Totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, by their nature must restrict freedom of thought to maintain power.
The Soviets claimed that communism is the pinnacle of democracy. As Bush pointed out, however, there are blatant contradictions between Soviet democratic rhetoric and its totalitarian practice. The Bolsheviks called on the people to rise up against the rich and take back the means of production, but in the Soviet system that emerged, the confiscated property simply changed hands from a small Tzarist authoritarian clique to a small communist totalitarian clique. Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership could not allow free elections—a hallmark of democracy—because an election threatened to take power from that clique.[69]
In an important aside, Bush points out that there is an essential distinction between the clique that runs Russia and the Russian people who are oppressed by this clique. The Russian people and the Soviet system must be kept separate in the minds of democratic leaders and peoples. Bush argues that the Russian people would be capable of great things if not for the Soviet regime’s suppression of their freedoms. This distinction should be kept in mind, Bush believed, lest the democracies lump all Russians in with the Soviet clique rather than seeing average Russians as victims.[70]
Fortunately—for the democracies—the narrow nature of the Soviet clique ensures that it will be cut off from the scientific discoveries and innovations produced by open societies: The Soviet system necessarily crushes the freedom of inquiry and expression that are at the heart of the arts and sciences. Since the survival and strengthening of the state are the highest goods, all science, all art, all literature, must serve the purposes of the state.[71] The Soviet system “can tolerate no real independence of thought or expression … [it] must be ever alert to purge those who would depart from discipline and think their own thoughts.”[72] As a consequence, any scientist who asserts that there is a scientific truth incongruous with the theory espoused by the party line “is torn from his post,” “sent into cold exile,” and “replaced by a charlatan who will see to it that the state theory is taught to young scientific disciples and that all research is based on a blatant fallacy and an unsupported hypothesis.”[73] This totalitarian approach to science cuts it off from the open and collaborative nature of scientific research and discovery.
As Bush relates from experience, scientific collaboration must be open. Furthermore, it is often international in character, with scientists from different countries meeting at conferences, sharing their ideas through professional publications, and establishing collaborative research efforts. Discoveries and innovations are arrived at by investigators driven by their desire for knowledge for its own sake. The discoveries that led to the atom bomb, Bush points out, were arrived at by scientists freely seeking in wonder to uncover the inner workings of the universe. Scientific investigation for its own sake, what is often called basic research, was the spark for the development of a source of energy and the development of a weapon that revolutionized international relations. Moreover, the pursuit of the atom bomb was an international project involving the United States, Britain, and Canada.
Scientific discovery and innovation at this scale requires a great deal of financial support. As noted above, Bush knew that a key component of Allied victory was the vast economic power of the United States. Presciently, Bush argued that free market capitalism would also be a key to survival and victory for America and its allies in the Cold War. However, Bush did not think that the free market would automatically fuel scientific discovery: Capitalism will not necessarily support scientific enquiry for its own sake. Government funding for this kind of basic research—which Bush has shown us is anything but basic—can preserve the core of free scientific enquiry and shield it from a strictly practical standard. Democratic government is not only about free people but also about free science “pursuing its independent way to unravel the mysteries of existence.” This free science should be “carried on by free men whose guide is truth and whose faith is that it is good to know.”[74] It is this kind of science that explores the frontiers of knowledge and, in the process, discovers what becomes the scientific and technological innovations that ensure that the democracies will be a least one step ahead of the totalitarian states. However, this free pursuit of knowledge is not driven by the desire for security, but by the human longing to know. The practical benefits are the fortuitous byproduct of this pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. For the democracies, then, freedom, especially of inquiry, is the key to security. It is indeed “good to know.” In the realm of scientific innovations that increase security, democracies can do well by doing good.
The Nazis, in fact, had also understood that an atom bomb was possible, but “they failed miserably,” getting only 5 percent of the way down the path pioneered by the Anglo-Allies.[75] And while the Nazi nuclear program did experience resource constraints because of Allied bombing, the real reason for its failure was, Bush argued, political.
After the war, the Allies examined the Nazi organization for scientific innovation. Bush derided that organization as “an abortion and a caricature.” “Parallel agencies were given overlapping power, stole one another’s material and men, and jockeyed for position by all the arts of palace intrigue.” Bush’s impatience with such arrangements and his sense of humor come out in his description of the resulting organization: “Nincompoops with chests full of medals, adept at [palace intrigues] presided over organizations concerning whose affairs they were morons.” Nazi scientists and military officers were also restricted to their own silos: “Communications between scientists and the military were highly formal, at arm’s length, at the highest echelons only, and scientists were banned from all real military knowledge and participation.”[76]
The inefficiency of the Nazi organization for scientific research contradicted pre-war expectations about authoritarian regimes. Before the war, Bush explained, it was popular to assert that dictatorships “get results much more generally and cheaply.” Postwar investigations into Nazi practices showed otherwise: “What we found at the end of the war exploded this myth for all time. Every team we sent returned convinced that the democratic system [was] clearly more efficient, dollar for dollar and hour for hour, than any totalitarian system.”[77]
The democratic mode of wartime organization for scientific research was superior, in part because in the democracies, criticism could and did move up and down and between scientific and military silos.[78] The democracies could call on experts in any subject matter who were free to present their views and judgments “with complete frankness.”[79] Those doing the criticizing were also a diverse group, because merit was the key qualification, not proficiency at “palace intrigue.” Both experts and capable amateurs were part of the conversation.[80] The freedom to criticize and the absence of a rigidly enforced hierarchy made the whole system “live and virile, changing and adaptable.” In contrast, the Nazi system was “frozen in a pattern where any absurdity or any incompetent can persist if politically entrenched.”[81]
Before we grow too complacent about the permanent virtues of democracy in science, we should reread that passage. Anyone who has researched military innovation would observe that this description, of an organization “frozen in a pattern where any absurdity or any incompetent can persist if politically entrenched,”[82] could apply to the giant defense bureaucracies that exist today within the developed democracies. Systems of organization for scientific innovation in democracies are not necessarily immune from the diseases that plague those systems in dictatorships. As Bush observed in torpedo development, when bureaucratic systems grow old and set in their ways, whether in democracies or dictatorships, they become rigid and uncompromising. The difference is that this tendency of bureaucracies suits the rigid and uncompromising political structure of dictatorships. In contrast, the more flexible political structure of democracies can reorganize and reorient bureaucracies. Although Bush does not make this point about the symmetry or asymmetry of bureaucratic tendencies and regime type, this conception is consistent with the evidence he presents.
As a general rule, if we see Bush’s description of the totalitarian system corresponding to our own approach, then we know that we are on the wrong track, that our system is insufficiently democratic, that we have allowed the tendencies of bureaucracy to sap too much of its vitality. For Bush, the government must keep a vigilant eye on its establishment for defense innovation and continually inject new blood, new perspectives, and new modes of organization into the system to dislodge bureaucratic indolence. Democracies are not without their flaws when planning for innovation, but unlike their totalitarian counterparts, they have within themselves the remedy for the illness.
Turning his attention from the Nazi to the Soviet scientific system, Bush concluded that the Soviet approach was much like the Nazi system but “magnified to the nth degree.” The Soviets produced a system of scientific and industrial production that could turn out massive quantities of war materiel. Nevertheless, the Soviet system was “not adapted for effective performance in pioneering fields, either in basic science or in involved and novel applications.”[83] While Bush did not think that the democracies could write off the Soviet adversary, he did think that they should appreciate Soviet weaknesses rather than magnifying its scientific prowess. Such magnification can have pernicious effects, like fear, that clouds reason and leads to irrational and counterproductive policies.
The hysteria that greeted the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the fear of the “missile gap” it produced, is a case in point. The gap was a fiction that John F. Kennedy rode all the way to the White House, even while he privately acknowledged the flimsy case for such a gap. The mounting fear produced by Sputnik helped produce a massive increase in defense spending under Kennedy. A cold blooded, realistic assessment of the nuclear balance, of the kind that Bush recommended, would have forestalled these increases. The Eisenhower administration, perennially concerned with the adverse economic consequences of defense spending, had conducted such an assessment which showed that the balance still favored the United States. President Eisenhower presented these figures to candidate Kennedy, who continued to tout the missile gap on the campaign trail because of its resonance with the electorate.[84] As this example shows, electoral politics can manipulate the fear that Bush saw as so corrosive of rational defense policy.
Bush acknowledged the almost bottomless industrial capacity of the Soviet system. However, in the realm of true scientific innovation the totalitarian system was too hostile to open scientific enquiry to excel. “The Communists can copy and improve,” Bush warned, “and a whole mass of scarcely developed techniques remains from the last war as material for this process.”[85] Could the Soviet system become open to innovation? Yes, but not if it wanted to survive. The Soviet Union “cannot possibly alter its pattern and become fully effective without at the same time becoming free, and if it becomes free the contest is ended.”[86]
The Soviet system for defense innovation, Bush believed, would suffer from the same handicaps that plagued the Nazi system. So long as the democracies do not give in to irrational fears—wasting their resources in response—and combat bureaucratic stagnation in defense innovation, Bush wrote, they would remain ahead of their authoritarian adversary in the Cold War and would eventually prevail. And prevail the democracies eventually did, but not without diverging on numerous occasions from Bush’s advice. That the democracies survived, thrived, and were victorious in the end, is a testament to the strength of democracy and the brittle nature of the authoritarian Soviet system.
Conclusion
In the early years of the Cold War, Vannevar Bush committed to paper the hard-won lessons of World War II. These lessons referred to scientific innovation and implementation across the belligerents in that war, and how those lessons might inform the policy of the United States and its allies in this area in the nascent Cold War. As the title implies, Modern Arms and Free Men is about technological innovation for the defense of democracies. According to Bush, the chief lesson was that democratic regimes are more effective at producing and fielding technological innovations for warfighting than their authoritarian adversaries:
The thesis of this book is that [democracy] is far stronger, in dealing with the intricate maze of affairs that the applications of science have so greatly elaborated, than any dictatorship. The democratic system, in which the state is truly responsive to the will of the people, in which freedom and individuality are preserved, will prevail, in the long run, for it is not only the best system, the most worthy of allegiance that the mind of man has built; it is the strongest system in a harsh contest.[87]
The central force that stalled or spurred scientific advancement during World War II was the political regime within which scientists, engineers, military men, and political leaders found themselves.
When it came to vital technological inventions, their manufacture, and their deployment to the battlefield, the democracies were often leaps and bounds ahead of the totalitarian system of the Nazis. In the cases of the proximity fuse and nuclear weapons, for instance, Nazi scientists lagged behind the Allies, even though scientists and engineers in Germany understood the science that underpinned both capabilities. Bush argues that this phenomenon can be explained by the kind of organization for defense innovation that existed in democratic versus authoritarian regimes. The Nazi system was hierarchically arranged, with military officers and scientists kept isolated from one another in their own silos, and receiving orders from and reporting up to higher political authorities. In contrast, in the democratic American system, military officers and scientists and engineers communicated often, both with each other and with political superiors. Information and criticism flowed up and down the lines of authority and between military officers and scientists and engineers. This less formal system allowed for the rigorous testing of assumptions, ideas, and concepts, and could overcome the bureaucratic forces, both military and scientific, that resisted innovations away from their norms. Bush argues that because the Soviet system is a still more hierarchical and closed system than the Nazis’, it would be subject to the same pitfalls.
A meeting regarding the 184-inch cyclotron project, held at the University of California, Berkeley, on March 29, 1940. Left to right: Ernest O. Lawrence, Arthur H. Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Karl T. Compton, and Alfred L. Loomis
Bush was not arguing, however, that the democracies could rest on their laurels and win the Cold War by default. Democratic leaders must protect the democratic character of their system of defense innovation through vigilant oversight. Otherwise, the tendencies of large bureaucracies as they age to resist innovation will set in, and there will be little to distinguish the democratic and the authoritarian systems.
Planning for innovation in defense necessarily involves an element of prediction. However, the human imagination being what it is, predictions about the future character of war can all too easily move from the realistic to the fanciful, sometimes with devastating results. In the interwar period, Bush argued that an unrealistic assessment of the military potential of airplanes, put forward by Douhet, captured the imagination of politicians and military officers. The fear of a fictitious German strategic air force, and its potential to rapidly devastate societies, cowed the democracies into appeasing Hitler—thus ushering in war. To avoid repeating such threat inflation during the Cold War, Bush advocated a realistic assessment of trends in military capabilities, through a collaborative arrangement between military officers and scientists and engineers, under the supervision of their political superiors. Bush’s advice rings true today, as we attempt to guess at the character of future war. Our imaginations, though vital, must be kept in bounds by a clear-eyed appraisal of likely future trends in military capabilities.
A reasonable criticism of Bush’s approach would be to point out that the innovations of which he speaks are often born of wartime struggle, and not the ease of peacetime. Bush foresaw and addressed this objection. Indeed, wartime innovation is easier because the presence of a genuine threat to national security unifies parties that would otherwise be separated by their competing parochial interests. Those narrow interests reemerge in peacetime, and the unity of the recent struggle gives way to fractured bureaucracies that become more set in their ways the longer the interval of peace. Here again, however, democracies enjoy an important advantage over autocracies. The rigid hierarchy of a modern bureaucracy is a microcosm of an authoritarian regime, and this kinship between regime and bureaucracy reinforce one another. The democratic political structure, on the other hand—with its abhorrence of hierarchy and inequality—can combat the hardening of bureaucratic hierarchies, which Bush considered inevitable. However, democratic forces will not automatically break up bureaucratic gridlock. Political leaders in democracies, in the executive or the legislature, must take an active role in the reforming and oversight of organizations for defense innovation. While political leaders use their power to reward and punish these organizations for malfeasance and incompetence, they must resist the urge to use their power to interfere with the judgement of the military and scientific professionals who populate this defense organization.
Authoritarian regimes have other tendencies that planners within the democracies must take into account, and that can compel democracies to engage in policies incongruous with their norms. For instance, authoritarian regimes, Bush warns, are liable to engage in surprise attacks, if they think the advantages of surprise outweigh their numerical or qualitative inferiority in capabilities. Consequently, it is not enough for the United States and its allies to have a marginal superiority in capabilities over an authoritarian adversary. The regimes of free people must procure enough superiority in capabilities to offset the advantages the tyrant might gain from launching a bolt from the blue.
The free peoples of the world must also accept that it is sometimes necessary to ally themselves with non-democratic regimes. Bush advises the democracies against trying to win the Cold War by spreading democracy. He argues that the transition from authoritarianism to democracy takes at least a generation, and cannot be imposed quickly from the outside. Moreover, the interests of democracies and dictatorships can align, and thus the United States and its democratic allies should not refuse authoritarian partners simply on the grounds that they are not democracies. I need not point out to the reader how relevant this observation is to U.S. foreign policy in our own century.
In one of the most prophetic sections in the work, Bush sets out how the Cold War will end. He predicts that the economic power of the United States and the other liberal, capitalist democracies will overwhelm the Soviet Union, outlasting it. It is not economic power alone, however, that provides democracies with their winning hand in the Cold War, rather, it is the political system itself. Democracy is “most worthy of allegiance,”[88] because it is based on the dignity of the human person and does not see the individual simply as the consumable fuel for the progress of history and the interests of the state. Free peoples are opposed, Bush argues, by the “men of tooth and claw,” who have a narrow, materialistic view of human nature and science, and who fear the free human person, thinking freely, because he is a threat to their power. These narrow, hollow materialists must, therefore, suppress freedom of thought, and this requirement brings us to Bush’s final insight into the relationship between modern arms and free—and unfree—men.
The cramped materialist view of science that inspired and perpetuated the authoritarian system in the 20th century, and beyond, robs science of its very essence. The essence of science, its engine of discovery, according to Bush, is wonder at the mysteries of the universe and the human love and pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The most important scientific discoveries that contributed most to victory in World War II, such as the atom bomb, did not always emerge from the demands of war. The Manhattan Project did not originate from an authoritarian demand to make a super weapon, but from scientists seeking out the mysteries of the natural world, pursuing knowledge because they perceived its pursuit as a good. To make this pursuit possible people must have freedom of thought and association. The individual freedom of thought afforded by democracy leaves open the path to pursue knowledge for its own sake. In that pursuit, Bush argues, the pursuer comes to see the limits of science and to perceive that the causes and the meaning of the true, the good, and the beautiful, the sources of faith and hope, must be sought elsewhere. The reason for the scientist’s thirst for knowledge for its own sake, for instance, cannot be uncovered by science.
That democracy allows, and even encourages, the search for that knowledge is why it remains the system “most worthy of allegiance that the mind of man has built,” and is, simultaneously, “the strongest system in a harsh contest.”[89] In the end, Modern Arms and Free Men is not just a “discussion of the role of science in preserving democracy,” but a discussion of the role of democracy in preserving science—and each preserving the other.
Peter Campbell is associate professor of political science at Baylor University.
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NOTES
[1] Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1949).
[2] G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, 2018, 3.
[3] Ibid., 7.
[4] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 121.
[5] Ibid., 52.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 98.
[8] Ibid., 53.
[9] Ibid., 99.
[10] Ibid., 46.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., 35–36.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., 250.
[15] Ibid., 73.
[16] Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, Fifth Edition (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2015).
[17] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 79.
[18] Ibid., 74.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 62.
[21] Ibid., 61–62.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., 74.
[24] Ibid., 95.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, New RAND ed (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp, 1959).
[28] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 101.
[29] Ibid., 96.
[30] Ibid., 137.
[31] Ibid., 102–3.
[32] Ibid., 156.
[33] Frank Herbert, Dune, 40th anniversary ed (New York: Ace Books, 2005), 12, 370, 489.
[34] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 251.
[35] Ibid., 252–53.
[36] Ibid., 253–253.
[37] The distinction between wartime and peacetime innovation is central to Stephen Peter Rosen’s work on military innovation, whose work was inspired in part by Bush’s experience and writing. Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the next War: Innovation and the Modern Military, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, NY London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 206.
[38] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 255.
[39] Ibid., 254.
[40] Ibid., 253.
[41] Ibid., 257.
[42] Ibid., 257–58.
[43] Ibid., 261.
[44] Ibid., 125.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Ibid., 130.
[47] Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996); Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., “An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (December 1999): 791–807, doi:10.2307/2586113; Michael W. Doyle, “Three Pillars of the Liberal Peace,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 3 (August 2005): 463–66, doi:10.1017/S0003055405051798; Jo Jakobsen, Tor G. Jakobsen, and Eirin Rande Ekevold, “Democratic Peace and the Norms of the Public: A Multilevel Analysis of the Relationship between Regime Type and Citizens’ Bellicosity, 1981–2008,” Review of International Studies 42, no. 5 (December 2016): 968–91, doi:10.1017/S0260210516000097. For a comprehensive critique of Democratic Peace see Sebastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (November 2003): 585–602, doi:10.1017/S0003055403000893.
[48] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 125.
[49] Ibid., 130–31.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid., 131.
[52] Ibid., 168.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid., 169.
[55] Ibid., 163.
[56] Ibid., 169.
[57] Ibid., 97.
[58] John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[59] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 97.
[60] Ibid., 161–62.
[61] Ibid., 162.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Ibid., 130–31.
[64] Ibid., 163.
[65] Ibid., 126.
[66] Ibid., 184–85.
[67] Ibid., 186.
[68] Ibid., 242–43.
[69] Ibid., 194–95.
[70] Ibid., 209–10.
[71] Ibid., 197.
[72] Ibid., 201.
[73] Ibid.
[74] Ibid., 248.
[75] Ibid., 206–7.
[76] Ibid., 207.
[77] Ibid. Emphasis added.
[78] Ibid., 208.
[79] Ibid.
[80] Ibid., 244.
[81] Ibid., 208.
[82] Ibid.
[83] Ibid.
[84] Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, 1. Harper Perenniel ed (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2014).
[85] Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy, 209.
[86] Ibid., 210.
[87] Ibid., 8.
[88] Ibid.
[89] Ibid.
