The history of military technology, including the military funding of science, has had a powerful transformative effect on the practice and products of scientific research since the early 20th century. Particularly since World War I, advanced science-based technologies have been viewed as essential elements of a successful military.
World War I is often called "the chemists' war", both for the extensive use of poison gas and the importance of nitrates and advanced high explosives. Poison gas, beginning in 1915 with chlorine from the powerful German dye industry, was used extensively by the Germans and the British; over the course of the war, scientists on both sides raced to develop more and more potent chemicals and devise countermeasures against the newest enemy gases.Harris, Robert and Jeremy Paxman. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare. 2002. Chapter 1. Physicists also contributed to the war effort, developing wireless communication technologies and sound-based methods of detecting U-boats, resulting in the first tenuous long-term connections between academic science and the military.Kevles, Daniel J. The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1971. pp 137-138.
World War II marked a massive increase in the military funding of science, particularly physics. In addition to the Manhattan Project and the resulting atomic bomb, British and American work on radar was widespread and ultimately highly influential in the course of the war; radar enabled detection of enemy ships and aircraft, as well as the radar-based proximity fuze. Mathematical cryptography, meteorology, and rocket science were also central to the war effort, with military-funded wartime advances having a significant long-term effect on each discipline. The technologies employed at the end—jet aircraft, radar and proximity fuzes, and the atomic bomb—were radically different from pre-war technology; military leaders came to view continued advances in technology as the critical element for success in future wars. The advent of the Cold War solidified the links between military institutions and academic science, particularly in the United States and the Soviet Union, so that even during a period of nominal peace military funding continued to expand. Funding spread to the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. Emerging fields such as digital computing, were born of military patronage. Following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, military funding of science has decreased substantially, but much of the American military-scientific complex remains in place.
The sheer scale of military funding for science since World War II has instigated a large body of historical literature analyzing the effects of that funding, especially for American science. Since Paul Forman's 1987 article "Behind quantum electronics: National security as a basis for physical research in the United States, 1940-1960," there has been an ongoing historical debate over precisely how and to what extent military funding affected the course of scientific research and discovery.Forman, Paul. "Behind quantum electronics: National security as basis for physical research in the United States, 1940-1960," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 18, Pt. 1, pp 149-229. Forman and others have argued that military funding fundamentally redirected science—particularly physics—toward applied research, and that military technologies predominantly formed the basis for subsequent research even in areas of basic science; ultimately the very culture and ideals of science were colored by extensive collaboration between scientists and military planners. An alternate view has been presented by Daniel Kevles, that while military funding provided many new opportunities for scientists and dramatically expanded the scope of physical research, scientists by-and-large retained their intellectual autonomy.
Before the modern era
While there were numerous instances of military support for scientific work before the 20th century, these were typically isolated instances; knowledge gained from technology was generally far more important for the development of science than scientific knowledge was to technological innovation.Hacker, Barton C. "The Machines of War: Western Military Technology 1850-2000." History and Technology, Vol. 21, No. 3, September 2005, pp 255-300. p 255. Thermodynamics, for example, is a science partly born from military technology: one of the many sources of the first law of thermodynamics was Count Rumford's observation of the heat produced by boring cannon barrels.von Baeyer, Hans Christian. Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat. New York: The Modern Library, 1998. Mathematics was important in the development of the Greek catapult and other weapons,Hacker, "The Machines of War," footnote 1. but analysis of ballistics was also important for the development of mathematics, while Galileo tried to promote the telescope as a military instrument to the military-minded Republic of Venice before turning it to the skies while seeking the patronage of the Medici court in Florence.Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. In general, craft-based innovation, disconnected from the formal systems of science, was the key to military technology well into the 19th century.
Even craft-based military technologies were not generally produced by military funding. Instead, craftsmen and inventors developed weapons and military tools independently and actively sought the interest of military patrons afterward.Hacker, "The Machines of War," p 256. Following the rise of engineering as a profession in the 18th century, governments and military leaders did try to harness the methods of both science and engineering for more specific ends, but frequently without success. In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, French artillery officers were often trained as engineers, and military leaders from this mathematical tradition attempted to transform the process of weapons manufacture from a craft-based enterprise to an organized and standardized system based on engineering principles and interchangeable parts (pre-dating the work of Eli Whitney in the U.S.). During the Revolution, even natural scientists participated directly, attempting to create “weapons more powerful than any we possess” to aid the cause of the new French Republic, though there were no means for the revolutionary army to fund such work.Gillispie, Charles Coulston. "Science and secret weapons development in Revolutionary France, 1792–1804." Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp 35–152. Quote from excerpt of Georges Cuvier's eulogy of Claude-Louis Berthollet, p 35. Each of these efforts, however, was ultimately unsuccessful in producing militarily useful results. A slightly different outcome came from the longitude prize of the 18th century, offered by the British government for an accurate method of determining a ship's longitude at sea (essential for the safe navigation of the powerful British navy): intended to promote—and financially reward—a scientific solution, it was instead won by a scientific outsider, the clockmaker John Harrison.Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Penguin, 1996. However, the naval utility of astronomy did help increase the number of capable astronomers and focus research on developing more powerful and versatile instruments.
Through the 19th century, science and technology grew closer together, particularly through electrical and acoustic inventions and the corresponding mathematical theories. The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed a trend toward military mechanization, with the advent of repeating rifles with smokeless powder, long-range artillery, high explosives, machine guns, and mechanized transport along with telegraphic and later wireless battlefield communication. Still, independent inventors, scientists and engineers were largely responsible for these drastic changes in military technology (with the exception of the development of battleships, which could only have been created through organized large-scale effort).Hacker, “The Machines of War,” pp 256-257.
World War I and the interwar years
World War I marked the first large-scale mobilization of science for military purposes. Prior to the war, the American military ran a few small laboratories as well as the Bureau of Standards, but independent inventors and industrial firms predominated.Kevles, The Physicists, pp 103-104. Similarly in Europe, military-directed scientific research and development was minimal. The powerful new technologies that led to trench warfare, however, reversed the traditional advantage of fast-moving offensive tactics; fortified positions supported by machine guns and artillery resulted in high attrition but strategic stalemate. Militaries turned to scientists and engineers for even newer technologies, but the introduction of tanks and aircraft had only a marginal impact; the use of poison gas made a tremendous psychological impact, but decisively favored neither side. The war ultimately turned on maintaining adequate supplies of materials, a problem also addressed by military-funded science—and, through the international chemical industry, closely related to the advent of chemical warfare.
The Germans introduced gas as a weapon in part because naval blockades limited their supply of nitrate for explosives, while the massive German dye industry could easily produce chlorine and organic chemicals in large amounts. Industrial capacity was completely mobilized for war, and Fritz Haber and other industrial scientists were eager to contribute to the German cause; soon they were closely integrated into the military hierarchy as they tested the most effective ways of producing and delivering weaponized chemicals. Though the initial impetus for gas warfare came from outside the military, further developments in chemical weapon technology might be considered military-funded, considering the blurring of lines between industry and nation in Germany.Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, pp 11-12.
Following the first chlorine attack by the Germans in May 1915, the British quickly moved to recruit scientists for developing their own gas weapons. Gas research escalated on both sides, with chlorine followed by phosgene, a variety of tear gases, and mustard gas. A wide array of research was conducted on the physiological effects of other gases, such and hydrogen cyanide, arsenic compounds, and a host of complex organic chemicals. The British built from scratch what became an expansive research facility at Porton Down, which remains a significant military research institution into the 21st century. Unlike many earlier military-funded scientific ventures, the research at Porton Down did not stop when the war ended or an immediate goal was achieved. In fact, every effort was made to create an attractive research environment for top scientists, and chemical weapons development continued apace—though in secret—through the interwar years and into World War II. German military-backed gas warfare research did not resume until the Nazi era, following the 1936 discovery of tabun, the first nerve agent, through industrial insecticide research.