Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain by Katherine C. Epstein (review)

Historians often push the origins of phenomena further back into the past; Katherine Epstein does just that by locating the origins of the military–industrial complex in turn-of-the twentieth-century British and U.S. torpedo production, rather than in the Cold War arms race. Epstein asks us to redefine the scale of the military–industrial complex’s features and cast our attention not just on the United States, but on Great Britain as well. Because of the tremendous technical detail and perceptive analysis, this proves easy enough. Torpedo combines the fields of legal, business, and science and technology history to offer fresh insight on a subject usually left to military historians.

The book comprises six chapters that alternate between the United States and Great Britain. Before diving into the particularities of torpedo production in each country, Epstein begins by laying out the new private–public relationships spawned by the development of the torpedo in the several decades before World War I. Designed by British inventor Robert Whitehead, the modern torpedo—a self-propelled underwater weapon—emerged in the 1860s. Soon afterward, torpedoes became fixtures in the global marketplace. As weapons systems, they depended not only on government capital, but also on multinational corporations and the transnational flow of ideas. Improvements in the torpedo were often led by technological rather than scientific advances, and, as such, required heavy amounts of research and development (R&D) investment to make trial and error possible. For the United States, this R&D occurred mostly in the private sector, whereas the British moved more quickly to internalize it.

The chapters on the United States focus on what Epstein sees as major gambles that the Bureau of Ordnance took to compensate for American naval weakness. The bureau forged dependent relationships with private firms in an attempt to get hold of the latest technology, whereas Britain, operating from a point of strength, was reluctant to accept change. For Britain, technology advances were double-edged swords because they improved the torpedo’s accuracy—and, for example, made possible the naval strategy known as flotilla defense—but also required new tactical adaptations, such as the demise of the naval blockade. Britain’s superior resources, however, allowed it to operate more cautiously in its dealings with the private sector. When Robert Whitehead’s namesake company (based in Austria, with a factory in Weymouth, England) sought government funding for trials of a gyroscope, the Navy agreed to only limited trials because officials feared that the company would exploit its investment to attract foreign investors. As the leading naval power with superior capital ships, Britain’s main concern was avoiding technological advances that would benefit other navies.

Britain’s status quo policies were not always successful, however. In the 1890s, the Royal Navy adopted a pattern unification policy to simplify its torpedo manufacture and end competition among suppliers. This decision, however, completely stifled innovation and the Navy eventually reversed course. The Navy also failed to implement automatic means to determine torpedo fire range, choosing instead to rely on traditional means of estimating an enemy’s course and speed. This aversion to change resulted in a weakness in its naval armaments on the eve of World War I. The United States, on the other hand, was eager to change the status quo and consequently had less room to negotiate with the private sector. The U.S. Bureau of Ordnance, for example, prematurely committed to the New Jersey-based Bliss Company for torpedoes, based on the company’s assurances of successful experimental technology, only to find itself dependent on a firm that had overpromised. To compensate for this error, the bureau put Bliss in competition with Whitehead & Co. for the next contracts, rather than staying course and devoting the resources to develop a domestic company. When Bliss secured the rights to manufacture the Whitehead torpedo, the...