Technological Change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945 (review)

Technological Change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945. By William M. McBride. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+333. $45.

Technological Change and the United States Navy shapes a new course through familiar waters. William M. McBride, a 1974 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, received his Ph.D. in history at Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and has taught history at James Madison University and the Naval Academy. This book, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, is an intellectual history of American naval technology that examines the dominance of the battleship mentality. It does so by using analytical concepts borrowed from social constructivism, though McBride argues that neither social constructivism nor technological determinism alone provide a sufficient explanatory framework for technological change in the U.S. Navy.

From the Civil War to the 1920s, line officers sought to control engineers from the moment they entered the navy, inculcating in them the profession's "thought style" as well as a sense of their subservient role in producing the artifacts that served the professional status quo. The battleship emerged as what McBride describes as the normal technological and strategic paradigm toward the end of the nineteenth century. Supporting technologies were developed and new technologies accepted only if their proponents could articulate a subordinate role for these technologies within the battleship-dominated hierarchy.

If a new technology appeared to threaten the battleship's dominance, it was ignored, manipulated, or suppressed. Aviation advanced after World War I because it was perceived to support the dominant battleship paradigm. Aircraft could scout for battleships, spot for their guns, and undertake offensive operations against enemy planes. Similarly, submariners flourished in the interwar years only when they presented their vessels not as a counter to the battleship but as a supporting element within the battleship hierarchy. "Fleet" submarines could scout for the battle line, populate "submarine zones" over which enemy vessels could be lured, or serve as mobile minefields.

For McBride, it was World War II that stripped away cultural barriers to innovation and provided an "unbiased crucible" (p. 210) for naval aviation to prove the superiority of the aircraft carrier over the battleship. Pearl Harbor was not the demarcation between the old battleship navy and the new carrier navy. Rather, McBride argues that the paradigm shift cannot be placed earlier than July 1943, when Admiral Ernest J. King canceled the Montana-class superbattleships. Then, after World War II, aviators ignored, manipulated, or suppressed new technologies according to the carrier paradigm, much as battleship advocates had done before. McBride concludes that while no single model explains technological change across his entire time frame, different models do explain change in different periods.

The book is chock-full of paradigms, presumptive anomalies, and thought collectives, and McBride's infatuation with social constructivism often makes for ponderous prose. "Much like late medieval astronomers arguing over the significance of a new comet to the Ptolemaic universe, U.S. naval officers differed over what conclusions should be drawn from the Russo-Japanese War," he writes. "The battleship paradigm, like the pre-Copernican Ptolemaic cosmogony, was intact but contained certain puzzles that required refinement, such as the size and type of battleship which best exemplified the paradigm" (p. 64). Such passages will leave readers unfamiliar with social constructivist theory scratching their heads.

Moreover, McBride sometimes bolsters his argument with unsupported assertions. Although he twice characterizes the ascendancy of carrier-based aviation over the battleship as a "near-run" thing (pp. 203, 212), he provides insufficient evidence to make a convincing case. He also declares that "the small Ranger and Wasp proved ineffective" simply because "Wasp was sunk in 1942" and "Ranger was relegated primarily to noncombat missions during the war" (p. 194). He bases his argument on documents and articles penned largely by contemporary partisans of battleships, as well as on a deep reading of the relevant secondary literature in American naval history and the...