DePuy, in unpublished papers, accumulated evidence that in ground combat the impact of a new weapon upon the outcome of a war usually has been local and almost always has been transitory. He believed that a technological surprise by itself never has won a war on land, but that technology accompanied by a tactical revolution has. Napoleon’s tactical use of mobile artillery was revolutionary; the field artillery itself was not new. It is ironic that the Germans exploited tanks so effectively with their Blitzkrieg, for one of their victims, the French, possessed more and better tanks, and another, the British, had invented them. In these instances the new tools, artillery and armor, were no secret at all. In contrast, when tanks were a surprise, first used in substantial numbers by the British at Cambrai in World War I, the British forces achieved local successes but could not exploit their new weapons. Some argue that the British prematurely squandered tank technology before the accompanying tactics had matured.
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Because there are fewer big battles at sea, the potential for decision by technological surprise is greater. At least one weapon is comparable in decisiveness to cryptanalysis, which wrought the great increase in Allied scouting effectiveness: it is the kwi-suns, or turtle boats, of Korean Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, which in 1592 helped win two decisive battles against the Japanese at Pusan and in the Yellow Sea.
Another secret weapon sprung long after its prewar invention was the Japanese Long Lance torpedo. As late as the summer of 1943, the U.S. Navy did not know exactly what the Japanese weapon was or why it had been so effective. The Long Lance had been developed in the early 1930s, and Japanese cruiser and destroyer men had trained extensively with it. American scorn for Japanese technology takes much of the blame for the U.S. Navy’s overconfidence at the start of the Pacific war, which was almost as foolhardy as German and Japanese overconfidence in the immunity of their own ciphers.
Then there is the atomic bomb. Although it was not specifically a naval weapon and not numerous enough to be regarded as tactical, the bomb was the shocking weapon that administered the coup de grace to Japan in 1945. The science and technology took four years to develop, and only two bombs were built.
Is it possible to keep the development of an “ultimate weapon” a secret in peacetime? Evidence suggests that it is not possible, at least not in the United States. Many people in this country believe secret weapons are proper public news.
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Here are some examples of weapons, mostly naval, that brought disappointment in World War II:
- Magnetic influence mines. Germany introduced them against shipping in the estuaries of the British Isles. They were effective, but they were used prematurely. As a result, they turned out to be vulnerable to countermeasures.
- Magnetic exploders in American torpedoes. Developed before the war, they worked badly and were a great setback to U.S. operations. In a short war, American torpedoes would have been an unmitigated disaster. The British and Germans also experienced early problems with their sophisticated torpedoes.
- Proximity fuzes. For much of the war they were restricted to use over water out of fear that the Germans would recover one and adopt the technology against U.S. strategic bombers.
- Night fighters. These were highly effective, but there were too few of them to be decisive.
- Submarines. They had a powerful impact, but their role against warships was well recognized before World War I.
- Sonar. This was a crucial response to the submarine, developed in secrecy. It was not enough to neutralize the threat.
- “Window,” the strips of aluminum foil used to jam enemy fighter-direction radars. The Germans had window early in World War II, but they delayed its application until the Allies used it in the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Both sides appreciated the fact that window was a doubled-edged tool of war—of value to both sides.
- Jet aircraft, V-1 and V-2 missiles, and snorkeling submarines. All arrived too late in the war to have much effect.
Here are some reasons that new weapons, whether secret or known, do not always deliver what they promise:
- Production limitations, as with magnetic mines
- Testing limitations, as with torpedo exploders
- Great complexity, requiring skilled operators and integration into fleet tactics, as with radar and night fighters
- Great simplicity, threatening adoption and exploitation by the enemy, as with window
- The risk of failure after introduction, as with the U.S. magnetic torpedo
- Exaggerated expectations, as with sonar
- The penalty for maintaining secrecy during a lengthy period of development, as with Nazi Germany’s secret weapons
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There are many examples in which important improvements in combat capability have been hidden. One is the rifling of gun barrels. Another is the improved fire-control systems in dreadnoughts. New engines barely can be detected from an aircraft’s appearance, but they can vastly change the plane’s performance. Changes in computer reliability or cryptology or in scouting systems in outer space are invisible, at least to an amateur observer.
Karl Lautenschlaeger asserts that the most important characteristic of the Soviet Oscar-class submarine was not its great size, but the likelihood that its missiles were guided by space-based sensors.
Submarines that depend on acoustic stealth are in a continuing competition to operate more quietly than the enemy; the quieter they become, the more “invisible” they are.
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Vannevar Bush once said that the unity of decision under a totalitarian regime was a recipe for making colossal technological mistakes, whereas the prevalent confusion of decision-making in a democracy was more efficient. He could not have anticipated the tortuous system of procrastination that characterizes modern American defense procurement.
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Usually more than one piece of technology is required to create a revolution. Sail and cannon together replaced the oared galley. Steam power alone was not enough to replace the ship of the line; it took the steam engine, the screw propeller, and the metal hull all together, which in turn made possible the big gun and the marriage of rifling, breech-loading, and an effective fire-control system. Big aircraft carriers were nothing without powerful aircraft engines to lift bomb-loads worthy of the name, and big aircraft required powered elevators, catapults, arresting gear, and the science of long-range navigation over water.
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Even the Polaris submarine, the embodiment of a naval revolution as neat and swift as we are apt to see, would not have arrived without the inspired marriage of two technologies, nuclear propulsion and solid-fuel rocketry; and the work of two great technical leaders, ADM Hyman Rickover, USN, and VADM William F. “Red” Raborn, along with Arleigh Burke, a Chief of Naval Operations who understood warfare, politics, and the value of swift action.
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It is impossible to design the perfect weapon for large-scale production and employment without practicing with it; even then, it takes three or four generations of hardware before a weapon realizes its full potential.
