War Machines: Transforming Technologies in the U.S. Military, 1920-1940

Front Cover
Texas A&M University Press, 2001 - History - 218 pages
The American military establishment is intimately tied to its technology, although the nature of those ties has varied enormously from service to service. The air force evokes images of pilots operating hightech weapons systems, striking precisely from out of the blue to lay waste to enemy installations. The fundamental icon for the Marine Corps is a wave of riflemen hitting the beaches from rugged landing craft and slogging their way ashore under enemy fire. How did these very different relationships with technology develop?

During the interwar years, from 1920 to 1940, leaders from the Army Air Corps and the Marine Corps recreated their agencies based on visions of new military technologies. In War Machines, Timothy Moy examines these recreations and explores how factors such as bureaucratic pressure, institutional culture, and America's technological enthusiasm shaped these leaders' choices.

The very existence of the Army Air Corps was based on a new technology, the airplane. As the Air Corps was forced to compete for money and other resources during the years after World War I, Air Corps leaders carved out a military niche based on hightech precision bombing. The Marine Corps focused on amphibious, firstwave assault using sturdy, graceless, and easytoproduce landing craft.

Moy's astute analysis makes it clear that studying the processes that shaped the Army Air Corps and Marine Corps is fundamental to our understanding of technology and the military at the beginning of the twentyfirst century.

 

Contents

Culture Technology and Institutions
xvii
The Bombers Vision
17
The Bombers Technology
33
Political Opportunities and Daylight Precision
53
A HighTech Delivery System
68
Political Pressure on a Warrior Elite
101
Technology and Training
116
Doctrine and Fishing Boats
131
Eureka
148
Victory Military Bureaucratic and Cultural
163
Notes
179
Bibliography
201
Index
211
Copyright

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Page 22 - The air force has ceased to remain a mere auxiliary service for the purpose of assisting an army or navy in the execution of its task. The air force rises into the air in great masses of airplanes. Future contests will see hundreds of them in one formation. They fight in line, they have their own weapons and their own way of using them, special means of communications, signalling, and of attacking. Armies on the ground or ships on the water have always fought on one surface because they could not...
Page 22 - A very significant thing to me was that we could cross the lines of these contending armies in a few minutes in our airplane, whereas the armies had been locked in the struggle, immovable, powerless to advance, for three years.

About the author (2001)

TIMOTHY MOY, who received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, is an assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.