This was how America acted when it was serious

Friday, April 1st, 2022

It is difficult to overstate the all-encompassing sense of urgency that Washington felt in the early years of the Cold War, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

The way Eisenhower saw it, Washington’s primary role was to get the big things right. That started with picking the right people—not necessarily good people or nice people, but exceptional people, the kinds of people who might today be called “founders.” Eisenhower believed in empowering these founders by giving them broad authority to solve clearly defined problems, providing them all of the resources and support they needed to be successful, and then holding them strictly accountable for delivering results. In short, it was a strategy of concentration—of priorities, money, effort, and, most importantly, people.

[…]

He awarded gigantic contracts with fat margins to companies and technologists and integrated them into one military-industrial team. He scraped a space launch center out of a boggy stretch of Florida wetland called Cape Canaveral. He repeatedly blew up rocket engines and missile prototypes on the launchpad. But along the way, Eisenhower defended Schriever, got him more money when he needed it, and protected him from bureaucrats and staunch rivals, such as fellow Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who tried to kill the project at every turn…

Eventually, Schriever and his team did the impossible: they developed the Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons to precise locations on the other side of the planet in minutes.

[…]

This was how America acted when it was serious. The paramount concern was picking winners: the priorities that were more important than anything else, the people who could succeed where others could not, and the industrialists who could quickly build amazing technology that worked.

[…]

This is how Silicon Valley originated: as a start-up incubated by the Department of Defense. Margaret O’Mara, a historian and former staffer for Vice President Al Gore, has observed, “Defense contracts during and after World War II turned Silicon Valley from a somnolent landscape of fruit orchards into a hub of electronics production and innovations ranging from mainframes to microprocessors to the internet.”

[…]

A sprawling bureaucracy materialized in the 1960s to administer and discipline the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower’s more personalized approach to military acquisition and innovation, which was based on picking winners and holding them accountable, became bureaucratized amid the broader adoption of the industrial age management practices that had come into vogue in leading companies.

No one did more to further this trend than Robert McNamara, a veteran of Ford Motor Company who ran the Pentagon for much of the 1960s. Under his tenure, in the spirit of improving efficiency, new layers of oversight, analysis, and management were added, and these grew and began choking off the ability to develop breakthrough technologies quickly.

[…]

The result was that the process of developing military technology became harder, slower, and less creative. This outcome only intensified in the early 1970s, when many engineers in Silicon Valley began growing uncomfortable working for the US government as the Vietnam War grew more divisive.

Comments

  1. Altitude Zero says:

    Eisenhower made huge mistakes (looking at you Suez!) but he remains one of our most under-rated presidents, the man who really won the Cold War. In contrast, Robert McNamara could stand for all that went wrong in late 20th Century America – arrogant, dismissive of those who had actual real-world experience, obsessed with numbers and “metrics” to the exclusion of reality, unwilling to admit mistakes until it was too late, and then expecting hosannas of praise for having finally admitted them, constantly failing upward – an astonishing figure, impossible in any other time and place than late 20th Century Western society.

  2. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    If there really was a genuine ‘sense of urgency’, they wouldn’t have assassinated Patton and delivered basically everything Stalin wanted in the post-war settlements. To say nothing of the massive economic and socio-cultural support the blue tribesmen running America provided to the USSR, which was critical in keeping the whole potemkin country propped up as long as it did, before, during, *and after* the war.

  3. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    We should be more precise; obviously the red tribesmen in and around the Pentagon felt a sense of urgency; but of course they were outflanked at every turn by the bluecheck class avant la lettre, in and around state department.

  4. David Foster says:

    I reviewed a biography of General Schriever here:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/24503.html

Leave a Reply