Episode 2: How We Learned to Love Unmanned – The Cold War, Nuclear Weapons, and Strategic Unmanned Stability

>> Julia MacDonald: Episode 2: How We Learned to Love Unmanned the Cold War Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Unmanned Stability. It was 1945, and the world had changed forever. The United States had just secured Allied victory in World War II, and the world had just witnessed the first use of a terrifying weapon called the atomic bomb.

 

The war was over, but General Half Arnold was already thinking about the next war. Legend has it that General Arnold declared, we have just won a war with a lot of heroes flying around in planes. The next war may be fought with airplanes with no men in them at all.

 

Take everything you've learned about aviation and war and throw it out of the window and let's go to work on tomorrow's aviation. It will be different from anything the world has ever seen. General Arnold had just finished commanding pilots as they bombed Europe and Japan and would go on to lead the new US air Force.

 

He came from a tribe that was intensely proud of the pilots slipping the surly bonds of earth. Yet here he was, predicting that one day soon there would be no pilot at all.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Welcome to The Hand Behind Unmanned, a podcast about how America fights war without human beings, told from the perspective of the human beings making those choices.

 

I'm Jackie Schneider.

>> Julia MacDonald: And I'm Julia MacDonald. In this podcast, we take you inside weapons budget lines and behind classified program doors to understand not only what unmanned technology the US Military bought, but why. For those of you who came for the technology, we hope you'll stay for the people.

 

Because this really is a story about remarkable humans, historical junctures and our beliefs about the future of war and what that means for unmanned weapons we buy.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Along the way in our unmanned journey, we'll learn valuable lessons about how technology shapes the winners and losers in war.

 

How humans and technology interact at a time when the march of technological progress seems inevitable, how public funds get invested when it comes to warfare, and above all, the human hands. At the heart of unmanned technology.

>> Julia MacDonald: We pick up the story of America's autonomous arsenal in a post World War II United States.

 

There is a simmering tension with our previous ally, the Soviet Union, and the US is jousting with the socialist state to rebuild the international order. Choices need to be made about the American military, its weapons, organizational structure and purpose. In particular, two important weapons debuted at the end of World War II the rocket first invented by the Germans, and America's own homegrown nuclear bomb.

 

A post war America needs to figure out how it will build its new military to leverage these technologies, protect democracies in a new world order, and somehow avoid nuclear war. Enter the Air Force.

>> Julia MacDonald: In 1947, as part of its attempts to rebuild the new post war military, the United States introduced the National Security Act.

 

The law reorganized the Department of War and US Intelligence agencies, and most importantly to our story, created the Air Force. The Air Force is going to dominate much of this podcast because starting in 1947, the Air Force begins to give off what my tween daughter might call main character energy.

 

And so, given the introduction of the Air Force to our story, I want to pause in the timeline and introduce one of the most important ideas that shaped the contemporary US Unmanned arsenal. You might remember from our first episode that we said that beliefs and identities were how big organizations like the Department of Defense make decisions about weapons and force structure, especially when faced with uncertainty.

 

These beliefs about the future of war, about the role of technology, change over time. But our ideas about who we are, our identity, can play a large role in the beliefs we are more or less willing to adopt or abandoned. We, as individual humans, have our own personal identities.

 

But groups can also have identities. In the Department of Defense, there are a few groups that have very strong identities, identities so strong that absent big interventions, these identities can dictate the direction of the American military. We call them service identities. So what are the services and what are their unique identities?

 

The military services, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and recently Space Force all have distinct cultures, traditions, and feelings about what makes you part of their group. If you've seen a Go Navy Beat army bumper sticker on a car or heard Marines say oo rah, you've gotten a glimpse into how defining these identities can be.

 

But service identities are more than just football or Marine grunting. They define how each of the armed services want to fight in a war, what missions they prefer, what role they want to play in national security, and ultimately what weapons they want to buy. When a weapon fits a service's identity, it's more likely to have advocates within the service and to survive the vicious Pentagon budget wars.

 

When a weapon doesn't fit into a service identity, or worse, seems to threaten a core identity, it needs an outside advocate, civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, members of Congress, or a president, ideally all three of these actors in order to keep it alive. Thomas Mahnken, a professor at Johns Hopkins, has written extensively about military innovation, and he explains a bit about how these identities and organizational politics shape the larger Department of Defense.

 

 

>> Thomas Mahnken: Fundamentally, organizations are meant not to innovate. It's there in the name organization, right? Organizations are there to organize to provide regular delivery of capability. Organizations are not designed to innovate. So we shouldn't expect organizations to all of a sudden do something that's alien to their nature and innovate.

 

 

>> Julia MacDonald: What are the organizations in the Department of Defense? I think sometimes people don't understand that like there's the DOD and they think about the Pentagon really there's a lot of sub organizations inside there.

>> Thomas Mahnken: The services have the responsibility to organize, train and equip and they also as part of that equip they procure, they develop doctrine and then those service doctrines, those service capabilities are combined by combatant commanders into other kind of capability packages.

 

And then even I would say for some of the services it's about communities within the service. You have different tribes, different organizations within particular services that have really loud voices. So for the army it's not just the army but it's the various combat branches of the Army. Infantry, Artillery, armor, cavalry, aviation.

 

For the Navy, it's not just about the Navy, it's about surface warfare, subsurface, aviation. For the Air Force, it's about the fighter community, the bomber community. For the first part of the Air force's existence, from 1947 to 1974, every Air Force chief of staff was a bomber pilot.

 

Since then, with one now, I think two exceptions, every Air Force chief of staff has been a fighter pilot. I think that tells you all you need to know about the shift in the balance of power within one particular service.

>> Julia MacDonald: To be completely transparent, I have lived and breathed the Air Force identity.

 

Not only did I serve in the Air Force, but my great grandfather was in the Army Air Force. Both my grandparents served in the Air Force. My uncle, husband and cousins are all Air Force pilots. My dad used to sing me the Air Force song as a lullaby, which I in turn sang to my children at night.

 

So it shouldn't be a surprise to you that I know the Air Force identity well. For the Air Force, this is a service built around the airplane and the love of flight, where technology is core to identity. As military strategist Kara Bilder described the Air Force in his Cold War era book the Masks of War, the bond is not an institution.

 

But the love of flying machines and flight technology and air power may be the Air Force's core identity, but concern for service autonomy and survival is the Air Force's core insecurity. That desire for survival means that the Air Force is willing to sacrifice some of its identity to take control of capabilities and missions that ensure the service's survival.

 

But it also means that the Air Force is uniquely poised to mold and evolve technology for wars of strategic air power. In contrast to the Air Force is the Army.

>> Julia MacDonald: The Army's identity is defined by pride in its people and its long tradition of service, which means it's less interested in fancy new technologies, but instead on manpower and that relationship with the American citizenry.

 

It is probably the service most willing to adopt joint campaigns and joint technologies, though generally they would prefer to invest in technologies to support their belief that wars are intrinsically won by boots on the ground. The Navy, also one of the two oldest services, derives its identity from traditional and a deep belief in its own institutions, the most important of which is independent command at sea.

 

The Navy is described by old friend Carl Bilder in the Masks of War as a unique godlike responsibility. Unlike that afforded to commanding officers in the other services, the Navy has its own air powers, sea power. When they're claiming the Marines, their own ground power. This makes them the least joint of the services.

 

But it also means that the competition between naval warfare specialties like surface warfare officers, submarine officers, and aviation officers may explain more about what weapons they buy than competition between the Navy and the army or the Navy and the Air Force. And that leaves the Marines. The Marines have one of the strongest and most cohesive identities within the armed services.

 

The Marines are by law a naval service. However, the service has worked hard to create a separate and distinct identity from their naval brethren. They quickly adopt and change their doctrine based on advances in warfighting, more concerned with showing their utility and relevance over time than their identity within one core warfighting competency.

 

This makes them extremely flexible with technological adoption, not beholden to particular platforms or technologies for their core identity. As true identity entrepreneurs, the Marines have led a dedicated effort to promote their identity within Congress, in the public and among other services. The Marines started this public affairs effort after World War II when a restructuring of the Department of Defense threatened the service.

 

They recruited journalists, movie stars and producers, and lobbied Congress through a network of former Marines. You may remember part of this effort in the 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima. John Wayne plays a tough as nails Marine, Sergeant John Stryker, who led his Marine unit into combat in the Pacific.

 

 

>> Speaker 5: You joined the Marines because you wanted to fight. Well, you're gonna get your chance and I'm here to see that you know how. If I can't teach you one way, I'll teach you another. But I'm gonna get the job done.

>> Julia MacDonald: The Marines were so effective at this public relations strategy that President Truman is famously quoted as saying that the Marines have a propaganda machine almost the equal of Stalin's.

 

So now we understand service identity, let's return to the timeline. It's 1947. The new air force has just stood up, led by Hap Arnold, the general we introduced you to at the beginning of this episode. It creates a strategic Air Command which by 1948 is led by a cigar smoking, unfiltered, strategic, bomb loving Curtis LeMay.

 

LeMay is a consummate institution builder, an influencer by sheer force of nature. He believed deeply in strategic bombing and pilots, which makes the next thing the Air Force does somewhat unexpected. And this is that the Air Force becomes the first service to wholly adopt missiles. Why and how?

 

Well, coming out of World War II, there were 47 different guided missile programs in some stage of development with post war budgets that needed to be whittled down. Who was going to win in the battle for missiles, the new Air Force got a jump start over its rivals.

 

HAP Arnold had pushed for the JB2 missiles, which were an American version of the German V1, eager to stake out another role for the Army Air Forces. A few years later, as political efforts to create the Air Force were coming to a head, Major General Curtis LeMay effectively peed on what he saw as Air Force missile territory, asserting the long range future of the Army Air Force lies in the field of guided missiles.

 

In its quest to wrestle control of missiles away from both the army and the Navy, the Air Force began a campaign describing missiles as pilotless or robot aircraft, making a clear distinction from the unguided artillery of the Army. This also led to a brief moment in 1946 where the Army Air Force made a play for anti aircraft missiles or surface to air missiles by calling them supersonic pilotless aircrafts.

 

This was a precarious balancing act for the Air Force, keeping the army and Navy from co opting missile missions while making sure the munitions wouldn't threaten the Air Force's core bomber constituencies. The tension between co opting missiles and justifying manned bombers was obvious from the very beginning. In its fight to take over missile missions, the Air Force needed to decide whether it wanted to prioritize the cruise missile or the ballistic missile.

 

Cruise missiles which fly within the atmosphere and are often jet engine powered, more closely resembled manned aircraft. This made cruise missiles a logical first step in a technological progression. As one airman recounts from the time period, to people who had grown up with manned bombers before and during World War II, a cruise missile was a less painful, and certainly a less abrupt departure, from what they were familiar with than would be a totally alien ballistic missile.

 

Those who favored the evolutionary approach to the creation of a new generation of weapons, predominantly missiles, were people to whom aircraft had a meaning as a way of life, a symbol, a preferred means of performing a military assignment. Accordingly, in the first decade or so after World War II, the Air Force put its short term eggs in the cruise missile basket.

 

Not too successfully, by the way. One of the Air Force cruise missile programs, the Snark, had so many failures that they called the testing area around the launches Snark infested waters.

>> Julia MacDonald: That changed, however, not long after the debut of the Air Force. The dominant organization within the Air Force, Strategic Air Command, worried the cruise missiles, which looked similar to manned aircraft, threatened Air Force long range manned bomber aspirations.

 

So the Air Force changed their focus and opted instead to invest in the fundamentally different ballistic missiles, but with caveats. The Air Force needed to win control of missiles from the other services, but not at the expense of manned bombers.

>> Speaker 7: Good evening. I hope you'll excuse all this, but I've been taking some time off from my job to look into something important to all of us that seems to be pretty well confused.

 

What I mean is missiles, high performance airplanes. Why do we have so many? Why do we need both?

>> Julia MacDonald: That was Jimmy Stewart from a 1957 public affairs promotion created by the Air Force. And it demonstrates the tightrope the Air Force had to walk by arguing for missiles as strategic air power, but at the same time asserting that the new ballistic missile guidance systems were too crude to provide the accuracy to completely replace the manned bomber.

 

This was a bit of a chicken and egg argument as Air Force leadership worried that missiles would threaten their manned bomber force, invested little in missile guidance systems until the advent of a hydrogen bomb made ballistic missiles far more strategically useful. As late as 1953, the Vice Commander of the Strategic Air Command wrote that regardless of the missile program, it is the opinion of this headquarters that the continued advance in the art of manned flight to high altitudes and long ranges should be at all times a priority objective.

 

It took civilian intervention, first from President Eisenhower's famous Solarian Commission and then from senior civilians in Air Force research and development to create a new protected entity within the Air Force, focused solely on developing ballistic missiles and led by a former German citizen, Bernard Schreiber. But none of this would have happened if it wasn't for the Soviet Union and the Sputnik moment.

 

So let's leave this here for now, and we'll come back to it after we visit the Navy and the army for a bit. Initially, the Navy's ballistic missile development was a joint endeavor with the Army. However, an early test of liquid propellant intermediate range ballistic missiles on a mock aircraft carrier led to catastrophic damage to the carrier and soured the Navy on joint ballistic missile development.

 

It also forced them to focus their attention to the alternative cruise missiles. For the Navy, early investment in cruise missiles represented not so much an embrace of the technology as a deep distrust of the alternative. This led to the Regulus, the Navy ship and submarine launched cruise missile which was deployed from 1955 to 1964.

 

But ballistic missiles weren't dead in the water. Remember earlier when we talked about identity, I mentioned that the Navy is driven much more by competition within its service than competition with the other armed services. In the post World War II US navy, the aircraft carrier reigned supreme. That was a bit of a problem for Navy missiles because the cruise missile was too big to be carried by the existing inventory of carrier aircraft.

 

Which meant that cruise missiles were assigned primarily to submarines tasked with nuclear deterrence patrols. But the submarine community was changing its focus and in no small part because the Navy now had its own unmanned influencer submariner Hyman Rickover. A dogged advocate for the nuclear powered submarine who refused to take a no going around his immediate leadership and straight to Nimitz.

 

Along the way, his leadership style made a fair share of enemies within the Navy.

>> Speaker 6: Isn't that what the military is about? Working within the system.

>> Speaker 9: My job was not to work within a system. My job was to get things done and make this country strong.

>> Julia MacDonald: Rickover wanted a nuclear powered submarine, but the platform needed a mission.

 

And the new ballistic missiles with their promise of nuclear deterrence seemed like an appropriate fit for Rickover's vision of a nuclear Navy. The Navy was still smarting from the Jupiter missile, its liquid propelled experiments. The answer was the solid propellant submarine launched Polaris missile. Together the Polaris ballistic missile and Rickover's nuclear propelled submarines offered a potentially invulnerable nuclear strike option, solidifying Rickover's influence over the Cold War Navy and the future of ballistic missiles within the Navy.

 

Rickover's success with the Polaris ballistic missile also lit a fire in the Air Force's missile program. Not for the last time, the Air Force responded to the Navy's unmanned innovation with an all out influence campaign and a recharge of its own technological development. The Air Force responded with a new nuclear strategy to target the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal and began to genuinely invest in ballistic missiles as a response to Navy success.

 

Rickover's advocacy for ballistic Missiles on nuclear powered submarines was another reminder of how these distinct military service identities affected the type of weapons leaders push for. For Rickover, ballistic missiles were a means toward an end for his vision of submarine warfare, another leader in his place, a Navy pilot or a surface warfare officer, might have made totally different choices and changed the future of unmanned weapons at sea for decades.

 

It's time to talk about space, because it's the Sputnik moment that ultimately cements the Air Force's role in ballistic missiles and creates a whole new domain for armed service infighting.

>> Speaker 8: Today, a new moon is in the Sky, a 23 inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.

 

 

>> Julia MacDonald: So before Sputnik, the US had played around a bit in space with unmanned platforms. In the 1950s, the United States launched hundreds of intelligence balloons over the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the balloons were easy to shoot down, and in the end, the United states only recaptured 40 of the 448 balloons launched.

 

The photos the United States did garner were of little intelligence value because the balloons couldn't be controlled. Most of the pictures ended up being of fields and forests. What's more, the balloons caused the diplomatic furor when the Soviets learned of the program. After a 1958 disastrous attempt at a high altitude unmanned balloon reconnaissance program that ended up crashing in Poland, Eisenhower ended the program and doubled down on investments in the U2, a manned high altitude reconnaissance aircraft.

 

The US was hesitant about space. In the 1950s, the Navy had a Vanguard satellite program in development, but the program had been kept secret and given a tight budget, ostensibly so it wouldn't compete with investments in ballistic missiles and nuclear powered submarines. The Air Force was also tentative, more focused on manned strategic air power.

 

And it didn't help that the then Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, didn't believe in satellites and showed open ambivalence to the Soviet efforts. But like any good story of American innovation, that all changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite into space. And all of a sudden, the US realized it was in a race that it was losing.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Aaron Bateman is an assistant professor of history at George Washington University. And his book Weapons in Space tells the story of American offensive weapons in space.

>> Aaron Bateman: What ends up happening is afterwards the United States invests much greater resources in science and technology across the board. But one of the things that Eisenhower does is as he establishes NASA as the face of the American space program.

 

And so this happens for a variety of reasons. But I think it's really important to know about Eisenhower is Eisenhower did not really care that much about space exploration. But what he was concerned about is that there needed to be some kind of international political regime that viewed satellite reconnaissance, or at the very least, overflight from space as a legitimate activity.

 

And he really worried about having the military as the public face of the American space program. And so what ends up happening between the establishment of NASA in 1958, the establishment of the National Reconnaissance Office in September of 1961 is that you really have the development of three American space programs.

 

You have the civilian program, primarily under NASA. You have the military program under the Department of Defense, and then you have the intelligence space program under the National Reconnaissance Office. That lives very uncomfortably between the national intelligence community and the Department of Defense. Eisenhower was really concerned that if you have the military as the public face of the American space program, that it's going to give it a much more aggressive, militaristic image.

 

And one of the things that he did was he really restrained some of the more, I would say, outlandish aspirations of the military services for all kinds of offensive capabilities in space that also weren't really of great military utility at that time.

>> Julia MacDonald: The Air Force may have lost space to the civilian in a row.

 

The Sputnik moment galvanized ballistic missile development in the Air Force. Congress and the President infused the Air Force's ballistic missile program with cash. The budget for the weapons went from 3 million in 1954 to 2.15 billion in 1958. Maybe more importantly, an enterprising Air Force General Bernard Schreiber focused on process and production, leading to the Atlas missile program and its descendant, the Titan.

 

Which sprinted forward technologically as congressional and executive pushes ensured a solid budget allocation support, no doubt spurred by the Soviet Sputnik moment. Here's General Shriver from a 1992 oral history recounting how President Eisenhower protected him as he cut through Air Force bureaucracy and kept the ballistic missile program a top budget priority.

 

Even in an administration that was fiscally conservative.

>> Speaker 10: General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, he certainly didn't want to spend money on obsolete systems which in the military sometimes hang on to for far too long. But he certainly understood technology and the importance of it and the importance of introducing it into the inventory of the military at the earliest possible date.

 

And this was such new technology and for the first time it really threatened the United States of America. And I mean it was a real threat. Our shores had never been threatened before anywhere close to life. So the funding, while he was bent on a balanced budget, we were given priority funding wise and I can say that we didn't get a blank check, but we certainly were funded adequately and we did achieve our target dates incidentally.

 

 

>> Julia MacDonald: In just a few short years Shriver pushed Atlas and Titan past their army competitors and cemented the Air Force's control over both intercontinental ballistic missiles and the shorter range intermediate range ballistic missiles. This was good news for the Air Force's overall budget as fears that the Soviets were leading the United States in missile and space development ultimately drove Eisenhower's scientific advisory committee to recommend an increase in IRBMs from 60 to 240 systems and an increase in ICBMs from 80 to to 600.

 

So what's the army doing during all this Air Force Navy missile jousting? The army started off promisingly with the Redstone Arsenal, which featured the first missile used in an American nuclear test. Additionally, the Army's Jupiter Intermediate range ballistic missiles, the program the Navy abandoned, outperformed the Air Force competitor the Thor.

 

However, when the Air Force launched an effort to control ballistic missiles, including a remarkable public campaign in the New York Times maligning the Army's missile program, the army eventually ceded most of these missions and capabilities to the Air Force. The Jupiter Intermediate range ballistic missiles were ultimately fielded by the Air Force and decommissioned shortly after the one long range nuclear capable missile the army retained control of.

 

The Pershing survived the Air Force onslaught only because they allowed the Air Force to axe the Mace cruise missile, which the Air Force hated even more than the army controlled Pershings. So the army may not have been doing missiles, but it was fighting a war, a nasty one at that.

 

Just a few years after World War II, the Korean War broke out.

>> Speaker 11: But there was worse to come. A highly trained and well equipped North Korean army swarmed across the 38th parallel to attack unprepared South Korean defenders. Caught off guard, they were all but overwhelmed until the United nations took its historic direct bolt to intervene.

 

 

>> Julia MacDonald: This often overlooked hot war in Asia changed the way the US Military thought about its capabilities. In particular, it created space for the military to experiment with unmanned systems. The army developed anti-tank, anti-personnel, and bounding mines which they used extensively during the Korean War often deployed by aircraft.

 

Mines were seen as a necessary and effective tool to combat large wave offensives such as those seen in the Chosin Reservoir and led to the development of the Claymore mine, an above Ground Command detonated mine that continued to be used all the way into Vietnam. The Korean War also forced both the Air Force and the Navy to develop tactical systems to support the ground fight.

 

After largely ignoring guided bombs after World War II, the need for more accurate combat air support during the Korean War led the Air Force to dust off a radio controlled bomb designed at the tail end of World War II, the Raison VB3. And subsequently modified the Tarzan, a 12,000 pound bomb with Raison's radio guidance.

 

The war also saved cruise missiles from the budget trash heap. Strategic Air Command had abandoned the cruise missile in favor of the ballistic missile. But the less powerful Tactical Air Command continued to invest in cruise missiles, developing and deploying the Matador and Mace nuclear cruise missiles to Europe and Asia, as well as smaller air launched missiles and decoys.

 

These early cruise missile systems were designed to target air defenses as well as other conventional military targets that might have otherwise been difficult for manned fighters and bombers to reach. The Korean War cemented their utility and kept the systems a priority for Air Force investment, despite the relative power disparity between Strategic Air Command and Tactical Air Command.

 

Finally, the Korean War also spurred investment in air and surface missile, in particular, the Navy ship based Terrier and the Sparrow air missile systems, as well as the Army Nike ground based missile system were put on the fast track for development because of the Korean War. The Korean War demonstrated the important role that wars play in weapons trajectory.

 

Wars forced the services to work outside their core identity and in this case, to invest in tactical unmanned systems with joint missions. As we've seen in this episode, the US had a lot of choices coming out of World War II. New technologies opened the door for remarkable innovation.

 

But those technological choices were made just as much because of the organizational tumult of the new Department of Defense as they were a response to technology itself. We also saw how context mattered. A Sputnik moment, a growing nuclear shadow and a war on the Korean Peninsula all shaped US investment in unmanned systems.

 

But everything was about to change, because it wouldn't be long before the conflict in Vietnam dominated the evening news and forced a reckoning in the US military, one that would set the stage for the predators and reapers of the early 2000s. Join us in the next episode when we come back to the US Military in the midst of a cold war, fighting an unpopular proxy war in Vietnam and reckoning with a new technology, the computer and its potential offset implications for modern warfare.

 

I'm Julia.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I'm Jackie.

>> Julia MacDonald: This is the Hand Behind Unmanned podcast. If you liked it, buy the book. It's by Oxford University Press and available on Amazon. Thanks for listening.