Role of Science & War during the 1930s

Abstract:

In this blog post, I’ll try to discuss the role of science & war during the 1930s by explaining about the emergence of Cybernetic vision & the Anti-aircraft(AA) weapons developed with the the mechanized soldier faced his opponent as a machine, and machines manifested themselves as people during the WW-II.

Vannevar Bush - Military Advisory, WWII:

In the 1930s, US military research was relatively small and disorganized. It was performed primarily by military staff and often duplicated between different branches of the military. On June 12, 1940, Vannevar Bush met with President Roosevelt to detail a plan for changing the organization of military research & proposed a new organization, called the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), which would bring together government, military, business, and scientific leaders to coordinate military research.

Science at War – The Calculating Enemy :

In the mean time, three closely related sciences engaged this calculating Enemy : operations research, game theory, and cybernetics. Each had its own prototypical war problem. Operations research focused, for example, on maximizing efficiency in locating and destroying German U-boats in the North Atlantic and along the coast of the Americas. Game theory, though it had mathematical roots in the interwar years, exploded into view with John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern's masterwork of 1944, ’Theory of Games and Economic Be’ picked up the technique as a way of analyzing what two opposing forces ought to do when each expected the other to act in a maximally rational way but were ignorant both of the opponent's specific intentions and of the enemy's choice of where to bluff. Wiener, the spokesman and advocate of cybernetics, in a distinction of great importance to him, divided the devils facing us in two sorts. One was the "Manichean devil" "who is determined on victory and will use any trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory." Wiener's rational Manichean devil could, for example, change strategy to outwit us. By contrast, the other, the "Augustinian devil" (and Wiener counted the forces of nature as such) was characterized by the "evil" of chance and disorder but could not change the rules.' Exemplary of the Manichean enemy, von Neumann's game theory postulated a logical but cunning opponent; it was designed precisely to analyze an antagonist who played against us and would bluff to win.

Cybernetic Vision – Blurring of Man & Machine boundary:

According to Galison, the system of weaponry and people that Wiener had in mind was predicated on a picture of a particular kind of enemy. On the mechanized battlefield, the enemy was neither invisible nor irrational; this was an enemy at home in the world of strategy, tactics, and manoeuvre, all the while thoroughly inaccessible to us, separated by a gulf of distance, speed, and metal. It was a vision in which the enemy pilot was so merged with machinery that (his) human-nonhuman status was blurred.

In fighting this cybernetic enemy, Wiener and his team began to conceive of the Allied antiaircraft operators as resembling the foe, and it was a short step from this elision of the human and the nonhuman in the ally to a blurring of the human-machine boundary in general. The servo mechanical enemy became, in the cybernetic vision of the 1940s, the prototype for human physiology and, ultimately, for all of human nature. Where Darwin had assiduously tracked the similarities between human and animal in order to blur the boundary between them, Wiener's efforts were devoted to effacing the distinction between human and machine.

World War II elevated the stakes of understanding the enemy's intention to survival itself; it stripped human behavior to moves of pursuit, escape, and deception; and it introduced a new class of self-regulating weapons. It is in this specific context that the identity of intention and self-correction was forged. And hence, the mechanized soldier faced his opponent as a machine, and machines manifested themselves as people.

Conclusion:

              In this way, Cybernetics which was intended by Wiener so as to use electrical networks to determine, several seconds in advance, where an attacking plane would be and to use that knowledge to direct artillery fire, the cybernetic vision changed the entire nature of war with Cybernetics, that science-as-steersman, made an angel of control and a devil of disorder.
                                                                                                                                   Submitted by: Syed Ashruf,
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