From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (review)

This is a very interesting book about the way in which American institutions get bamboozled into adopting popular fads and trends that ought to be scrutinized more carefully. Professor Jennifer Light has investigated the movement of American planning and governmental institutions over the years since the Second World War to adopt techniques like operations research, systems analysis, computer modeling, simulations, photo imaging, cybernetics, and other tools first developed by the military or space agencies. She has argued that the trend began with the fear of nuclear attack which led to the dispersal movement, was given further impetus by the Cold War, took a further start from the demands of social reformers to balance the spending on war and space with spending on social problems, and was then accelerated by the urban riots and disorders of the sixties. The failure of urban renewal encouraged city professionals to try something new and defense contractors to look for new business with them. Various motivations drove this trend. Sometimes it was a fear that their military or space missions were declining that led such institutions to diversify their markets by selling their skills to urban governments. Sometimes it was "mission creep," to employ a military term, that expanded the reach. Sometimes it was a defensive reaction to minimize civilian criticism, much in the same way that nuclear power was.

Light emphasizes the importance of New York and Los Angeles as case studies and institutionally, the RAND Corporation. For a time in the sixties and seventies, RAND even had a branch office in New York City. Liberals like Mayor John Lindsay of New York and conservatives like Mayor Sam Yorty of Los Angeles each bought into the offerings of the contractors.

Pittsburgh, the model urban renewal city, did too. It should be emphasized that Professor Light is not talking about the military per se, but about contractors to the military, like RAND. NASA was a different case, since it did directly peddle its space wares to unwary urban governments.

The book tells a fascinating story, but it is not user friendly, largely because it is so choked with jargon and acronyms. Undoubtedly, there is no help for the problem because the bewildering rise and fall of agencies and institutions compel the embrace of such language.

Professor Light has done a mountain of primary and secondary research to reach her conclusions. The most important of these is that all of the input of military technique and technology improved the lives of urban dwellers very little. In contrast, professionals on both sides of the public and private divide improved their lives considerably. They gained public and professional reputations by implementing these techniques and technologies, engaged in high-powered exchanges over them, and made millions of dollars contracting their services. The public was often left holding the bag. These findings are gratifying to the author, who wrote a book with a similar title, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare, published by Oxford University Press in 1992. However, that book investigated how cities developed their economies by piggybacking off military institutions like bases, defense plants, laboratories, and headquarters. Light comes at it from the opposite direction, investigating how laboratories, think tanks, universities, and defense contractors piggybacked on cities to promote their interests. An interesting, confirming contrast, if perhaps a bit harsh to city planning.