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

4. Urban Intelligence Gathering

C H A P T E R F O U R Urban Intelligence Gathering In 1968 remarks to a forum on “systems analysis and social change,” U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey offered his analysis of military technology transfer to date. The nation’s military-industrial complex had developed a robust variety of managerial innovations, he observed, but there was still much that the aerospace community could do. He presented the assembled audience— members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Operations Research Society of America—with a challenge: “I want every one of you to become more involved in solving our problems here on Earth,” he declared, citing the troubles plaguing the nation’s cities as an especially urgent priority.1 Humphrey, chair of the National Aeronautics and Space Council and a former Minneapolis mayor, suggested that if aerospace executives and engineers followed his call to ~nd new markets—a sensible strategy for any industry—they might lead the way toward better governance in America’s increasingly ungovernable cities. Humphrey was not the ~rst to suggest the aerospace industry’s ideas and innovations could offer assistance to the nation’s city administrators. Yet his remarks offered a new motivation for their intervention in urban affairs. “The techniques that are going to put a man on the Moon are going to be exactly the techniques that we are going to need to clean up our cities,” he explained in another presentation that same year, pointing to the “systems analysis approach ” as an especially promising strategy.2 Humphrey’s proposal was a direct response to criticisms from mayors such as Detroit’s Jerome Cavanaugh, who charged that excessive spending on the Vietnam War and the Apollo Program was diverting investments from U.S. cities, even as NASA’s budget was curtailed. Humphrey painted a picture of cities improved, rather than depleted , through an expanded aerospace industry. At the same time that their colleagues in think tanks worked to bring cybernetics and computing to American urban operations, the aerospace community proposed that its own brand of innovations would offer an ideal complement . Systems analysis was not, as Humphrey predicted, their central focus. Instead, innovations in nonphotographic reconnaissance technology and image -interpretation techniques to survey territory from air and space, as well as the “space age management” techniques that were said to have made possible these innovations’ rapid development, became the aerospace community’s chief proposed exports to urban markets. Like their colleagues in defense research and development, this breed of technology-transfer enthusiast found ways to de~ne city problems to parallel problems encountered in the nation’s space program. Improving the comprehensive planning process in an era of cities’ limited ~nancial resources was the overarching stated goal of their initiatives . The unspoken agenda was repairing the aerospace community’s public image in the face of critics such as Cavanaugh in order to insure the industry ’s survival. U.S. defense and aerospace communities historically have been tightly coupled , yet one signi~cant difference separated their experience in urban operations . For the defense intellectuals who worked to export military innovations to Community Renewal and related programs, declaring a “war” on urban problems became a controversial exercise. Activists charged a war already was under way in America’s inner cities—a war against, rather than for the bene~t of, urban populations. The community of aerospace experts who followed Humphrey’s advice faced a far less daunting climate for public relations. For the activities of the military space program remained wholly classi~ed, leaving the aerospace community with a civilian agency to lean on. With NASA as their ~gurehead, aerospace executives and engineers eschewed the public rhetoric of war in favor of the language of scienti~c planning and manage96 Cities in the Space Age ment. Yet if their linguistic ballet painted one picture of industry efforts to promote new approaches to urban data gathering and analysis, a more accurate representation remained concealed. Behind the rhetoric of science lay the reality that the innovations that aerospace executives and engineers endeavored to transfer to urban operations—like NASA and indeed much of the aerospace industry—were historical products of America’s cold war concerns about national security. A Brief History of Aerial Reconnaissance Military leaders have long depended on remote sensing techniques to gather information about enemy territory. The earliest recorded uses of aerial surveillance in the West date...