Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars

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While technology obviously played an important part in the outcome of the First and Second World wars the outcome was largely determined by the significantly greater industrial capacities of the US and British empire, together with their better access to resources in the form of finances, people and raw materials. Many other naval technologies were developed in the same period, and several had revolutionary impact. Heinz worked for many years as a financial services lawyer while maintaining an active interest in military and naval history. O'Hara's work has also appeared in periodicals and annuals including Naval History, Naval War College Review, Warship, MHQ, World War II Magazine, World War II Quarterly, Seaforth Naval Review, American in WWII, WWII History, and Storia Militare.

Once the technology existed, however, bottom-up experimentation and lessons learned were the quickest ways to develop effective exploitation methods. In general, navies strive to win wars with better versions of existing weapons, tools, and platforms rather than use novelties in the front line. The section describing the exploitation of the technology in World War II is followed by a summary of postwar developments and a brief review of the technology’s current state. Starting in 1942, Manhattan Project personnel built the world’s first nuclear reactors, processed tons of uranium ore to isolate radioactive material for the bombs, and designed incredibly precise mechanisms to make them explode at exactly the right moment. Given the limitations of the cases presented here, the authors did a commendable job of creating an accessible and readable volume that points out some potential pitfalls to avoid and techniques for developing technological advantage in wartime.

In the course of doing so, the authors tell how these "six technologies facilitated and frustrated navies in their pursuit of victory" (p. Many more cases, covering more diverse technologies over longer spans of history and including differing cultures will be required before achieving the goals that the authors set out for this book.

To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, while the concept of innovation is simple, innovating under enemy fire is difficult. The bibliography is well-organized, showing that the authors made liberal use of official histories and primary documents and hundreds of articles, chapters, and books by well-respected scholars. Navies that specialized in specific technologies often held advantages over enemies in some areas but found themselves disadvantaged in others. Still, by 1914 fleets of gun-armed capital ships dominated naval thinking, much as the ship of the line had more than a century before.He had to account for these threats with only speculation and imagination to inform his countermeasures. The dreadnought battleship was, in 1914, the alpha naval technology upon which victory at sea was supposed to depend. Not only could the United States outproduce its enemies, but it also had the money, materials, and ingenuity necessary to create the best possible equipment and supplies all of which helped the Allies fight more efficiently and effectively.

In an age of technological innovation, it is too easy to avoid going beyond the sizzle to ask what should or should not be adopted, and how. In naval terms, this change came in four major waves, with the first three climaxed by a major naval war. An example documented by O’Hara and Heinz is China’s use of mines dating back to the tenth century during the Sung dynasty.The first wave began in the mid-nineteenth century with the shift from sail to coal-fired steam engines, and included the development of armor, the improvement of. By 1944, synthetic rubber plants were producing around 800,000 tons of material annually for the war effort. The guiding idea was to focus, not on technical details but to explore “the process by which each technology’s possibilities were first recognized, tested, then used, or not used, to best advantage” (2). The Germans’ use of radio in World War I facilitated their operations, but overuse gave their enemies critical information about those operations.

This study, then, looks at how six technologies facilitated and frustrated navies in their pursuit of victory.In relation to submarines, it is concluded that: “There is reason to think that they would be even more effective now, given the relative states of submarine and ASW technology. Navies will still require wings, but those wings may well prove to be of a new type (such as unmanned drones) flying from new platforms rather than large, expensive aircraft flying from large, expensive ships. Winning the war relied upon having the best weapons, computers, communication technologies and medicines.