A story on how military innovation is stifled

In a very interesting episode of the a16z podcast, Marc Andreessen talks about how society often pushes back on technology. A famous case of military innovation, continuous-aim firing, found in Elting Morison’s Men, Machines, and Modern Times. [I’ll forego the indentation]

Marc Andreessen: It’s the topic of, how does science enter society and how does the status quo of society react. And Morison tells a story, he hangs his hat on this whole thing, with an amazing story from a 120 to 130 years ago, about a guy named Sims at the time who worked in an area of naval warfare. Big seafaring battleships firing on each other, land targets and so forth. So 120 to 130 years ago, we didn’t have military airplanes yet so naval warfare was warfare. This was the core aspect of military technology at the time.

Sims worked on guns of big military ships and in particular how do you aim guns on big military ships. Before Sims, guns were fixed in position on a ship, it’s latched to the deck so it doesn’t roll around. The sea is moving, so the ship is going back and forth in the water, and so the gun is going back and forth. In naval battles up until Sims, the accuracy rate of guns being fired off this ship was at best ten percent, and quite often below that. They’d miss most of the time. They’d miss because the gunnery officer got a fix on a position but by that point the ocean and ship have moved. He’d no longer have a lock. A lot of naval battles at the time had these ships firing at each other missing all the time.

Sims said, there has to be a better way to do this. He designed a mechanical mechanism that automatically worked in opposition — counterbalanced the roll of the ship. If the ship is going down, the mechanism would automatically correct and the gunner could get a fix. All of a sudden the accuracy rate shoots up to 90%.

[Eric: It was actually a much bigger improvement. Morison reports a 3,000% improvement in accuracy in six years after adoption. Also, William Sims did not invent continuous aim firing, Sir Percy Scott did in the UK.]

What’s so great about this example is it is the most obvious thing in the world. Every country’s military should instantly adopt this, every military ship retrofitted to do this. This is the most obvious slam dunk thing you could do. It’s a huge advance in warfare. You couldn’t imagine warfare without it. That’s what you’d assume. Of course, that’s not what happened at all.

It took Sims a full 25 years to convince the American and British navies to adopt it. It took a full generational shift. He goes in detail what happened. The command structure basically told him to f- off with your new fangled thing. We’re going to do things the old way. Sims ultimately had to appeal directly to President Teddy Roosevelt who ordered the Navy to look at it. They later ended up adopting it.

So Morison goes into it. If they won’t adopt that technology then this must be some primal type of counter-force. His thesis is the following: every new technology is a reordering of the power and the status in society. Specifically in the form of this gun, the entire training and officer promotion method — the entire social hierarchy of how naval gunnery officers were trained and how guns were built, manufactured, crewed, and managed and how military doctrine worked, how you make decisions about this — it was all based on the old model. That became obsolete as soon as the gun came out, so the people believed they’d become obsolete or so they feared. This new breed of more advanced breed of engineering mentality came in and was a profound threat. And that eventually happened, you needed a generational turnover in all the staff and officers in naval gunnery.

[Eric: Does this remind you of anything today…?]