One seemingly obvious innovation back a the turn of the 20th century which met heavy resistance within the Navy was an elevation system to keep guns steady while the ship pitched and rolled at sea. The technology, called continuous aim-firing, undoubtedly revolutionized naval gunnery.
In the Spanish-American War, thousands of naval shots were fired with only a handful landing a hit. Continuous aim firing literally improved naval gunnery by one-thousand fold. In 1966, in his classic book Men, Machines, and Modern Times, historian E. E. Morison put forward a generalized process that brought the Navy continuous aim firing at the turn of the twentieth century:
1. The essential idea for change occurred in part by chance but in an environment that contained all the essential elements for change and to a mind prepared to recognize the possibility of change.
2. The basic elements… were put in the environment by other men, men interested in designing machinery to serve different purposes or simply interested in the instruments themselves.
3. These elements were brought into successful combination by minds not interested in the instruments for themselves but in what they could do with them…
4. [They] were opposed on this occasion by men who were apparently moved by three considerations: honest disbelief in the dramatic but substantiated claims of the new process, protection of the existing devices and instruments with which they identified themselves, and maintenance of the existing society with which they were identified.
5. The deadlock between those who sought change and those who sought to retain things as they were was broken only by an appeal to superior force, a force removed from and unidentified with the mores, conventions, devices of the society.
No doubt this pattern existed for a number of important systems, including the atomic bomb, ballistic missiles, the sidewinder missile, the jeep, the P-51, UAVs, and the lightweight fighters of the F-16 and F-18.
The first three steps alone relate to technological innovation while the fourth and fifth relate to the process of innovating, or changing, the social institutions that embed the new technologies. The cases presented all required a “superior force” to break the deadlock, which is by no means certain.
If the acceptance of technological innovation depends on social adaptability, and, as Morison suggests, societies in the military services have trouble reforming themselves without outside direction, the extended implications present a “discouraging thought.” Morison asked what if “no society can reform itself? Is the process of adaptation to change, for example, too important to be left up to human beings?” Morison called for the deliberate creation of an emotionally “adaptive society.”
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