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Introduction Alittle over a quarter-century ago I was a naval officer newly assigned to a Pacific Fleet destroyer. During my warfare qualification I was introduced to a piece of electronic gear designated ULQ-6. One of its features was the ability to increase the radar reflection of our ship. In this “blipenhance mode” the ULQ-6 theoretically would trick radar-guided missiles into mistaking our tiny destroyer for a huge aircraft carrier. When I expressed surprise at such a suicidal device, I was told not to worry because the blip-enhance mode was “always broken.” The notion of hierarchical sacrifice the ULQ-6 entailed was not new to me. The Naval Academy’s “Sea Power” course had acquainted me with the sacrifice of destroyers and destroyer escorts, and the deaths of 526 of their crews, off Samar in 1944 to protect aircraft carriers.1 What bothered me was my expendable status thirty years later in what many nonaviators considered a futile sacrifice to protect a vulnerable capital ship. What intrigued me as I later took up the study of the history of technology was how the naval profession developed the intellectual and institutional framework necessary for the conceptualization, design, testing, and deployment of such a device. In retrospect, I am amazed at the ULQ-6 designers ’ optimism that sailors would use it and its apparent easy circumvention by personnel unwilling to play capital ship during an attack. I never found out if the account of constant disablement of the ULQ-6 was apocryphal. I spent the next thirty-three months far below the air-conditioned domain of the ULQ-6, in a world dominated by boilers and steam turbines and populated by colorful characters drawn from Georgius Agricola ’s 1556 treatise, De Re Metallica. My introduction to the ULQ-6 occurred within the context of the “holP low force” navy of the late Vietnam era. Aviators dominated the service, and the navy contained large numbers of aging World War II ships such as mine. In general, the navy measured its health in the numbers of attack carriers able to project power ashore and, theoretically, able to control the seas in the tradition of Alfred Thayer Mahan. While my shipmates and I were busy serving as lesser cogs within the technological framework that supported the aircraft carrier, I perceived some weakness in the claims of its dominance of war at sea. Nuclear-powered submarines posed a serious challenge. During periodic exercises, submarines routinely and successfully attacked us and the aircraft carriers we escorted. Most times they did so undetected, even by newer antisubmarine ships. Since the Soviet navy had over three hundred submarines, I wondered about the aircraft carrier’s ability to survive even a limited conventional conflict. I was not alone and recall one illustration in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that featured an aviator admiral scanning the heavens while centered in the crosshairs of a submarine periscope. Two years after my introduction to the ULQ-6, another occurrence caused me to question the navy’s apparent singular focus on air warfare and became the nascent catalyst for this study. My old World War II–era destroyer sank the nuclear-powered supercarrier Enterprise in two of three phases of a fleet exercise. Despite local umpire agreement with the success of our attacks, we were informed that the final exercise report did not mention them. I assume the admiral who approved the report had a broader view of the exercise and had valid reasons to discount our success. Or perhaps he was just partial to aircraft carriers and knew that a nuclear-powered supercarrier like Enterprise was only vulnerable to an airborne assailant. The incident paralleled a successful British submarine attack on a battleship during a pre-1914 exercise. The battleship admiral’s signal to the submarine captain was dismissive: “You be damned!”2 The whole Enterprise issue seemed to repeat the stereotyped myopia of pre–Pearl Harbor battleship admirals. I can think of no other modern weapon that, in the popular view, so embodies obsolescence as the battleship. The 1965 Random House American College Dictionary on my bookshelf even used the battleship as an example in its definition of “obsolete.”3 This view originated with postwar perceptions that the battleship had failed to fulfill its pre-1914 billing as a decisive weapon. Images of the 1921 battleship bombing trials lingered in the public and political consciousness and contributed...

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