Plenty of folks are writing about the sacrifices of life and limb made by U.S. military veterans. I’m grateful but don’t have anything original to add so I thought I would write a note of appreciation for the contributions made by military design engineers (as distinct from “military engineers” who may have built impressive roads, etc.).
Gerry Sussman, one of my advisors at MIT, liked to point out how the N connector and BNC connector were compatible in an emergency, something that he attributed to engineers designing for military use.
World War II was also a great time for military-driven innovation in aircraft and avionics, still paying peacetime dividends, but it is tough to pinpoint specific design engineers who were actually in the military and separate their accomplishments from those working for contractors. For example, I’m pretty sure that someone in the U.S. Air Force was responsible for our country’s early lead in integrated circuits, but I can’t figure out who it was (see this history of Texas Instruments for “while the U.S. Air Force showed some interest in TI’s integrated circuit, industry reacted skeptically.”; see also Wikipedia).
That’s my Veteran’s Day message: Thanks to the engineers inside the U.S. military who pushed for technology that all of us can now use on a daily basis.
Readers: Can you think of specific active duty U.S. military service members who contributed to technology?
The first two who come to my mind are John Boyd (a fellow Georgia Tech graduate) and Bernard Schriever.
> U.S. Air Force was responsible for our country’s early lead in integrated circuits
Lt. Colonel Philip Corso’s book “The Day After Roswell” claims development of integrated circuits was jump-started by reverse-engineering artifacts recovered from a UFO crash near Roswell NM in 1947.
Corso’s biography makes him credible. It includes:
– chief of the US Counter Intelligence Corps in Rome
– commander of all US European nuclear missiles
– staff member President Eisenhower’s National Security Council
– chief of the Pentagon’s Foreign Technology desk in Army R&D
BillG: I guess we should also then thank the aliens who, out of all of the years in which humans have been on Planet Earth, were kind enough to crash in the same year that the semiconductor transistor was developed! Our cousins grunting around at the beginning of the movie 2001 probably wouldn’t have been inspired to set up a clean-room fab if an alien ship had crashed near their camp…
Grace Hopper was a rear admiral.
While there are undoubtedly civilian spinoffs from military technology, I don’t feel as if the return on investment was very good. Mostly the Cold War was just a giant sink hole for our national wealth and in the mean time we lost our lead in the auto industry, the consumer electronics industry, our cities became slums, etc. It’s like the space program – we spent a trillion dollars and got teflon frying pans and Tang powdered breakfast drink. The Japanese were essentially demilitarized after WWII and they developed a lot of stuff, especially in the electronic field, built high speed rail, etc.
Izzie,
I disagree. I am not aware of any study or paper which shows government spending on Lisp Machines or GPS satellites caused GM to make crappy cars, or Motorola to make crappy TV sets.
To answer Phil’s question, Bradford Parkinson link is credited as one of the developers of the GPS system and he was active-duty in the Air Force during the initial development. Even if Ashton Carter thinks the GPS system is junk link, I think it is pretty nifty.
Jay, Chalmers Johnson wrote about it a lot. The massive footprint of the military industrial complex has had major negative impacts on American private sector competitiveness, and can be linked to the trade deficit. Manufacturing or even contracting for Uncle Sam warps your physical tooling as well as your organization such that you can’t also make things for private citizens.
At the very least there’s a massive diversion of capital. I agree with the gist of Izzie’s point.
The astounding money and expertise poured into the F-35 program *must* represent a “broken window” of sorts. What would that money and those engineers have achieved over the last 20 years had they never latched onto the federal teat? I’m betting a couple more useful things.
Joe, Izzie: You guys are depressing me because of course I know that you’re right. Actually when I worked at HP fresh out of college one of the first things that they explained was that they wouldn’t do government contracts because entering that business would distort the company to the point that it wouldn’t be able to compete in the commercial world.
@ #5 Izzie L., #7 joe, philg,
finally, sanity prevails. US military = one big sink of wealth from the nation. Ask (biographers of) LBJ, whose Great Society program, eradication of rural poverty that he knew so well from personal experience, never got off the ground, because he would not be the one to lose Vietnam, as Truman lost China.
My late father was in Patton’s Third Army in WWII and as such saw extensive battle time as a tank driver in the 11th Armoured Division. I recall many times when he credited Army engineers for devising things and actions that saved many lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_X._Kane
The money the US Government spent on jam-resistant communication (CDMA) in the 70’s and 80’s led in the 90s to the development of CDMA cell phone technology. The money the US Government spent on satellite and microwave modems in the 70’s and early 80’s led in the 90s to digital cable modems and high speed Ethernet. The money Uncle Sam spent on developing GPS for bombs led to GPS in consumer products and general aviation. In all three cases , the same people who were doing work on government contracts in the ’80s founded multi-billion dollar companies in these fields using the knowledge they gained. I am referring obviously to QUALCOMM, Broadcom, and Garmin which were founded and staffed by people who worked at Linkabit, TRW, and Magnavox respectively. The government gave funding for programs which pushed the state of the art because the government felt they needed it for tactical and strategic advantage. So maybe we didn’t develop high-speed rail or great TV sets, but we developed great products as a result of government-sponsored research and development. How is Japan doing these days, BTW?
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover is not only the father of the Navy’s nuclear power program. He is the father of Rankine cycle nuclear power period.
As I said before, it’s not that there were NO civilian spinoffs from military spending but that the return on investment was lousy in most cases. And you are talking about the handful of “winners” that did have significant civilian application – how many programs have ZERO spinoff . We spend $45,000,000,000 to build 20 B-2 bombers. What did we get for that? You could heat your house by burning $100 bills and there’s no question you would get some warmth out of them, but it’s damned inefficient way to do it.
What’s that Darpa-thing I’ve been hearing so much on the internet about?
@Joe, you can look at Iceland as a recent example of what happens if you pour your efforts into one thing. This pulls the best and brightest in that sector and all other sectors suffer by not having access to talent. This is one of the reasons the poor EU states can’t get anything done. All their top talent is going into getting EU grants instead of startups or local projects.
@tekumse, can you please link some articles talking about the issues with Iceland? I am interested and I couldn’t find any recent news regarding that.
SuperMike: Darpa has, of course, funded some interesting projects, but I don’t think it fits the criteria of the original posting because, as far as I am aware, the employees of Darpa are civilians (and therefore cannot be “veterans”). A former civilian employee of the U.S. Department of Defense, however significant his or her contribution might have been, is not a “veteran”.
I worked at Motorola for most of my career. The company had multiple split personalities and complete separate division due to the government being involved in many different activities. We had to keep complete separate accounting and payroll and human resources and physical space etc.. It was a big mess. But it did allow us to leverage government programs (first integrated circuits and large computers built with integrated circuits) and create big commercial programs from those beginnings. Same situation with CPUs. Many early generation semiconductor CPU’s (before Intel 4004 and Moto 6800) were funded by NASA and related groups for the space program. Then they were spun off at TI and Moto to commercial activities.
As far as “veterans” go, there are tons of them working at Motorola Govt groups and related company division that have been bought out by other companies. I worked for a one star general (retired) for a while and we had tons of similar people working civilian jobs after completing their 20 years. TI and other big companies have similar arrangements.
DARPA = Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
I can’t seem to find anything on Google but in my mind it was something like the Economist. I did however find this quote from their president:
http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-grimsson-iceland-2012-4?page=3
“So the lesson from this is: if you want your economy to excel in the 21st century, for the IT, information-based high-tech sectors, a big banking sector, even a very successful banking system, is bad news for your economy. You could even argue based on this that the bigger the banking sector is, the worse is the news for your economy, because their magnetic attraction of taking engineers and technically qualified people and computer scientists into the banking sector is due to high bonuses and higher salaries prevents these creative growth sectors from realizing their full potential.”
@SuperMike
Do you mean AlohaNet? Still government money but not DoD. The idea that the feds and Gore invented the Internet is preposterous.
It is maddening that military development is so inefficient, but it is hard to envision where the dumb money would come from to start developing things like GPS and rocketry. Private capital demands (or seeks) more immediate returns.
More on topic, many of the notable veterans (Boyd,Rickenbacker, Mitchell, Rickover) were actually FIGHTING the military establishment to get breakthroughs recognized.