Peter Mitchell is a U.S. Army officer and former instructor of strategy at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His novel Captain Hawke will be released this summer. He has also written an adventure following a young Clausewitz, a story that, much like Scharnhorst’s early efforts, is still searching for its breakthrough. Follow him on X @peternmitchell.

In 1801, a Hanover-born artillery officer named Gerhard Scharnhorst arrived in Berlin with an unusual mission from the King of Prussia: he was tasked with making the Prussian Army think.

This was, at the time, a revolutionary act.

Quite literally—people thought he was a crypto-republican.

Prussia in 1801 was (to her officers’ minds) already perfect. Her army was the most storied in Europe. It stood upon the legacy of Frederick the Great, who had died in 1786 having won wars that defied all considerations of manpower and geography. Prussian officers still dressed after his fashion, drilled in his formations, and repeated his maxims as gospel. The army had become a living museum, and in such a place as that the most dangerous thing an officer can do is suggest that the exhibits be removed.

Gerhard Scharnhorst was just such a man.

The Parade Army

To understand what Scharnhorst was up against, you have to understand how badly the Prussian Army had stagnated by the dawn of the nineteenth century. Structurally, it was still the army of Rossbach and Leuthen of five decades before: fighting in rigid linear formations with brutal drill discipline enforced by the rod. Officers were selected by birth rather than ability and operated in a command culture that punished initiative as a form of insubordination. The enlisted ranks were filled with levied peasants, criminals, vagabonds, and foreign mercenaries held together through coercion rather than cohesion. The whole edifice assumed that war would obligingly be fought by the same immutable Frederician script.

However, Napoleon Bonaparte had written a new one.

South of the Alps, France had spent the better part of a decade kicking the armies of the old order up and down the Po Valley. The levée en masse had mobilized the whole of French society and replaced small, professional Ancien Regime armies with conscripted citizens on a scale far greater than the traditional Prussian canton system. French corps operated semi-independently, foraging off the land, moving faster than a traditional supply train could follow. Commanders were selected by merit and ruthlessly replaced when they failed. The French Republic was forging fundamentally different methods of modern war.

The Prussian high command watched all of this and shrugged chauvinistically. Even after the Prussian defeat at Valmy in 1792, France’s further successes against Austria and the smaller German states were attributed to luck, revolutionary fervor (a temporary condition, surely), and the perceived incompetence of Prussia’s Habsburg rivals. The institutional conclusions that should have followed were systematically suppressed by an officer corps whose identities, social status, and economic livelihoods were intertwined with the existing system. Admitting that the system was broken meant admitting that they were, too.

The Outsider’s Audit

Scharnhorst understood the Prussian problem because he was not quite one of them. Born in 1755 to a family of modest Hanoverian freeholders he had no aristocratic sinecure to protect. He had earned every position through demonstrated intellectual and professional ability, which made him unusual in every army in which he served. He joined the Hanoverian artillery, studied obsessively, and began publishing his own military journal in the late 1770s when he was barely in his twenties. By the time he was a first lieutenant, he had already written more seriously about the theory of war than most generals had read. But Scharnhorst was no desk jockey. When the wars of the French Revolution erupted in 1789, he joined the Hanoverian Expeditionary Corps under Prince Frederick, Duke of York and fought with great distinction in the Netherlands.

Prussia’s Frederick William III recognized something in Scharnhorst. In 1797, Prussia invited him to the kingdom with an offer of a promotion to lieutenant colonel. Scharnhorst demurred, preferring to stay in Hannover with his writing and his wife Clara. In 1801, the King of Prussia invited him again to Berlin with the promise of a nobility patent (making him Gerhard ‘von’ Scharnhorst), a double salary, and a promotion to colonel.

This time Scharnhorst accepted and moved with his wife to Berlin, where the king appointed him to lead the newly founded Akademie für junge Offiziere der Infanterie und Kavallerie. It was an experiment in building what we would now call institutional knowledge. Scharnhorst occupied a townhouse on the prestigious Unter den Linden boulevard and put out a request for regiments to send him their best and brightest young officers to teach them the art of war. He meant to expose them to that which the Prussian military had rarely prioritized: serious, critical thought about why armies won and lost, not just how they maneuvered and fought. He also started a seminar known as the Militärische Gesellschaft or “Military Society” for similarly aligned officers such as the brilliant August von Gneisenau.

The old guard was not pleased. To men like Field Marshall Wichard von Möllendorf, the Akademie looked very suspicious. A boondoggle. Officers who asked too many questions were dangerous. Officers who read theory were practically treasonous. The aristocratic establishment that ran Prussia’s military viewed Scharnhorst’s project as an irritant at best. At worst, they feared it was a seditious little intellectual club that—even if it wasn’t fomenting republicanism—would certainly produce nothing useful for the real business of war.

The Prussian general of the day would have heartily agreed with Britain’s Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, when he asserted: “Brains? I don’t believe in brains! You haven’t any, I know, sir! There is a time for everything, and the time for change is when you can no longer help it.”

So Möllendorf and the other generals kept Scharnhorst far away from any influence over doctrine, procurement, or command selection. Only a handful of young ensigns and cornets were sent to the Akademie, largely outcasts that the colonels didn’t mind losing to their young king’s eccentric project.

Let the Hanoverian Colonel Scharnhorst have his cadets and run his Francophilic seminar. He could not actually change anything that mattered.

The Star Student No One Wanted

One of the young officers Scharnhorst received was a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant from Prince Ferdinand’s 34th Infantry Regiment named Carl von Clausewitz—a young man who, by almost every conventional Prussian measure, had no business being in the room.

Lieutenant Clausewitz was from Magdeburg. His father was a minor civil servant and former officer, technically of noble birth, but he had retired from the army at the same time as Frederick the Great’s purge of non-noble officers. Clausewitz’s tenuous claim to his “von” (along with his suspiciously Slavic-sounding surname) led to loud questions from officers with family lines stretching back before the foundation of Prussia.

To make matters worse, Clausewitz was socially awkward, bookish, and possessed of a neurodivergent intensity that made him deeply unsuited for both small talk and the glad-handing politics of the regimental mess. He did not mesh well with the kind of men who ran things. He had earned a battlefield commission during the Siege of Mainz in 1794. He had no patrons, no family connections to command, no path to preferment.

What he did have was an extraordinary mind.

Scharnhorst saw it immediately. He took Clausewitz under his wing, guided his reading, sharpened his thinking, and (critically) advocated for him in the face of a system that would have been happy to leave him in obscurity. When Clausewitz’s noble credentials were challenged in 1803, Scharnhorst intervened with the king to arrange for Clausewitz to be made aide-de-camp to Prince August. He used personal capital that a more self-interested man would have husbanded carefully. He spent it on a young man his colleagues considered more trouble than he was worth.

Scharnhorst had grasped something the establishment was incapable of grasping: that the asset which would determine Prussia’s future military effectiveness was not the bayonet or the battalion square, but the caliber of mind that could understand war well enough to adapt to it in real time. He was building intellectual infrastructure.

The institution, for the moment, was entirely uninterested.

The Prussian Blue Screen of Death

On October 14, 1806, the parade ground army met the real thing at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt.

In a single day, Napoleon’s forces completely destroyed the Prussian field army of 70,000 men. Prussian formations that had drilled for years dissolved. Commanders who had been promoted for lineage rather than ability fought with tremendous bravery and failed in ways that were, in retrospect, entirely predictable. The rigidity that the old guard had mistaken for discipline became a death sentence when the French corps commander Louis-Nicolas Davout improvised, flanked, and refused to fight on Prussian terms.

The commander of the Prussian main body, the Duke of Brunswick, was shot in the head while trying to rally his grenadiers and killed. As the main body fell back in disarray, they ran smack into the Prussian vanguard, which was fleeing north as fast as they could from Napoleon and four other French corps.

Within three weeks, the Kingdom of Prussia was prostrate. French troops occupied Berlin. The king fled east to Königsberg. The army that had been the terror of Europe for sixty years had been broken faster than anyone thought possible in a humiliation greater even than Austerlitz.

Scharnhorst, who had argued for years that a reckoning like this was coming, was given command of the rear guard and was wounded in the subsequent holding action to buy time for the king to escape. He was then assigned to manage the armistice negotiations.

Lieutenant Clausewitz spent a year as a prisoner of war before being exchanged.

The Seeds and the Sower

Here is the part of the story that matters most: Scharnhorst’s post-Jena reforms were not built from scratch.

Scharnhorst’s Militärische Gesellschaft had produced a cohort of officers that understood that Prussia’s loss was not a question of bravery or morale. It was the result of a structural failure. These men had read military history, studied Napoleon’s campaigns, and learned to ask hard questions rather than reflexively defer to seniority. Scharnhorst now had something to work with. The King of Prussia made him a general and gave him carte blanche to reform the army.

The reforms Scharnhorst rammed through between 1807 and his death in 1813 were sweeping: the abolition of corporal punishment; the transformation of the Akademie für junge Offiziere into the famous Prussian Kriegsakademie, the war college that would produce professionally educated officers for generations; the opening of commissions to non-nobles on the basis of merit; and the development of the Landwehr, a reserve system that could mobilize the nation’s manpower beyond just the standing army. He also pushed for the development of the general staff as an institutional brain trust rather than a collection of royal favorites—a concept so foreign that it required the complete destruction of the old system to implement.

Major Clausewitz completed the transformation, becoming the superintendent of the Kriegsakademie from 1818 to 1830. The thinking he had done under Scharnhorst’s guidance was refined over years of study and tested against the catastrophe of 1806. Clausewitz, with the extensive help of his loving and very patient wife Marie, produced On War, the most important work of strategic theory in the Western canon.

The Prussian army that defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 and the Prussian state that became the dominant power in Europe by 1871 (along with the modern United States officer corps) stood on the foundation Scharnhorst laid before anyone thought a foundation was needed.

What This Means for Today

Scharnhorst’s life is a story about the cost of institutional complacency and the mechanism by which that cost eventually gets paid.

The Prussian officer of 1805 was not stupid. He was not a coward. He was a rational actor operating within a system that rewarded the perpetuation of existing structures over honest assessment of emerging threats. The incentives ran in exactly the wrong direction. The intelligence was there. The information was available. The analytical capacity existed—somewhere—in the system. But the institutional architecture was built to filter it out.

Scharnhorst’s answer was to build a parallel infrastructure—a small, underfunded, politically marginal military academy—and populate it with aligned men who had no vested interest in defending the existing answers. He could not reform the institution from the inside through persuasion; it was too well-defended for that. He built the capability that the institution would need when it finally had no choice but to change.

Armies, governments, and industries have always preferred the comfortable illusion that existing structures can be changed when needed over the expensive, politically fraught work of building what is needed in advance. The Prussian high command of 1805 was certain that its machine would perform when called upon. Its failure was comprehensive, rapid, and very nearly fatal.

The problem that the West faces today is a version of the same. The systems, processes, and procurement cultures built for a post-Cold War world of limited contingencies and leisurely acquisition cycles are not suited to the current environment. The gap between what existing architecture can deliver and what the moment requires is widening. The Jenas of the next decade will not announce themselves in advance.

Scharnhorst did not wait for Jena to start building the Kriegsakademie. He started five years before with a handful of students and a small budget.

That is the lesson. Not the dramatic rebuild after the disaster, but quiet, stubborn investment in the face of institutional intransigence.

The Prussian Army eventually got its reformation, but the cost of waiting was severe and entirely avoidable.

Gerhard von Scharnhorst knew that. He said so, repeatedly, before anyone cared to hear it.

That’s the sort of vision after which warships are named.

Max Streeter is a Deployment Strategist at Palantir Technologies serving U.S. government clients.

In his autobiography, Royal Navy Admiral Percy Scott told of a letter written by a fellow naval officer that breached all protocol. In November 1901, a forty-two-year-old American lieutenant bypassed his superiors and wrote directly to President Theodore Roosevelt. Scott called it “a gross act of insubordination for a junior officer.”

Lieutenant William Sims did not deny the charge. He justified it as a necessary act. He wrote to the president because the United States Navy could not shoot.

That conclusion sat awkwardly beside the country’s recent naval performance. The Spanish-American War had ended swiftly and decisively. But a closer inspection found that the accuracy of American guns hovered around four percent. One after-action observer remarked dryly that “Spain exerted all her skill to lose the war.”

The State of Gunnery

For centuries, naval gunfire had been a battle between gravity and swell. A gun crew stood on a rolling deck, waiting for the fleeting second when ship and target aligned. Fire too early and the shell flew high; too late and it sank into blue water. Gunnery was patience masquerading as precision.

In October 1900, then-Captain Scott of H.M.S. Terrible ended the masquerade. By re-gearing gun elevation mechanisms to allow continuous micro-adjustment, he freed the gunner from waiting for the sea’s permission. Add telescopic sights and extended range, and the effect was transformative: accuracy multiplied, rate of fire surged. The outcome was continuous-aim firing.

Despite these dramatic results, the Admiralty demurred. Scott’s comprehensive and technical report, endorsed by Admiral Edward Seymour and supported by Captain John Jellicoe, received no official Admiralty response. It was allegedly turned down by a junior lieutenant at the gunnery school. The innovation was judged against the cost of redesigning gunnery quarters and retraining all gunners across the Royal Navy.

Across the Hong Kong harbor aboard the USS Monterey, Lieutenant Sims immediately grasped the implications. What set Sims apart wasn’t brilliance or technical acumen, but a perspective that saw technology not as a threat to tradition but as a tool for mission.

The Brilliance of Lieutenant Sims

Sims was a middle-of-the-class graduate of the Naval Academy. He struggled with the entrance examinations and, allegedly, the congressman who wrote his recommendation later claimed he almost regretted doing so. After graduating in 1880, Sims spent 17 years at sea aboard numerous ships. During that time, he was shaped by the bureaucracy around him. It was an education in naval custom rather than innovation.

In 1897, his perspective widened. Posted as a naval attaché to Paris, St. Petersburg, and Madrid, Sims officially collected intelligence on the Spanish Navy. Unofficially, he learned a sobering lesson in how far the U.S. Navy lagged Europe’s great powers.

Those powers were not idle. An industrial arms race was underway: armor shifted from iron to KC steel and effective naval gun ranges expanded from roughly 2,000 yards in the 1880s to nearly 10,000 by the mid-1890s. Accuracy mattered more, not less.

Sims saw in Scott’s continuous-aim firing not a curiosity but a naval necessity. The inconvenience of redesigning ships and retraining crews paled beside a more fundamental truth: a battleship exists to hit what it fires at. Lethality is not ornamental.

Sims installed Scott’s system in his own squadron on the China Station. He took steps to retrain his gun crews and test and measure results. Their accuracy improved markedly. He reported his findings to the Bureau of Ordnance and received no response. His appeal could have ended there, alongside Scott’s. Instead, he appealed to higher authority.

Sims’s letter to President Roosevelt came through desperation. “I have within the past few months submitted to the Navy Department a number of reports on foreign target practice,” he pled. The reports concluded “that our marksmanship is so crushingly inferior to inevitably suffer humiliating defeat at the hands of an equal number of an enemy’s vessels of the same class and displacement.”

Sims had seen the future of long-range naval engagements that would characterize the Great War and sought to give the U.S. a head start. He wrote of how he had modified his own fleet but also highlighted the appalling accuracy of U.S. Navy gunnery. Roosevelt, formerly the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, understood immediately. Sims demonstrated that American ships obtained less than 10 percent accuracy, whereas Scott’s ship, H.M.S. Terrible, achieved 80 to 85 percent.

Roosevelt recalled Sims to Washington and made him Inspector of Target Practice, a position created to prove his claims weren’t fiction.

The outcomes followed swiftly. Sims implemented continuous-aim firing alongside a reformed training regime. Modeled off the Royal Navy, he launched an annual gunnery competition. The winning crews’ methods were written up and circulated across the Navy. Within years, the system increased American accuracy by 100 percent and battery effectiveness by 500 percent. An early American report suggested he had elbowed his technology into frame: “The very first practice under his system convinced the authorities that he was right and that much of the gun gear was all wrong.”

In 1909, Roosevelt summarized the progress of American gunnery and attributed the feat to Sims: “our fighting power is at least five times greater than it was before our training had been improved by Commander Sims’ methods.”

The Iconoclast

The historical record only ever suggests so much about a man’s character. What picture we do get of Sims suggests a career that never settled. In 1918, he wrote to a friend that he had “never liked” the Navy and had “never been comfortable in uniform.” There is a certain breed of officer who loves his service enough to irritate it.

Following the Great War, Sims irritated it some more. He publicly refused his Distinguished Service Medal and rebuked the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, for altering promotion standards in ways that made them less meritocratic. His low opinion of Daniels prompted him to write a scathing report, “Certain Naval Lessons of the Great War,” which questioned the Navy’s failure to adequately prepare for war, citing inadequate ship construction among other deficiencies. Some scholars suggest that his parochial pursuit of truth is the reason why he was not promoted from Rear Admiral to Admiral.

Sims spoke truth to subordinates and superiors alike, memorably stating to 400 naval officers:

“It is not only the privilege but the duty of Army and Navy officers to direct letters of constructive criticism to their superior officers, and the officer who chooses to accept personal comfort in place of responsibility for such criticism is not only not worth his pay, but he is not worth the powder to blow himself to hell.”

Sims fought two wars throughout his career: one against foreign navies, another against the peacetime inertia and bureaucratic resistance of his own. The latter proved more exhausting.

This meant overturning assumptions and preconceptions as technology evolved. In 1921, he warned the Naval Academy graduating class against institutional calcification around emerging technology. A year later, after observing a demonstration of aerial bombing tests on naval vessels, Sims pronounced decisively: “the battleship is dead.” The man “who taught the navy how to shoot” had already seen the next generation of carrier-based warfare and wasn’t going to wait.

Continuous-aim firing did not shape naval warfare simply by existing. It shaped conflict because someone refused to let it be ignored. There are great innovators like Admiral Percy Scott who engineer innovative technologies. But an innovative technology is nothing if it languishes in obscurity. We must equally esteem iconoclasts like Sims who refuse to let bureaucracy bury the future.

Every generation confronts its own version of the four percent accuracy problem. Sims’s remedy was clear: focus on the outcome and champion the technology through the institutional machinery.

And write the letter anyway.

Yoel Margolis is a student at Reichman University in Israel. He was previously a Deployment Strategist intern at Palantir.

When Israel’s Merkava (Chariot) tank was introduced in 1979, experts in Israel and abroad disparaged its radically unconventional design, which broke many commonly held assumptions in the industry. The tank’s chief designer—Major General Israel Tal—was written off as delusional.

Four decades and eight wars later, the Merkava, now in its fourth generation, is regarded as one of the best armored combat vehicles in the world. Israel Tal’s image can be found on the “Wall of Greatest Armor Commanders” at the Patton Museum of Leadership, alongside figures such as Creighton Abrams, Erwin Rommel, and Old Blood and Guts himself.

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention—and the Merkava is no exception.

In the mid 1960s, Israel was in desperate need of modern tanks. The British, recognizing an opportunity for collaboration, agreed to sell the Chieftain, their newest tank, to the IDF. In return, Israel became a secret development partner—providing invaluable knowledge from its recent combat experiences. Israel even helped to sell the Chieftain to Iran—then a discreet ally of Israel on matters of defense.

It seemed like a perfect deal. There was only one problem: the British were bluffing.

Succumbing to pressure from Arab states, the British finally came clean in 1969, after years of relying on Israeli expertise. They had no intention of selling the Chieftain to Israel. Instead, they announced several deals with Arab nations including Jordan—at that time a sworn enemy of the State of Israel.

Facing grim intelligence reports of modern Soviet T62s pouring into the surrounding Arab armies, Israel scrambled for a second option. The United States, reluctant to sell their newest tank, the M60, to Israel, agreed to arrange the sale of refurbished M48 Pattons from the West German army, following an overhaul process conducted by the Italian defense company OTO Melara. This deal also collapsed, partially due to noncooperation from communist Italian union workers influenced by Soviet anti-Israel propaganda.

Driven by his frustration over the Chieftain and Patton debacles, Major General Israel Tal, the head of IDF armored corps, came to a radical conclusion: the time had come for Israel to develop its own domestic tank program.

No stranger to controversy, Tal had earned a reputation during his years of service as blunt and uncompromising—promoting his unique perspectives on armored warfare and its central importance in broader strategic planning. His unconventional views created tension with many powerful members of IDF senior leadership. Tal resigned twice from the military—first in 1969 following a dispute with Chief of Staff Haim Bar Lev over a strategic decision in the Sinai desert. Wooed back three years later, he served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Commander of the Southern Command during the Yom Kippur war until he resigned again in 1974—this time because of an argument with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

Despite his resignations, Tal did not disappear from the defense establishment. In 1970, following his first resignation, he founded MANTAK (an abbreviation of Merkava and Armored Vehicles Directorate) as a subunit within the Israeli Ministry of Defense. MANTAK’s one mission was to develop an indigenous tank program that would relieve Israel’s armored corps from any dependence on potentially unreliable foreign states.

Surprisingly, given his discordant relationship with many in the defense establishment, Tal was essentially given free rein. Reporting directly to Dayan, he structured MANTAK with a model of extreme centralization. He employed just 150 engineers and took part in almost every decision—ensuring that his unique design philosophy was implemented across every step of production.

After many years as an armored field commander himself, Tal had developed a perspective on armored warfare tactics that differed from the mainstream. He viewed tanks as the ideal front-line force while most thought of them as support assets that depended on infantry protection. This shift in tactical thinking formed the basis of his guidelines for the Merkava.

Before Merkava, most tank programs promoted a balanced compromise between speed, firepower, and protection of the crew. Tal, drawing on his experience leading tank troops, insisted on a design philosophy that prioritized the protective qualities of the tank above all else. If the tank was to lead the charge in battle, without infantry protection, then ensuring its resilience to enemy fire was crucial. Furthermore, he believed that tank crews with an added sense of protection would perform better, thereby making up for potential losses in mobility and firepower.

In the most notable departure from standard designs, the engine was placed in front of the crew, rather than behind it. A crew hatch was placed in the rear, allowing crews to evacuate an immobilized tank while being protected from enemy fire by the front facing, heavily fortified, engine compartment. Choices such as these added significant weight to the Merkava, severely reducing its horsepower to weight ratio compared to other comparable tanks. It was a tradeoff Tal thought would pay off.

His perspective emerged from personal study of battlefield reports from Israel and around the world. As military strategists Edward Luttwak and Eitan Shamir note, “[The Merkava] is also the only tank designed by tank soldiers based on their own experiences, including the synthesized experience of Tal’s exhaustive ballistics research…” For instance, one report examined 500 damaged tanks and determined that while penetration of the engine compartment only immobilized the tank 2% of the time, a breach of the crew compartment disabled the tank 100% of the time. This report, among others, reinforced Tal’s decision to provide enhanced protection to the crew.

Israel of the 1970s was still very much a product of its socialist founding and its private defense industry was far from the powerhouse it is today. The Merkava’s design and production processes were run from within the Ministry of Defense itself with Israel’s large defense primes (including IMI, Rafael, and others) limited to manufacturing specific components. To anyone familiar with the typical failures of government-run production projects, this arrangement might seem destined for disaster.

Yet Tal succeeded, likely because he reported directly to the defense minister, essentially removing the lengthy chains of command and bureaucratic red tape that typically stifle efficiency and innovation. The freedom he enjoyed, combined with the relatively small size of his team, enabled him to maintain a rapid development timeline—components were designed in weeks (and sometimes hours), immediately tested and refined, then moved to full-scale production.1

This model of rapid feedback loops and compressed timelines proved remarkably effective. Tal delivered combat-ready tanks in 1979—a timeframe similar to tank programs of countries with significantly more developed industrial bases.

The Merkava drew intense criticism upon its introduction. Skeptics both in Israel and abroad questioned Tal’s design decisions—above all, the front-facing engine compartment, which conventional wisdom deemed a fatal compromise.

Unlike many other heretics featured in this series, Tal’s vindication did not take long to arrive. In 1982, the State of Israel invaded southern Lebanon in Operation Peace for the Galilee. The campaign, remembered today as the First Lebanon War, was the Merkava’s combat debut. It silenced the critics almost immediately.

The Merkava spearheaded Israel’s ground invasion and Tal’s controversial design choices proved their merit under fire. Crew survival rates far exceeded those of previous tanks, even when hit. Demand for the Merkava from armored commanders soared as they recognized the added safety and success rates of Merkava crews.

Throughout the war and its immediate aftermath, Tal and his team at MANTAK gathered field reports and combat data, documenting every aspect of the tank’s performance. When the Merkava Mark II rolled out in 1983, barely a year into the conflict, it incorporated dozens of refinements drawn directly from frontline experience. The rapid iteration that had defined the tank’s development continued through its evolution.

Over the next two decades, the Merkava became synonymous with the IDF, ultimately becoming its sole tank in 2004. Tal retired as special armor advisor to the minister of defense in 1989 but remained unofficially involved in developing all four Merkava variants until his death in 2010.

In the two years since the October 7th Hamas attacks, Tal’s philosophy has been vindicated once again. For decades beforehand, Israeli defense leaders, including multiple chiefs of the general staff and defense ministers, had backed strategic policies that marginalized the armored corps. Armored battalions were cut as resources shifted to the “sexier” elite special forces and cyber units. When hostilities erupted in Gaza and Lebanon, the armored corps returned to center stage, proving crucial to the IDF’s counterguerilla strategy in both invasions. Once again, Tal’s theory of armored warfare’s centrality proved correct in the face of skepticism.

Beyond the enduring relevance of tanks, the story of Israel Tal and the Merkava offers a number of lessons for modern military innovators in Israel and abroad. Western nations face a defense industrial challenge similar to Israel’s in the 1970s: how to rapidly rebuild and reshore the production of critical military capabilities. The Merkava program demonstrates how military bureaucracies can break from peacetime inertia and produce genuinely innovative technologies when national security demands it.

Not all features of the Merkava’s story should be replicated. Establishing a MANTAK-esque government-run production line for defense technology would be a recipe for disaster in most large Western countries. However, there is undoubtedly much to learn from how Tal leveraged this potential nightmare of bureaucratic inefficiency. Tal used his organization’s placement within the Ministry of Defense to gain frictionless access to frontline troops for constant testing and feedback. This rapid iteration cycle, combined with his own combat experience, ensured the Merkava’s design reflected actual battlefield needs—not the theoretical preferences of executives disconnected from war.

Most importantly, the Merkava succeeded because Israel’s defense establishment recognized brilliance even in its prickliest form. Tal deserves immense credit, but so do the IDF and Ministry of Defense leaders who backed him—and who had personally clashed with him in the past. They set egos aside, recognized his unique strengths, and empowered him despite the friction.

The question facing today’s defense bureaucracies is whether they can do the same: identify the righteous heretics in their ranks and empower them in spite of—or perhaps because of—their heresy.

Further Reading

The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces by Edward N. Luttwak and Eitan Shamir

Scarlett Swerdlow is a product manager at Orbis Operations. She served as a Digital Service Expert in the U.S. Department of Defense, where she helped digitize the world’s largest collection of human tissue samples, improve the drone defenses of American military bases in the Middle East, and reduce interruptions to the DOD Information Network. Outside of work, Scarlett loves visiting Civil War battlefields, creating Taylor Swift data visualizations, and traveling in search of the world’s best food.

On the morning of March 8, 1862, the CSS Virginia steamed into Hampton Roads and announced the future of naval warfare. Built from the wreckage of the USS Merrimack and armored with iron plate, the Confederate ironclad devastated the Union’s wooden fleet. It rammed and sank the USS Cumberland, then turned its guns on the USS Congress until it surrendered and burned. Only nightfall and the ebbing tide saved the grounded USS Minnesota. By day’s end, 261 Union sailors were dead and another 108 wounded. It was the worst day for the U.S. Navy until Pearl Harbor.

That night, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton predicted catastrophe. According to witnesses, he panicked that the Virginia “would destroy every vessel in the service, could lay every city on the coast under contribution . . . likely [its] first movement would be to come up the Potomac and disperse Congress, destroy the Capitol and public buildings; or she might go to New York and Boston and destroy those cities.”

On March 9, when the Virginia returned to finish the Minnesota, a strange vessel appeared. One observer called it a “cheesebox on a raft.” The USS Monitor, the Union’s ironclad, had arrived less than twelve hours earlier. For hours the two ironclads hammered one another at point-blank range, each ship’s shots bouncing harmlessly off its adversary. Both ships withdrew—the Monitor temporarily when her captain was wounded, the Virginia permanently when her commander saw the falling tide and assessed his damage.

A tactical draw, the battle of the ironclads at Hampton Roads was a watershed in naval warfare. Within weeks, the U.S. Navy ordered more ironclads. Britain halted construction of wooden warships. The age of sail and timber had ended in a morning. The age of steel and steam had dawned.

What made the events of March 9 more extraordinary was that the Union’s savior, the Monitor, had been built in only 100 days through a process unrecognizable to today’s defense technologists. This is the story of how it happened, and what it teaches about innovation under existential threat.

100 Days to Revolution

The process started on August 3, 1861, when Congress directed Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to appoint a board to study ironclads and appropriated $1.5 million (about $52 million in 2025 dollars) for construction. Five days later, Welles had his board: three senior naval officers chosen to avoid what he called “humbugs.” That same day, the board advertised in newspapers across six cities for “iron-clad steam vessels of war.” The solicitation gave contractors twenty-five days to submit proposals.

Congress’s appropriation could fund multiple approaches. After several weeks of deliberation, on September 16 the board recommended three distinct designs to field as prototypes in a competitive trial. The Navy wouldn’t commit to production until it saw results. When Congress appropriated $10 million (approximately $350 million in today’s dollars) for 20 more ironclads, the Navy insisted on waiting for operational experience first. On September 21, the board notified the three winners. Two weeks later, contracts were signed.

One contract would change everything. Less than one-thousand words, it demanded delivery in 100 days, set a fixed price of $275,000 (roughly $9 million in today’s dollars) with no cost overruns, and included a performance warranty: if the vessel failed in battle, contractors would repay the government. That vessel would become the Monitor.

Behind it was an unlikely partnership: a disgraced inventor who refused to work with the government, a young venture capitalist who knew how to game the system, and a Navy secretary willing to bet everything on as-yet-unproven technology.

The Heretic and His Necessary Partners

John Ericsson was exactly the visionary the Union needed in 1861—and exactly the kind who would never work with the U.S. government again. The Swedish-born engineer had designed the U.S. Navy’s first screw propeller for the USS Princeton in 1844, but the disastrous results of that venture had left him bitter. During a demonstration on the Potomac, one of the Princeton’s guns exploded, killing Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Navy Secretary Thomas Gilmer. Though Ericsson wasn’t at fault, the Princeton’s commander, Captain Robert Stockton, made Ericsson the scapegoat, going so far as to lobby Congress not to pay the inventor for his contributions to the Princeton. When the Navy’s ironclad solicitation came in 1861, Ericsson had the answer, but refused to submit it.

Enter Cornelius Bushnell, a New Haven financier barely out of his twenties but already one of Connecticut’s richest men. Bushnell wasn’t seeking Ericsson. He wanted technical validation for his own ironclad proposal, and a colleague connected him with Ericsson. At the end of their meeting in Ericsson’s workshop, the inventor pulled out “a dusty cardboard box” and explained his own radical design: a vessel with a submerged hull and rotating turret, “absolutely impervious to the heaviest shot and shell.” The “quick, canny, enthusiastic” Bushnell immediately saw the superiority of Ericsson’s design. Bushnell urged Ericsson to present it to Washington. When Ericsson refused, Bushnell told him he’d do it himself.

This was Bushnell’s genius: recognizing breakthrough innovation and knowing how to deliver it. Bushnell had survived Connecticut’s railroad wars and understood legislatures. He knew where deals got made in Washington: places like the Willard Hotel, where he lobbied Welles “amid the cigar smoke and genial pandemonium.” When the Ironclad Board hesitated, Bushnell lobbied, maneuvered, and persisted.

But even Bushnell’s capital, connections, and tenacity weren’t enough. The innovation needed an internal champion willing to stake everything on it.

Navy Secretary Gideon Welles was that man. The civilian in charge of a navy dominated by tradition-bound officers, Welles made what one historian calls “the most important technical decision of the war” while “completely unfortified by technical knowledge.” When the Ironclad Board balked, Welles told them he would “assume the risk and responsibility.” If the Monitor failed, Welles risked his position, his reputation, and potentially the Union itself. Welles had already shown his appetite for risk by buying civilian steamers indiscriminately to blockade Southern ports in what critics called the “Soapbox Navy.” Now he was betting on completely unproven technology from a disgraced inventor.

The success of the Monitor required all three men. Ericsson, the heretic, provided the breakthrough. Bushnell, the enabler, furnished the resources and savvy to hack the system. Welles, the bureaucrat, absorbed the risk and shielded the project from institutional resistance. Remove any member of this triumvirate and Ericsson’s ironclad design stays in its box—leaving the Virginia to destroy the Union fleet, ransom coastal cities, and perhaps bombard Washington itself.

Ready for the Next Crisis

It’s tempting to dismiss the Monitor‘s story as a product of existential crisis—possible only when the Union faced annihilation and normal constraints dissolved. There’s truth to that. Risk appetite increases when survival is at stake, and we shouldn’t expect peacetime acquisition to move at wartime speed.

But the Monitor’s lessons aren’t just about speed under pressure. They’re about the fundamental structure of how breakthrough innovation reaches the field.

First, recognize that heretics alone don’t deliver innovation. Ericsson’s genius would have stayed in a dusty box without Bushnell to champion it and Welles to bet his career on it. Today’s defense innovation needs all three: heretics, system-savvy enablers, and risk-absorbing bureaucrats. Build these teams deliberately.

Second, design acquisitions that prioritize outcomes over process. The Monitor‘s contract gave Ericsson 100 days with a performance warranty. The solicitation’s twenty-five-day deadline forced rapid decisions. Modern programs are more complex, but the principle holds: ruthlessly eliminate requirements that don’t serve the mission. Test multiple prototypes competitively. Make contractors share the risk.

Finally, remember the Monitor wasn’t built from scratch: it leveraged existing industrial capacity and proven technologies in a novel configuration. Radical innovation doesn’t require inventing everything anew.

We can’t manufacture existential crisis to drive urgency. But we can build the partnerships, structures, and industrial base now so that when crisis comes we are ready to move with the tenacity of the unlikely partnership that produced the Monitor.

Further Reading

Ferreiro, Larrie D. “The Wrong Ship at the Right Time: The Technology of USS Monitor and Its Impact on Naval Warfare.” International Journal of Naval History, 2015.

Mayer-Sommer, Alan P. “An Historical Case Study of Planning and Control Under Uncertainty: The Weapons Acquisition Process for the U.S. Ironclad Monitor.” Management History 7, no. 2 (2014).

Remling, Jeff. Patterns of Procurement and Politics: Building Ships in the Civil War. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021.

Snow, Richard. Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle That Changed History. New York: Scribner, 2016.

Yoel Margolis is a Deployment Strategist intern at Palantir Technologies and a student at Reichman University in Israel.

Less than a month after the fall of France, the German Luftwaffe set its sights on Britain, launching near-daily bomber raids to achieve air superiority in preparation for invasion. Many of those raids failed. Formations of Royal Air Force (RAF) Spitfires and Hurricanes pounced on German bombers, almost as if they were waiting for their arrival. The German crews were dumbfounded. How did the British pilots know their exact position with such remarkable accuracy?

The answer was the Dowding System, a complex organization of detection, command, and control centers that is credited as the world’s first integrated air defense system. To understand just how innovative this network was, one must remember that “range and direction finding”—the British precursor to radar and the technological foundation of the system—was no more than five years old in the summer of 1940.

The mastermind (and eponym) of the Dowding System was Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, the 54-year-old head of RAF Fighter Command. How was Dowding rewarded for designing and commanding the system that successfully defended Britain from Hitler’s Luftwaffe? With forced retirement and a long list of enemies in the RAF senior leadership and British War Cabinet.

Dowding was an unlikely heretic, neither combative nor overbearing (unlike many others in this series). He was a reserved operator, arguing with colleagues only when he deemed it absolutely necessary. No one doubted his intentions or commitment to British military interests. Yet, he was removed from his command just months after the Blitz.

Dowding’s story offers practical lessons about integrating modern technologies into complex military systems. Perhaps more important, his story is a lasting reminder that success depends not only on innovation, but on the courage to challenge the institutions that fear it most.

The Bomber Will Not Always Get Through

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin declared in 1932 that “the bomber will always get through.” This assertion expressed deep-seated fears about strategic bombing that emerged during the First World War and intensified in the years that followed, as aircraft performance and payloads increased.

Marshal Hugh Trenchard, commander of the RAF, believed the answer to this threat was offensive buildup: creating bomber forces that could rival those of any enemy. Trenchard’s tendency to promote like-minded officers led to the RAF’s domination during the interwar years by what became known as the “bomber cult.”

Dowding, characteristically skeptical and contrarian, questioned the pervasive defeatism. He argued that instead of maximizing offensive capabilities, the proper strategy was defensive—emphasizing the development of fighters over bombers and exploring the potential use of emerging technologies to assist in early detection and warning.

This was not Dowding’s first disagreement with RAF superiors. In 1905, the Wright Brothers had pitched their newly invented airplane to the British army after being turned down by the Royal Navy. The army likewise declined; the responsible officers responded after a presentation on the aircraft’s potential reconnaissance capabilities that “aircraft could not fly at less than forty miles per hour, and it would be impossible for anyone to see anything of value at that rather high speed.”

Dowding, upon learning of the new invention, thought otherwise. Then a young officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery, he proposed using aircraft as a reconnaissance tool in a training exercise. His commanding officer dismissed the idea with laughter, predicting certain failure. Instead, Dowding’s six planes provided precise intelligence on enemy positions from unprecedented distances, enabling his decisive victory in the drill.

Twenty-five years later, while exploring technologies to support his defensive strategy, Dowding came across another intriguing invention. In 1935, radio engineer Robert Watson-Watt published a memo for the Air Ministry relating how overflying aircraft disrupted radio waves. He proposed that such disruptions could form the basis for aircraft detection and location. Dowding, in his role as Air Member for Supply and Research—a position which gave him oversight over scientific research within the RAF—, saw in these findings a potential solution for his dream of an air defense system. He enthusiastically provided the funding for further research.

This decision was controversial. Many in the RAF, especially members of the bomber cult, were skeptical of what became known as range and direction finding technology. Nevertheless, Dowding embraced the idea and championed its research all the way through its eventual integration in his grand air defense system.

Fighter Command

In 1936, with war on the horizon, Dowding was given control of the newly formed Fighter Command. He immediately went to work pushing for his contrarian, defensive approach. As Dowding saw it, the key to a successful defense was a strong fleet of fighters and well-trained pilots. Even the best warning system would be worthless without fighters to intercept incoming bomber formations.

Dowding shared this notion with another Heretic and Hero: Lord Beaverbrook. Their relationship was close. The two spoke almost daily to collaborate on their joint mission of increasing fighter production before the war began.

With the invasion of France in the summer of 1940, Dowding’s most intense bureaucratic battle began. Shocked by the invasion, British cabinet officials—up to and including Churchill—immediately responded to urgent French requests by sending fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid in the defensive campaign against the Germans. Dowding, worried about a shortage of fighters for home defense, bitterly opposed these transfers. This opinion brought him into direct confrontation with Churchill, usually sympathetic to Dowding. In May of 1940, Churchill requested six additional squadrons to send to France. The cabinet, successfully persuaded by Dowding’s lobbying, refused the request. This move proved monumentally significant in light of the Fall of France just one month later. Historians generally agree that sending the fighters would likely have had no effect in preventing the fall but would have significantly weakened British preparedness for the eventual assault on the homeland.

The Dowding System

Dowding’s insistence on keeping fighters in Britain proved prescient when the Luftwaffe turned its attention to the home islands. Britain had the fighters Dowding needed to implement his revolutionary detection and command system. The Dowding System combined cutting-edge radar, streamlined communications networks, and overlapping redundancies to detect incoming aircraft, track their precise locations, and direct RAF fighters to intercept them. To do so, the system had to overcome several immense challenges.

1. Lack of Early Detection.

All earlier methods of aircraft detection relied on human observation or acoustic mirroring. These approaches had extremely short ranges (sometimes as little as five miles). By the time an incoming aircraft was detected and the information was processed, the bomber would likely have reached its target, leaving no time for fighters to scramble and engage.

To solve for early detection, Dowding, relying on newly developed range and direction finding technology, established the Chain Home network, a system of linked RDF stations along the British coast. Each station provided aircraft detection coverage extending 60 to 100 miles over water within their assigned zones.

To cover for breaches in Chain Home, an additional network called Chain Home Low was established with specialized RDF stations capable of detecting aircraft flying at low altitudes. Finally, a volunteer Observer Corps was organized to provide inland detection capabilities, addressing the primary limitation of both Chain Home networks: their inability to track aircraft once they moved over land.

2. Information Overload

RDF stations generated massive amounts of data, with enemy aircraft often reported by multiple stations at slightly different times, creating a data stream that was very difficult to manage in a pre-computer era.

Dowding solved this problem by implementing a hierarchical command-and-control network. All reports of incoming aircraft were routed to a single Filter Centre, where operators plotted aircraft locations onto a table-size map called the Recognized Air Picture (RAP).

This near-instantaneous intelligence was then disseminated to one of four Group Headquarters, charged with creating their own intelligence picture for a particular area. The Group Headquarter in turn forwarded the information to the airfield-based Sector Commands Centers that communicated directly with the pilots.

Consequently, pilots received only the most up-to-date, mission-specific information. All language was standardized across the entire RAF, allowing squadrons and pilots to be moved between groups or sectors without learning new vernacular.

3. Inefficient Use of Resources

Prior to the development of a combined network, air defense depended on fighter patrols flying along predetermined paths in the hope of encountering the enemy. This method was incredibly inefficient, with very low interception rates.

Dowding’s solution increased the efficiency of the RAF’s resources dramatically. By providing precise information on the location of enemy aircraft, commanders could wait until an incursion was reported before deploying their fighters, ensuring they were not needlessly airborne. Furthermore, the overlap of the two Chain Home networks, combined with the Observer Corp, ensured that the surveillance coverage was complete.

Opposition

Dowding’s system and his leadership of Fighter Command played a crucial role in thwarting Hitler’s plans for air domination of Britain. However, the very strategy that saved Britain also threatened the reputations of those who had built their authority on the belief of bomber invincibility. The strongest resistance to Dowding came from within the RAF, and largely revolved around his insistence on resource conservation. Dowding was adamant that Britain’s goal was singular: survival. As such, he believed in conserving fighters, relying on precise vectoring to send a smaller number of fighters to confront incoming bombers.

A faction within the RAF disagreed with Dowding’s approach. Known as the Big Wing group, it advocated for large formations of fighters (Big Wings) to attack the enemy en masse.

Leading this faction was Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh Mallory, commander of No. 12 Group, who vowed to “move heaven and earth to get Dowding sacked.” He succeeded through ambush, luring Dowding into a meeting with some his biggest enemies, in which Dowding was accused of mishandling the Battle of Britain.

Their argument rested largely on the claim that the Dowding system’s nighttime performance was significantly worse than its daytime effectiveness. The heavy reliance on the Observer Corps for visual confirmation, they contended, combined with the bottleneck of a single filtering center, made nighttime raids considerably more difficult to intercept.

Dowding remained steadfast in defending his hierarchical filtering system. He and his supporters maintained that the current system was essential for correctly identifying enemy aircraft. They believed that with greater innovation—particularly in radar technology—nighttime capabilities would improve.

Nevertheless, the Big Wing faction ultimately prevailed, and in November 1940, Dowding was removed from his position as head of Fighter Command. Despite the official rationale for his firing, many argue that Dowding’s real offense was that he had disproved the RAF and the government’s fundamental belief that bombers were unstoppable.

Following his dismissal, Dowding was sent to Washington to lead the British Air Mission to the United States. However, in 1942, frustrated at the lack of appreciation for his historic contributions, he retired from the RAF.

His frustration persisted through retirement. Though he was raised to the peerage and created 1st Baron Dowding, the Air Ministry passed him over for the honorary title of Marshal of the Royal Air Force. In 1969, he supported the publication of a book by the historian Robert Wright that explicitly attributed his dismissal to a conspiracy orchestrated by Big Wing supporters.

In recent years, history has begun to treat him more favorably. Most historians today concur that Dowding’s system and leadership were decisive to British success in the Battle of Britain.

Tragically, Dowding never lived to witness his vindication. He died in 1970, still convinced he had been treated unjustly by the organization to which he had dedicated his life.

Legacy

Eighty-five years after the Blitz, Dowding’s story offers enduring lessons for modern defense.

Every generation confronts its equivalent of “the bomber will always get through” fatalism. Today’s version may be defeatism surrounding the application of AI in defense or the cost asymmetry in drone warfare. Dowding’s strength lay in rejecting both fatalism and denial, acknowledging potential dangers while acting pragmatically to counter them. His resistance to dogma came from his practical approach to problem solving, not an inherently rebellious nature.

Additionally, Dowding teaches us that revolutionary technology is important but insufficient on its own. The Battle of Britain was not won because the British possessed radar. It was won because they had the Dowding System—a masterfully designed internal infrastructure that successfully merged the human components of the RAF with the deployment of radar and other innovations.

Most poignantly, Dowding’s rise and fall exemplifies the immense challenges and potential consequences of righteous heresy within military bureaucracies. His dismissal just months after victory stands as a stark reminder of the costs of being right—a burden all heretics bear, if not always to the same extreme. One hopes that future leaders will possess Dowding’s conviction to challenge orthodoxies and drive change despite inevitable resistance.

Austin Gray is Co-Founder and CSO of Blue Water Autonomy, a defense tech shipbuilder. He writes frequently on Not Those Shades of Gray, where he’ll soon have more analysis of WW2 production lessons, from Spitfires to ships. He previously worked in a drone factory in Ukraine and served on active duty as a naval intelligence officer. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds degrees from Davidson, MIT, and Harvard.

As the Luftwaffe massed across the English Channel in the summer of 1940, Britain’s great hope was the Spitfire. Elegant, fast, deadly—but barely available. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Britain was producing just 13 Spitfires per month. By September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, British factories were producing 32 Spitfires per month.

They needed far more. Fighting over Flanders and France in early 1940 sacrificed 458 British aircraft. Germany, capable of producing more than 900 aircraft per month, could afford such losses. Britain could not. The Air Ministry knew it needed to ramp production. But the gigafactory that was supposed to churn them out, Castle Bromwich near Birmingham, had become a national embarrassment. Britain’s Spitfire production had stalled at its most critical hour.

Lord Nuffield, the automobile magnate tasked with running this new factory, had promised 240 Spitfires per month by May 1940. Instead, he delivered chaos. Castle Bromwich had not yet delivered a single Spitfire. Workers lacked training. Jigs and tools were missing. Subcontractors were late. The factory resembled a derelict workshop, not a humming factory organized by an experienced titan of industry. With the Battle of Britain beginning, the Royal Air Force (RAF) needed Castle Bromwich’s capacity.

Enter Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron whom Churchill appointed Minister of Aircraft Production on May 14, 1940. Beaverbrook saw the disaster at Castle Bromwich and knew that Britain’s survival depended on his ability to turn around the plant.

He phoned Nuffield, stripped him of control, and handed the plant to Edward ‘Rex’ Talamo, a mustached optimist who would bet Beaverbrook 500 guineas he could double production. He imported seasoned managers from Spitfire producer Supermarine, imposed his own frenetic style of oversight, and demanded daily output figures.

The effect was immediate. In June 1940, Castle Bromwich delivered its first 10 Spitfires. In July, 23 more. By August, 37. By September, 56—just in time for the Battle of Britain’s peak. Within a year, Castle Bromwich was the largest Spitfire producer in the country, eventually turning out more than 12,000 aircraft. Churchill was so happy with the turnaround that he sent Rex an inscribed silver ash tray and brought the king to tour the factory.

The episode became Beaverbrook’s trademark: find a mess, smash through the polite obstacles, and will results into being. To bureaucrats he was reckless; to production workers he was a savior. And to the RAF pilots flying Castle Bromwich Spitfires in 1940, he was something else entirely: the difference between life and death. Although the Spitfire turnaround captures the essence of his leadership style, Lord Beaverbrook’s duties in wartime Britain extended across multiple ministries and critical assignments. Wherever Churchill needed his focus, wherever Britain needed his energy, Beaverbrook was the man in the breach.

Britain’s Bureaucratic Swamp

To understand Beaverbrook’s impact, we have to appreciate just how messy Britain’s production system was in 1940. We also need to know who Beaverbrook was.

Before Churchill created the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP), responsibility for aircraft orders, contracts, and factories was scattered across multiple bodies:

• The Air Ministry, which set requirements and specifications but was notorious for delay.

• The Ministry of Supply, handling weapons and munitions.

• The Ministry of Labour, allocating workers.

• Interdepartmental production committees, which produced reports but lacked enforcement power.

In all, Britain’s official history of war production lists 19 different ministries involved in the production of military equipment. [1]

In theory, this distributed system encouraged coordination. In practice, it produced memos, turf wars, and excuses. Aircraft firms complained of shortages of aluminum and machine tools; engine makers blamed subcontractors; the Air Ministry insisted on design changes mid-stream. Meanwhile, frontline squadrons waited for airplanes that never came.

Beaverbrook cut through the bureaucratic briar patch with one heretical act: he centralized power in himself, making every order of raw materials, every workforce shift, and every production target subordinate to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He ignored committees, bypassed ministries, and worked directly with factory managers. The production of aircraft to defend Britain’s skies was his, his ministry’s, and the government’s highest priority—enforced by sheer force of personality and often at the expense of others.

The Crooked Outsider

Lord Beaverbrook was never a man for staid institutions. Born in Canada by the name Max Aitken, he made his fortune in finance before 30, moved to Britain, and reinvented himself as a newspaper baron. His Daily Express became the highest-circulation paper in the world by appealing directly to mass audiences with speed, spectacle, and sensation.

Whitehall hated him. Too brash, too Canadian, too rich. He dressed down civil servants, scrawled corrections across their reports in red ink, and called the Air Ministry “the Ministry of Obstruction.” The historian Jonathan Schneer writes in Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet that “Beaverbrook despised committee work, hidebound tradition, red tape and, above all, the time that he judged to be wasted talking,” especially with Royal Air Force generals. Even his allies found him exhausting. Churchill called him “my ferret”—and ferret-like, Beaverbrook burrowed into bureaucratic bottlenecks with manic energy.

Production as Warfighting

Beaverbrook’s genius wasn’t engineering—he didn’t design the Spitfire’s elliptical wing or Rolls-Royce’s Merlin engine. His genius was industrial relentlessness. “Urgency was in his temperament” wrote Schneer, who knew Max personally. His 3 a.m. calls to subordinates and peers infectiously spread that urgency.

His ability to reprioritize anything was forged in a newspaper culture centered on breaking a story first and printing on time, accurately. As in journalism, second place in war would not suffice. Hurricanes and Spitfires came first. Civilian aircraft programs were scrapped. Bombers were deferred. Trainers and transports were secondary. Every ton of aluminum, every skilled worker, every machine tool went into fighters.

The results were dramatic. In May 1940, Britain built fewer than 300 fighters. By July, that critical monthly figure had nearly doubled. By September, during the height of the Battle of Britain, factories were delivering more aircraft than Fighter Command was losing. Production had outpaced attrition, giving Britain the razor’s edge margin to avert defeat. By summer’s end, Churchill summed up Beaverbrook’s turnaround “magic” in classic, emphatic commentary before Parliament:

At the same time the splendid, nay, astounding increase in the output and repair of British aircraft and engines which Lord Beaverbrook has achieved by a genius of organisation and drive, which looks like magic, has given us overflowing reserves of every type of aircraft, and an ever mounting stream of production both in quantity and quality. The enemy is, of course, far more numerous than we are. But our new production already, as I am advised, largely exceeds his, and the American production is only just beginning to flow in. It is a fact, as I see from my daily returns, that our bomber and fighter strengths now, after all this fighting, are larger than they have ever been.

But Beaverbrook didn’t just juggle numbers; he understood psychology. He plastered factory walls with production tallies. He encouraged managers to publish subassembly competitions between shops (across the Atlantic, Henry Kaiser’s shipyards held similar competitions). He told women in factories that they were just as important as men in cockpits. Then, using his Daily Express network, he broadcast the message nationwide.

He made riveters and machinists feel like warriors—and they started to perform like industrial gladiators.

Methods of a Heretic

Beaverbrook’s approach was unorthodox, often destructive, but uniquely suited to the crisis:

• Bulldozing bureaucracy. “Beaverbrook smashed all the old bottlenecks and obstacles to rapid production,” wrote Jonathan Schneer in Ministers at War. He ripped authority away from committees and centralized it in himself. When Air Ministry officials protested, he ignored them.

• Short-term obsession. He focused relentlessly on output this week, this month. Critics said he sacrificed long-term planning—and he did. But in 1940, survival mattered more than sustainability.

• Publicity as a weapon. He used his press empire to glorify successful factories and shame laggards.

• Crisis leadership. “The man for the moment, not for the hour,” wrote Schneer, articulating that Beaverbrook was not the perfect leader for all seasons. “When the danger of imminent German invasion lapsed, and when he really could no longer stand the paperwork and committee work any longer, he resigned.”

Even the official history drily observes that Beaverbrook’s authority was personal, rather than institutional. The Ministry for Aircraft Production worked because Beaverbrook bent it to his will. When he faced opponents in the bureaucracy, they knew he had a direct line to Churchill, an old and trusted friend from before his time in government. When he left in 1941, his successors never replicated his energy.

Of course, miracles often come at a cost. Beaverbrook’s short-termism starved bomber production just as the RAF was preparing its strategic offensive. The prioritization system he introduced had so few priorities that essentials like ammunition, tanks, and artillery did not make the initial list. His endless feuds alienated colleagues doing their duty on other government work. And his pace was unsustainable: after less than a year at the ministry, he resigned, citing exhaustion.

Even Churchill, who valued him above almost anyone in the cabinet and knew he was the best man in a crisis, admitted that Beaverbrook had rough edges.

Hero After All

Yet the verdict of history is clear. Without Beaverbrook, the Battle of Britain may have been Britain’s final battle. Fighter Command might have run out of aircraft in 1940. The RAF might have lost the skies. And Britain might have lost the war.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson portrays him as manic, restless, nearly unhinged. In British War Production, he comes across as blunt and unsustainable. In Ministers at War, he is indispensable. Each portrait is true. Lord Beaverbrook was a heretic—but in Britain’s darkest hour, his heresy was precisely what was required.

And Beaverbrook wasn’t a natural choice for Churchill. Although they were old friends, Beaverbrook had supported Chamberlain and a negotiated settlement with Germany. He also had no experience in high government office, having only briefly served in Parliament decades before. King George himself noted these reservations to Churchill upon learning of the intended appointment.

Beaverbrook didn’t stop with aircraft production. He went on to lead the Ministry of Supply, which was to the Army what the Ministry for Aircraft Production was to the Air Force. Then, when Churchill needed a joint Ministry of Production to coordinate industrial policy with Soviet and American peers, he briefly served as the first minister.

Lessons for Today: Munitions, Shipbuilding, and Deterrence in the Pacific

For today’s defense technologists and acquisition leaders, the lesson is pointed. In times of disruption, processes and committees can become fatal luxuries. Sometimes survival depends on heresy—on giving one frenetic outsider the power to cut through the system and deliver what the moment demands.

More tactically, political leaders building their executive teams need strong, empowered lieutenants—men and women who can bring outside perspective and credibility to government institutions, but still operate with speed and precision inside the complex reality of government. These leaders must step away from rewarding careers, and, along with their families, endure the costs of entering the political arena. Changemakers like Lord Beaverbrook must be ready to make enemies and face vicious attacks in the press. And in a hyper-political era, they must wield the press, feeding their wins into the national discourse to fuel their own political power.

Today, as in 1940, critical military production is stalling. China’s fleet of warships grows while the U.S. fleet shrinks. U.S. missile and artillery stocks are dwindling, with production rates creeping up too slowly. With such trends, People’s Liberation Army commanders may gamble that their American counterparts won’t risk a force they can’t regenerate.

Might deterrence in the Pacific be saved by a 21^st century Beaverbrook?

[1] As a bonus, here’s a list of all 19 ministries involved in the production of British military equipment and a quick explanation of their duties:

• Aircraft Production (MAP) – Directed the design, production, and allocation of aircraft.

• Agriculture and Fisheries – Oversaw food production and farm supply mobilization.

• Blockade – Managed economic warfare and control of enemy trade access.

• Economic Warfare – Coordinated with Allies on blockade and enemy trade disruption.

• Food – Managed rationing, food distribution, and imports.

• Health – Maintained civilian medical services and public health.

• Home Security – Coordinated civil defense and air raid precautions.

• Information – Handled propaganda, news, and public information.

• Labour and National Service – Controlled manpower allocation, conscription, and labor disputes.

• Production – Managed raw material allocation and general war industry production.

• Shipping – Oversaw merchant fleet, convoys, and shipping priorities.

• Supply – Coordinated allocation of weapons, munitions, and raw materials.

• Transport – Managed railways, road transport, and fuel allocation.

• War Transport – Integrated civilian and military transport coordination.

• War – Directed the British Army and ground force operations.

• Works – Managed construction, repair, and airfield/building projects.

• Board of Trade – Regulated trade, industry, and economic policy.

• Treasury – Controlled finance, budgets, and economic mobilization.

• Air – Directed the Royal Air Force (operations, not production).

A Note From the Author: As our protagonist’s grandson, I’m cognizant that regression to the mean tends to dilute both impact and insight. But I love that I get to carry an echo of his legacy into our work at XYZ Venture Capital, backing founders building systems that move his mission forward.

It’s July 1943, and Allied forces are gearing up for the invasion of Sicily — Operation Husky. Bombers preparing to strike Axis targets across North Africa and Southern Europe stare down the barrel of a growing threat: radar.

German detection systems have been evolving fast, locking onto aircraft with brutal precision. Allied pilots know it. Commanders know it. Success depends on slipping past the enemy’s gaze. And then — just as the Allied planes approach their targets — the Germans’ radars blink out. Silence. Darkness. Confusion.

This wasn’t luck. It was physics.

At the heart of this engineered blackout was Eugene Fubini — a 5’1” Italian physicist with a volcanic mind and the bearing of a quiet revolutionary. A Jewish immigrant who’d fled Mussolini’s regime, he’d helped invent and deploy radar jamming systems that blinded German operators and bought Allied aircrews a precious edge.

Radar jamming wasn’t just a tactical innovation. It was a new kind of weapon. And it marked the beginning of Eugene’s career quietly reshaping how America builds and maintains its military edge. His approach didn’t call for more weapons. It emphasized better systems, faster iteration, and smarter procurement.

Perhaps most importantly, Eugene’s life and career demonstrated a high tolerance for heresy in service of long-term advantage.

A Mind Molded in Exile

Born in 1913 in Turin, Eugene grew up in the shadow of brilliance. His father, Guido Fubini, was a mathematical giant — his eponymous theorem is still taught to calculus students today. Learning was an imperative, and excellence wasn’t optional. Eugene delivered. He earned doctorates in both physics and electrical engineering, and held a faculty post at the University of Turin while still in his twenties.

Then, like for so many, fascism came for him. Mussolini enacted the Italian Racial Laws in 1938, stripping Jews of their citizenship and expelling them from academic and professional life. The Fubinis were abruptly forced into exile.

A sympathetic uncle smuggled them through Switzerland, France, and finally to the U.S. Eugene, now “Gene” to his friends, took no time to catch his breath. With the quiet help of his father’s friend, Albert Einstein, he landed first a post at Princeton and then a full-time technician job at the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

The role couldn’t have been more apt in a country girding for war. It wasn’t glamorous, but it gave Gene room to make major contributions to radio and television signal processing. The same physics he brought to bear on ultra-high frequency radio and microwave propagation directly informed his eventual work in radar and electronic countermeasures.

Over the next three years, the building wave of conflict catapulted Gene first to Harvard Radio Research Lab — a hotbed of innovation in radar and jamming theory — and then immediately into the thick of things. By 1943, he was embedded with Allied forces in Northern Africa, designating the systems that would scramble German detection equipment and protect Allied air missions. During the invasions of Italy and Southern France, radar jamming became the difference between mission success and mass casualties.

Gene’s contributions during the war earned him attention and clearance at the highest levels. More importantly, they cemented his strategic worldview: military advantage no longer hinged on brute force. The future of national security would be driven by sensing, computing, decision loops, and systems integration. This had to be his life’s work.

The Insider Who Refused to Go Native

After the war ended, Gene’s purpose led to the commercial world. He joined the Airborne Instruments Laboratory Company, where he continued to innovate in the field of reconnaissance electronics and churned out patents for electro-magnetics and microwave applications. But in the back of his mind, he knew he’d need to get closer to policy to make real change.

He got his chance in 1961, with an invitation to join the Office of Defense Research and Engineering. Once again, his ascent was steep. President John F. Kennedy appointed him Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering just two years into his government career. Suddenly, he was atop the Pentagon research apparatus — at the height of the Cold War.

This wasn’t just a job for Gene. It was a crucible.

Under Robert McNamara, the DoD was shifting toward centralized procurement and outcome-driven R&D. Gene was a perfect fit: precise, stubborn, and utterly unwilling to fund science for science’s sake.

He brought with him the same convictions that had shaped his radar work: that the U.S. could only maintain strategic advantage with technical superiority — and that this would require a wholly different operating rhythm than the one preferred by the Pentagon’s more cautious custodians.

His remit was vast. He oversaw nuclear R&D, space surveillance programs, emerging computing initiatives, satellite comms, and the earliest stages of digital encryption.

At the same time, he forced agencies like the NSA to rigorously justify their programs, cutting bloated, opaque budgets and consolidating theater-level processing centers in Europe. He chaired the Communications Security Board, reviewed classified satellite collection strategies, and routinely challenged senior leaders to articulate not just what they wanted to build — but why it mattered.

Suffice to say, not everyone loved working with him. In his words (and with the dry clarity of someone who stopped seeking approval a long time ago): “I seem to have become a controversial character here.”

But for all his confronting tendencies, Fubini wasn’t a purist. He was a builder. He understood that the systems most worth defending were often the ones most likely to upset entrenched interests.

Building the Bridge: Government x Industry

In 1965 — well into the Lyndon Johnson administration (and Vietnam War) — Gene decided to step out of his Pentagon role and do something few at the time had done: he carried the playbook for strategic R&D into industry, first as a senior executive at IBM and later on the board of Texas Instruments.

In the process, he revolutionized the way the private sector side of defense worked. Solidifying the role of corporate R&D as a national security asset, he advocated for long-term investment in advanced computing, secure communications, and defense-grade interoperability at a time when commercial technology firms were still seen as outsiders to the mission.

At IBM, he helped align product strategy with government priorities, shaping how computing systems would serve the military, intelligence agencies, and NASA. His influence extended to procurement strategy (providing a hyper-critical insider’s view of how the government buys), technical standards, and even internal corporate culture.

He was one of the earliest advocates of industry serving as a co-equal partner in defense innovation — not just a contractor, but a counterpart.

Gene’s model lives on today in the dual-use companies that serve both government and commercial customers, and increasingly define the defense startup landscape. Palantir, Apex Space, Forterra and others are operating along the same axis that he pioneered: moving fast, staying flexible, and building systems that scale across both government and commercial domains.

In all these ways, his impact was less about singular inventions and more about the connective tissue. The loops. The interfaces. The infrastructure that allowed technical advantage to be absorbed and operationalized at scale.

He understood that to move the mission forward, you often had to change the institution — not just the tool.

The Arc Continues

Fast forward to 1996, the Department of Defense created the Fubini Award, given annually to individuals whose contributions to national security research and development have shaped U.S. strategy. Naturally, Gene was the first recipient.

But for him, legacy was never about medals or job titles. It was the transmission of mindset — the ability to operate across disciplines, challenge orthodoxy, and stay fluent in both theory and practicality.

As his grandson, I saw that mindset up close. For five years of my childhood, I lived with my grandparents. I watched people from across the national security and academic worlds come to our house seeking my grandfather’s advice. He was older by then — quiet, still sharp, unassuming. But the steady stream of generals, university presidents, and former cabinet officials told me something that words never could:

The systems we live inside don’t maintain themselves. Someone has to build them. And someone has to keep pushing them forward.

I didn’t fully understand what he had accomplished until much later. It wasn’t until my twenties that I began digging into his papers and learning more from family who saw the many varied sides of him. It was clear just how large a footprint he left — not only on the Defense Department, but on the shape of the technology sector as it serves our defense goals.

That legacy is one of the reasons I’ve spent the last decade investing in leading technology companies — writing first checks to defense startups like Anduril and Apex and backing founders who are dedicated to pushing systems forward. These companies are doing the vital work of building the next layer of infrastructure for U.S. capacity, security, and — perhaps even more to the point — capability to serve our citizens better.

Today, I don’t pretend to be following in my grandfather’s footsteps. But I carry some of his questions. What systems are we building? Who do they serve? And how are we building them to last?

Gene Fubini understood — far earlier than most — that the future would be won not by the biggest bombs or the fastest planes, but by the teams who could integrate sensing, computation, and judgment faster than anyone else.

He built toward that future. That future is here. And now we need more heretics.

In 1942, as war raged across the globe, one of the most consequential alliances in the history of technology was forged—not on a battlefield, but in the heart of Ohio. While the world’s attention was fixed on the front lines, a quiet engineer named Joseph Raymond Desch stood at the center of a revolutionary partnership between the U.S. Navy and a private American company, working behind the scenes to tip the balance of the war.

That company was National Cash Register (NCR), a Dayton firm best known at the time for making business equipment like mechanical registers and punch-card machines. But behind the factory floor, NCR was also home to a small, powerful team of electrical engineers and inventors—including Desch—who had been experimenting with cutting-edge electronics well before the war. When the Navy came looking for a way to industrialize codebreaking, they found their answer in Dayton.

Working together, NCR and the Navy established the United States Naval Computing Machine Laboratory on NCR’s corporate campus. This unique partnership brought together Navy officers, civilian engineers, and NCR’s manufacturing expertise under one roof.

At this laboratory, where the Navy’s most advanced cryptographic machine work took place, American civilian Joseph Desch helped design and deliver 121 versions of a high-speed, electromechanical device called the Bombe, which played a crucial role in unlocking the secrets of the Nazi Enigma during World War II.

The Enigma Challenge

The German military’s use of the Enigma machine created a seemingly unbreakable wall of encryption. The Enigma used a series of rotating wheels, or rotors, that shifted position with every keystroke, scrambling each letter. Every day, the Germans would set the rotors and plugs to new starting positions, creating millions of possible configurations; without knowing the exact settings, the code was incredibly difficult to break. Enigma was how the Nazis coordinated everything from battlefield orders to U-boat attacks in the Atlantic. Cracking its code wasn’t merely an intellectual puzzle, it was a matter of life and death: Allied supply ships were being sunk at an alarming rate. Without the ability to anticipate and outmaneuver Germany’s fleet, the war could tilt further in the enemy’s favor.

British mathematicians led by Alan Turing had already made significant progress toward cracking Enigma at Bletchley Park, developing an early version of the Bombe to decrypt German army and air force messages. But the U.S. Navy faced a more difficult variant: the four-rotor Enigma used by German submarines. Cracking this code required more computing power, more speed, and a new design.

That’s where Desch came in.

From Dayton to Discovery: Desch’s Early Years

Joseph Desch was born in Dayton, Ohio. His father—a craftsman and farmer—encouraged his son to learn how to use the right tools to solve his problems, fostering a spirit of curiosity and hands-on experimentation from an early age. By age 11, Desch was a radio enthusiast, sparking a lifelong fascination with electronics and communication. As a teenager, he built his own laboratory, experimenting with vacuum tubes to pass signals and impulses, early steps on a path that would later revolutionize codebreaking.

In 1926, Desch passed his amateur radio license exam and began working at the University of Dayton repairing radios, laying the technical foundation for his later achievements. He eventually found work at the processing laboratory division at General Motors, and in 1938 followed a mentor to NCR, joining the electrical research laboratory under the guidance of the company’s president, Colonel Edward Deeds.

By the early 1940s, Desch had already designed one of the earliest high-speed electronic counting circuits, using vacuum tubes to reach performance levels far beyond anything in commercial use. He had even invented a binary computer for banks to use as an electronic calculator—an early glimpse of the digital revolution to come.

Building the American Bombe

In March 1942, the U.S. Navy contracted NCR to build Bombes—machines designed to process the German Navy’s complex four-rotor Enigma messages. Joseph Desch, head of NCR’s electrical research laboratory, was appointed as the principal engineer for the project. The British had already done invaluable work, and succeeded in breaking the four-rotor Enigma in December 1942. The Americans picked up the torch and pressed on, aiming to develop a faster and more reliable machine by fundamentally redesigning it to handle the increased cryptographic complexity.

The heart of this redesign was Desch’s push to incorporate vacuum tubes—a new idea at the time. Vacuum tubes were small, sealed glass cylinders that could control electric signals by allowing or blocking the flow of electrons. They acted as fast, reliable electrical switches or amplifiers. Unlike electromechanical relays, which worked by physically flipping switches on and off (slowing operations and causing wear), vacuum tubes used electric fields to allow or block the flow of electrons almost instantaneously. This meant they could switch on and off thousands of times per second. By using vacuum tubes, Desch’s design could perform logical calculations at unprecedented speed and reliability, making it possible to test millions of possible Enigma settings each day. This leap in processing power was crucial for codebreaking, as the German Navy changed their Enigma settings daily. Only a machine fast enough to keep pace could give the Allies the information they needed in time.

Many in the military and engineering communities were still skeptical of vacuum tubes. They were considered unstable and fragile for sustained, high-speed operation. Desch disagreed. Drawing on years of experience building high-speed counters and signal processors, he advocated for integrating vacuum tube logic to dramatically speed up the decryption process. His insistence on this direction required pushing back against conventional wisdom and military preferences for more familiar electromechanical systems. Desch had to make his case against institutional skepticism and operational conservatism. He understood that wartime innovation couldn’t wait for red tape.

Desch’s vision was to create a hybrid machine, combining mechanical rotors that would physically simulate the changing positions of the Enigma’s rotors with electronic logic circuits that could instantly detect contradictions in the wiring. These electronic logic units used vacuum tube comparators, which are components that evaluate electrical conditions. In this case, they would look for situations where a given Enigma configuration couldn’t possibly produce the decrypted result—allowing the Bombe to quickly discard bad settings and move on.

It was a clever and efficient system: the rotors turned rapidly through different key combinations, and the vacuum tubes instantly “judged” each configuration. The combination of mechanical motion and electronic logic allowed Desch’s Bombes to process hundreds of thousands of potential keys per second—something no purely mechanical device could match at the time.

The Power of a Mobilized Workforce

But machines alone weren’t enough. To operate the Bombes around the clock, the Navy deployed an extraordinary team of over 600 women from the WAVES—Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service—who were trained to configure, monitor, and maintain the machines. The women worked on certain parts to assemble the code-breaking machines for the military. Strict secrecy was enforced: they were not allowed to communicate with other civilians about their jobs, or even to talk about them among themselves outside of work. Many had no idea the full importance of their contribution to the war effort.

The Bombes, run by the WAVES, were connected to the broader Allied intelligence pipeline. Once a plausible Enigma setting was found by a Bombe, cryptanalysts in Washington would use it to decrypt intercepted German messages. These decrypts, known as Ultra intelligence, directly informed naval operations: rerouting convoys away from ambushes, revealing submarine locations, and accelerating the overall Allied campaign in the Atlantic. Through it all, Desch remained in Dayton, overseeing production and innovation in the shadows.

The Bombe’s Impact

In May 1943, Joseph Desch’s American Bombes, built at NCR’s Dayton facility, began arriving in Washington, D.C., transforming the Allied effort in the Battle of the Atlantic. These high-speed machines, enhanced by Desch’s pioneering use of vacuum tubes, tested millions of Enigma rotor combinations in a short time, such as a 20-minute run, enabling the rapid decryption of the German Navy’s complex four-rotor codes. The end result: Ultra intelligence powered by the Bombes enabled the Allies to reroute convoys, hunt U-boats, and disrupt German operations, saving countless lives and shortening the war. Approximately 121 Bombes were produced, showcasing American ingenuity and industrial prowess under wartime pressure.

More Than a Hero

Joseph Desch never sought the spotlight. He rarely spoke publicly about his work, even decades later, when the Bombe program was finally declassified. In part, this reticence stemmed from the enormous psychological toll the work had taken on him during the war. The burden of knowing that his codebreaking efforts could lead directly to the deaths of thousands weighed heavily on his conscience, underscoring the profound personal sacrifice he made in service to his country. His daughter, Deborah Desch Anderson, grew up knowing little about her father’s wartime work; it was only after his death that she began to uncover the vital role he played in Allied codebreaking efforts. Desch retired from NCR in January 1972. He died on August 3, 1987, taking many of his secrets to the grave.

But Desch’s legacy is profound. He built machines that changed the direction of war. He trained a workforce and laid the technical groundwork for the intelligent systems we rely on today.

Fast forward to 2025, and it’s clear the world needs more private-sector patriots. The world is now in the midst of a new kind of arms race. Artificial intelligence has become the decisive terrain for national security, global influence, and technological dominance. And once again, the United States is turning to its private sector for technical tools and leadership.

Joseph Desch provides a model of successful public-private partnership. When America’s government partners with its builders, scientists, and engineers in shared purpose, it can overcome the most daunting challenges.

Joseph Desch and the NCR proved that once. We can prove it again.

Josh Zavilla, Head of National Security, Palantir

Unlike Kelly Johnson, Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. is probably a name that does not immediately come to mind when you think of the phrase “overhead reconnaissance.” Yet, during the first decade of the Cold War, Richard Bissell changed the face of overhead reconnaissance, particularly as the Jet Age started to modernize US combat employment and intelligence collection. Cutting edge systems, like the Lockheed U-2 spyplane, the A-11/A-12 Oxcart test articles (precursors to the SR-71 Blackbird), and the first space-based imagery program, CORONA, can all be attributed to Bissell. Compared to the well-known pioneers of industry, like Johnson, Bissell’s life started as an academic that then moved into the shadows as a CIA employee. But for every successful national security innovator in industry, you need a government counterpart also willing to innovate and find ways to get through the status quo.

Born on September 18, 1909, in Hartford, Connecticut, Bissell was not an engineer or pilot. He pursued an academic career in economics, earning his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. His early career was marked by significant contributions to economic policy and his role in administering the Marshall Plan, which was crucial in rebuilding Europe after World War II.

After his success with the Marshall Plan, Bissell returned to the United States and became involved with various government projects. His reputation for effective management and innovative solutions caught the attention of key figures in the U.S. government, including Allen Dulles, who was then the Director of the CIA. Dulles recognized Bissell’s potential and recruited him to join the CIA in 1954, initially to work on economic intelligence. However, Bissell’s skills quickly found a new application in the burgeoning field of aerial reconnaissance. He ran three critical programs in this field during his time at CIA.

U-2: A Case Study in Breaking Bureaucracy

With World War II and events like Pearl Harbor still fresh in our collective memory, the US fixation with strategic surprise, attack, and deterrence emerged. President Eisenhower’s establishment of technical capabilities and intelligence panels leaned on America’s industrial expertise to redefine overhead collection intelligence. The US Air Force and CIA first came up with the concept of an overhead spy plane in early 1954, and before the end of the year, President Eisenhower gave the green light to Bissell to start building.

The first question was “how do we do this quickly”? The typical Air Force acquisition process was fraught with bureaucratic red tape, exhaustive requirements, and lengthy timelines. Bissell recognized that these constraints would be detrimental to the urgent need for reconnaissance capabilities during the Cold War. The traditional processes involved extensive documentation, multiple layers of approval, and rigid adherence to predefined requirements, all of which would delay the development and deployment of what would be called the U-2.

To circumvent these obstacles, Bissell adopted a radically different approach by focusing on outcomes rather than rigid requirements. He employed a prototype and bake-off strategy, where several companies pitched designs, and competed them for government selection. This method allowed for iterative improvements and quick decision-making, bypassing the slow-moving traditional procurement system. The bakeoff strategy shifted the burden of innovation to the experts in American industry, and allowed the government to focus on selecting the prototype that would best meet the objectives on the fast timeline they needed.

This doesn’t just encourage innovation, it encourages speed. The first operational prototype of the U-2 was ready in 9 months and was fully operational within 20 months. But in the Cold War, we needed to keep moving to stay in front of our adversaries. They were gaining capability and Bissell recognized the need to do the same.

A-12 Oxcart: Don’t Just Build the U-3

Bissell recognized that incremental improvements were insufficient; a fundamentally new platform was necessary to address evolving threats and intelligence requirements. While most government programs start with an existing, operational design and attempt to retrofit capabilities into that design, Bissell and his team recognized they needed a stepwise change to keep ahead of the Russians.

Authorized in 1959, the A-12 Oxcart was designed to fly higher and faster than the U-2, with speeds exceeding Mach 3 and altitudes of 90,000 feet, making it nearly invulnerable to enemy defenses. Shortly after its approval, the downing of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 in 1960 emphasized that Bissell was correct in his assessment and they again needed a quick-to-deploy capability to maintain the US’s advantage. He turned to Kelly Johnson, who helped him turn a success.

The Oxcart program faced numerous challenges, from developing new materials that could withstand extreme speeds and temperatures to creating advanced propulsion systems. Bissell’s leadership ensured that these challenges were met with innovative solutions. He fostered a culture of experimentation and rapid prototyping, enabling the development of technologies that were far ahead of their time. The first flight of the A-12 took place in April 1962, and its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird, would go on to become an iconic symbol of American aerospace ingenuity.

CORONA: Pursuing Parallel Paths to Success

At the same time, Bissell recognized the importance of placing a few big bets that employed different approaches to ensure the most critical needs could be met and that the US could maintain technical superiority. To do that, starting in 1956, he led the development of the first satellite photoreconnaissance system, CORONA, providing global coverage and overcoming the limitations of aircraft-based reconnaissance.

CORONA involved significant technical and logistical challenges, including the development of film recovery capsules that could withstand reentry and be retrieved mid-air by a moving aircraft. Again, an economist by trade, Bissell surrounded himself with industry experts and let a combination of government and industry experts drive the innovation with government managing toward the outcomes via “show me”-style experimentation. In 1958, the program was approved and funded.

Over 18 months, the program had 13 failed experiments (including failed launches, failure to achieve orbit, and failed capsule recoveries). This didn’t kill the program, but led to a successful 14th mission, just two years after funding was approved.

This first successful CORONA mission marked a revolutionary advancement in intelligence-gathering, providing invaluable data on Soviet military capabilities and changing the landscape of reconnaissance. It wasn’t just about building another U-2, but about building a second transformational capability that complemented the US’s strategy and filled a niche that the U-2 could not fill. By the time of its declassification in 1995, the CORONA program had produced over 800,000 images and set in motion a half-century of overhead collection techniques.

Under the now-declassified National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the CORONA lineage has morphed into ever-persistent overhead collection using sensors in space (“national technical means” in today’s lingo). Meanwhile, CORONA’s legacy is also visible in the commercial space industry, where dozens of companies build, launch, and operate satellites across sensor modalities and then sell relevant data to the NRO. Bissell would likely be shocked.

Conclusion

Richard Bissell's legacy is a testament to his relentless pursuit of innovation and his ability to challenge the status quo in American intelligence and aeronautics. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bissell was not satisfied with incremental improvements. He sought transformative changes that would redefine overhead reconnaissance and keep the United States at the forefront of intelligence capabilities.

As a government executive and program manager, Bissell's approach was instrumental in enabling industry pioneers (like Kelly Johnson) to succeed. By circumventing traditional Air Force acquisition processes, introducing bake-offs and rapid prototyping, and fostering a culture where failing fast was a necessary step toward groundbreaking success, he accelerated the deployment of critical reconnaissance capabilities and set new standards for innovation in government procurement.

Bissell's visionary strategies not only expedited the development of vital technologies but also demonstrated the power of effective government-industry collaboration in achieving national security objectives. His contributions have left an indelible mark on the field, proving that bold, unconventional thinking can yield extraordinary outcomes in the high-stakes arena of international intelligence and defense.

The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied in the article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government agency.

Just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, a 34-year-old physicist sat in his Virginia living room watching a football game broadcast live from San Francisco. The crisis had exposed a weakness in America's intelligence capabilities: by the time spy satellite photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba had been recovered from space, developed, and analyzed, the world was already careening toward catastrophe. But that Sunday afternoon in 1963, as Albert "Bud" Wheelon watched football beamed coast-to-coast in real-time, he had an insight that would transform global intelligence gathering: if television networks could instantly transmit a game across the country, why couldn't spy satellites do the same?

This episode was just one instance among many where Wheelon pushed the edges of what was possible in surprising ways. A pioneer of much of the spy satellite technology that has bolstered American security over the past decades, he also played a key role in developing America's first intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and led Hughes Aircraft Company into the era of satellite television. Crucially, the way he achieved these innovations was through the often-heretical practice of stimulating government competition and adopting commercial advances.

Before he revolutionized spy satellites, Wheelon helped solve one of the hardest engineering problems of the Cold War: building missiles that could hit Moscow from Kansas. At just 23, fresh from completing his physics PhD at MIT, he joined the newly-formed Ramo-Woolridge corporation. He found himself working alongside legends like John von Neumann on America's first ICBMs. When his boss, Dean Woolridge, explained they needed to build a missile that could travel 5,000 miles and hit within a mile of its target, the young Wheelon replied, "That's a good idea, let's get started."

His work on missile guidance systems soon caught the CIA's attention. They brought him in to analyze U-2 spy plane photographs of Soviet missile sites, giving him experience navigating the complex relationship between military and intelligence communities. By 1962, the Agency had recruited him to lead their Office of Scientific Intelligence.

At just 34 years old and a relative outsider, Wheelon was unafraid to stick his neck out to get things done. Brash and direct, he often diverged from the career bureaucrats around him. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he insisted - correctly - that the Soviets were placing nuclear weapons in Cuba, contradicting the Agency's official position. Afterwards, when someone from the Agency's Inspector General's office came by to chastise him for breaking with the party line, Wheelon shouted him out of the room: “You ought to be glad that somebody around here is yelling fire when there is a fire going on!” Rather than being punished for his independence, he caught the eye of CIA Director John McCone, who tapped him to create and lead the new Directorate of Science and Technology.

The timing was critical. Despite its recent successes with the U-2 spy plane and CORONA, the first successful imagery satellite, the CIA’s role in overhead reconnaissance was at risk.

America's space reconnaissance program was divided into three programs overseen by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO): Program A handled Air Force satellites, Program B ran CIA projects, and Program C managed Navy ocean surveillance. This arrangement was supposed to promote cooperation while preserving each organization's strengths. Instead, it became a dogfight between the defense and intelligence communities, with the NRO stuck in the middle.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was pushing to consolidate all satellite reconnaissance under Air Force control through the NRO, sidelining the CIA. The logic seemed compelling: centralize everything under military command, eliminate duplication, maximize efficiency. With the Agency's credibility at a low point following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, momentum was on McNamara's side.

But Wheelon saw something different. From his ICBM days, he knew that competition—even messy competition—often produced better results than streamlined efficiency. The Air Force's Atlas missile program had raced against the Army's team under Wernher von Braun. While critics protested the redundancy, both teams achieved what many had thought impossible.

Now, as head of the CIA's new Directorate of Science and Technology, Wheelon fought to preserve the agency's independent satellite development capability. The battle grew so intense that CIA Director John McCone at one point threatened to have the NRO abolished entirely. The eventual compromise—letting the CIA retain its autonomy—would prove crucial. As Wheelon argued, "We should be willing to bear the burden of untidiness and duplication in the government in return for getting good reconnaissance."

He made his point with two revolutionary programs. The first came from reading about the Syncom II communications satellite in 1963. Wheelon realized that if you could park a satellite high enough, with a big enough antenna, you could eavesdrop on Soviet missile tests across half the continent. The technical challenges were immense.1 The satellite would need an antenna 75 feet across—larger than anything ever deployed in space—that would unfurl once it was in orbit. A hand-cranked model was the best proof the engineering team had that the unfurling would even work. The NRO's director called it "hideously expensive" and questioned its worth.

When the NRO balked, Wheelon used CIA's own money and kept the Air Force in the dark, refusing to clear any DoD outsiders. The resulting RHYOLITE satellite, launched in 1970, proved extraordinarily effective at gathering intelligence crucial for arms control negotiations. Much of its impact and legacy is still classified.

His second breakthrough came from that football broadcast. The satellite architecture he envisioned would beam images directly to analysts, just like television networks beamed games coast-to-coast. When others said it couldn't be done, he pointed to his TV set. The system would take 13 years to develop, but it transformed overhead imagery from a strategic, long-term intelligence tool to a system that could provide actionable, current intelligence. For the first time, analysts could receive satellite imagery in near real-time, rather than waiting weeks for film to be physically returned to Earth.

Wheelon’s leadership style helped these ambitious programs just as much as his bureaucratic machinations. He was a demanding workaholic who did not suffer fools kindly. But he paired this with skin in the game and personal investment in winning.

These qualities shone through during his oversight of the A-12 spy plane program. The CIA’s Mach 3 aircraft prototype was having such awful stability issues that the test pilot quit. To reinvigorate the project, Wheelon took a massive personal risk by taking a ride in the Mach 3 aircraft himself. This bold action galvanized the team, inspiring them to get the plane on track ahead of his flight. McCone was furious that an executive would take such a personal risk and almost fired him for it, but Wheelon kept both his job and the pair of ejection spurs he wore during the flight.

Wheelon took this same approach to the Hughes Aircraft Company after just four years in government. As head of the Space and Communications Group, he broke down traditional barriers between commercial, military, and scientific spacecraft development. A single technology division supported three business units—Commercial Systems, NASA Systems, and Defense Systems—allowing advances in one area to benefit all.

This integrated approach was a hit. When NASA needed spacecraft to explore Venus in 1972, Wheelon saw that an existing commercial communications satellite could be cut in half to create two specialized probes—an elegant solution that saved years of development and millions of dollars. Under his leadership, Hughes captured over 50% of the commercial satellite market and laid the groundwork for direct-to-home television through Hughes Communications, which would later spawn DIRECTV.

Wheelon retired in 1986, but stayed active in government and technology circles while also publishing physics papers. He was keenly aware of how American defense was changing in the wake of the Last Supper. In a 1998 interview given to the CIA, he mused: “Men of good will and great ability once did amazing things together at incredible speeds. That does not describe the defense industry today.”

In the face of another technological race with an authoritarian rival, Wheelon's career offers a lesson in winning such contests: embrace the vitality of competition rather than the false comfort of efficiency. The proliferation of new defense startups and the complex interplay between agencies like the Space Force and NRO echo Wheelon's vision of productive competition in space. Perhaps he would say something different about the defense industry if he were around today.

Further Reading

• American Cryptology During the Cold War by Thomas Johnson

• The Wizards of Langley by Jeffrey T. Richelson

• The SIGINT Satellite Story by Maj. Gen. David Bradburn, Col. John Copley, and Raymond B. Potts

• An Interview with Former DDS&T Albert Wheelon

“The person is the program” has become common wisdom in discussions of what ails, and what can heal, a broken defense industrial base. We need rules that allow the best officers, Program Managers, and Program Executive Offices to stay with the programs they’ve built, until they are completed. That’s been the pattern with successful programs in the past, when the best had the best driving them across the finish line, whether we’re talking about Hyman Rickover and nuclear subs, Bernard Schriever and ICBMs, or John Boyd and the F-16.

Even more impressive, perhaps, are those rare figures who have managed to leave their personal stamp not just on a program or programs, but on an entire institution. In this country we can point to James Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense and John Lehman as Secretary of the Navy with his implementation of the 600 ship navy.

But the Royal Navy’s Admiral Jack Fisher may be the most impressive of all. As First Sea Lord (roughly the British equivalent of Chief of Naval Operations) in the decade before the First World War, Fisher will forever be linked to his most famous shipbuilding program, the HMS Dreadnought.

But during his six years at the Admiralty, Fisher also single-handedly transformed the strategic outlook of an entire armed service. He did it by acting as Disruptor-in-Chief, i.e. through his relentless pursuit of bringing new personnel, new technologies, and a new strategic vision to a navy that was already the largest and most respected in the world, but which had grown complacent after nearly a century of naval supremacy. Thanks to Fisher’s reforms, the Royal Navy was at last ready to face the challenges of 20^th century sea warfare, and to prevail against its most formidable opponent since Trafalgar—imperial Germany.

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As I point out in my book To Rule The Waves: How The British Navy Shaped the Modern World, everything about Jack Fisher cut against the grain. He was born in Ceylon—modern Sri Lanka—which prompted his enemies to suggest his unusual physical appearance with his yellow complexion (after suffering for years from malaria and jaundice) and almond-shaped eyes, owed something to “Oriental blood.”

Fisher had a ferocious temper and an ingrained tendency to be outspoken in the genteel Victorian age. His scribbled hand-written notes to subordinates and friends would end “Burn This!” or “Yours Til Charcoal Sprouts.” His unpredictable ways inspired fear as well as respect. Whenever he appeared on deck the word would spread throughout the ship: “Look out, here comes Jack.”

Unlike most naval officers of the time, Fisher had chosen gunnery, not navigation, as his professional specialty. It was working on the gunnery range that Fisher made his first important discovery, i.e. the operational possibilities of the torpedo. Few others did. As one old admiral told him, there hadn’t been torpedoes when he first went to sea, and he saw no need for the “beastly things” now.

But Fisher saw at once the torpedo could be a weapon that would decisively level the naval playing field, and make even the biggest battleship vulnerable to attack. “What is the use of battleships as we have hitherto known them?” he once wrote (the kind of question someone might ask of aircraft carriers today). “NONE! Their one and only function—that of ultimate security of defense—is gone—lost!”

Fisher’s favorite maxim was, “History is a record of exploded ideas.” One might almost add, exploded technologies, especially in warfare. When he became Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet in 1899, at age fifty-eight, Fisher saw a service that had become overladen with outmoded assumptions as well as ships and weapons, and had grown complacent about what it took to remain the world’s dominant navy. He set out to sweep away the old and obsolete, and bring in the new and effective, in order to create the modern technological navy he had in mind for the twentieth century.

As one officer remembered who served under him at that time: “Everything was about tactics, strategy, gunnery, torpedo warfare, it was a veritable renaissance and affected every officer in the fleet.” Fisher accepted no standard below that of excellent. When one of his officers failed in an exercise, he told him point-blank, “If this had been wartime, I would have had you shot.”

When Fisher was made First Sea Lord in 1904, he saw an opportunity to shake the service up from stem to stern. Over the next six years, he forced the navy to undergo a series of major reforms and changes—changes that made it a service ready to face a world war when it finally broke out in 1914.

Fisher started by broadening the service’s social and intellectual base, by smashing the old class barrier that had separated the navy’s engineering and executive officers, and having them learn and work together at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.

Besides the torpedo, the other new technology Fisher passionately fought for was the submarine. Like the torpedo, the submarine was a direct challenge to the thinking and mindset of more traditional officers and sailors (one admiral even pronounced them “underhanded, unfair, and un-English”).

But Fisher saw their significance in resetting the strategic balance at sea. Armed with torpedoes capable of hitting a target at one mile distance, “My beloved submarines,” he wrote, “will magnify the naval power of England seven times more than present.” He envisioned a Royal Navy “saturating” the seas around Britain with one hundred submarines and a hundred torpedo-wielding fast destroyers. Fisher never had time or money to realize his bold plan, but when World War I broke out in 1914, Britain’s D-Class submarine did set the international standard for undersea warfare.

Fisher also rammed home a new emphasis on accurate gunnery as the sine qua non of a modern navy. He found his man in Captain Percy Scott, who had been training gun crews to achieve on-target accuracy at unprecedented ranges of 5000-6000 yards, and on moving targets as well. Fisher created a position for Scott as Inspector of Target Practice, and put Scott to work creating shooting competitions between ships and fleets, as well as introducing new range finder technology. Before Scott and Fisher were finished, Royal Navy gunners could regularly hit the mark at more than four miles, while steaming at 14 knots. The superior gunnery of British ships at the battle of Jutland owed everything to Fisher and Scott’s reforms.

More accurate firing opened the way for bigger and better guns, and the ships to put them on. Like the United States and China today, Britain found itself locked in a race with imperial Germany for naval dominance. And like China, Germany had the industrial base capacity needed to outbuild Britain’s shipyards, unless Britain found a way to sprint ahead.

Fisher found his answer with the HMS Dreadnought, which was launched at Portsmouth in 1906. It represented a quantum leap forward in naval technology, one that left the German naval buildup far to the stern.

Dreadnought’s construction demanded top security. Sitting on my desk is the 1906-7 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, the final word on the state of the world’s navies for more than a century. At that point, Dreadnought’s specifications regarding her guns, armor, and other fittings were so secret that most of the discussion of the Dreadnought in Jane’s had to be left blank.

The key secret, however, was Dreadnought’s steam turbines, which made her the fastest capital ship afloat, able to do 21 knots—faster than any existing submarine that might threaten her. She carried ten 12-inch guns; her biggest German competitors carried only four. This meant that the firepower of a fleet of ten Dreadnought-class vessels could match the forward-firing firepower of thirty pre-Dreadnought battleships.

By March 1909 Great Britain had forty-three old style battleships, while the Germans had twenty-two and none of the new Dreadnought class. Britain, meanwhile, had finished two Dreadnoughts and three of Fisher's fast battle cruisers, with seven more Dreadnoughts on the way. The Germans gamely worked to catch up, building their own version of the Dreadnought class. But Fisher had leaped ahead of them with his other pet project, the fast battle cruiser, and then the Queen Elizabeth class battleship, first launched in 1912. Armed with 15-inch guns, and driven with oil-fired engines, the HMS Queen Elizabeth moved the goal posts for naval supremacy further and further away from Germany’s reach.

By 1914, when war finally came, Britain’s navy was equipped with no less than 22 modern-class battleships and 14 fast battle cruisers—plus 22 older battleships and 160 cruisers and destroyers. Germany was stuck with just 14 Dreadnoughts, and four modern battle cruisers. The world’s first great naval arms race had ended firmly in Britain’s favor, thanks to Jackie Fisher. Germany’s surface navy was taken out as a decisive factor in the world war.

Fisher had retired when war came, but he left one more important legacy for Britain’s naval future: his protégé Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Like his mentor Fisher, Churchill understood how technological advances carried the possibility of decisive victory. He pursued them relentlessly, expanding the use of wireless communication and developing the navy’s air arm, including dirigible airships and the first naval aircraft carrier, HMS Argus. He even developed an early helicopter.

His other enthusiasm was in code-breaking, and the Admiralty office he would sponsor and set up, Room 40, would crack the German naval code as well as the Zimmermann Telegram—probably the single most important contribution to the course of the war Churchill and the Royal Navy ever made.

By then, Fisher was out and out of favor. He had come back into service when war broke out, but instead of working with his friend Winston Churchill, they quarreled, just as Hyman Rickover would quarrel with Navy Secretary John Lehman. Giants don’t easily tolerate the presence of other giants. When the Cabinet okayed Churchill’s plans for the Dardanelles expedition, Fisher—who had opposed the plan—resigned in disgust.

By the time he died in 1920, however, Fisher’s reputation as the creator of the modern British Navy was secure. Of course, he had made mistakes. During the First World War his beloved battle cruisers proved fatally under-armored compared to their German counterparts, while the weapon he saw as saving the future of seapower for Britain—the submarine—would be turned by Germany into an existential threat against Britain, in not one but two world wars.

Fisher’s career is signal proof that it’s not the technology itself, but the one who seizes its full potential, who can ultimately prevail in a military contest. It’s a lesson American strategic thinkers need to keep in mind as they think about the applicability of AI and even quantum technology—as well as hypersonics and directed-energy weapons—to decisively tipping the strategic balance with China, in America’s favor.

But overall, we can say that Fisher’s career demonstrates how a single individual can reshape the destiny of an entire armed service—that is, if he’s bold enough, ruthless enough, energetic enough, and willing to be Disruptor-in-Chief.

ARTHUR HERMAN is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas-Austin, and author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

I.

In July 1938, in an Arab settlement just east of Nazareth, British captain Orde Wingate stood with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. Armed and ready to take on Arabs revolting against British rule and Jewish immigration, his men charged, taking their Arab adversaries by surprise. Early in the battle, Wingate began bleeding profusely from enemy bullets, but he did not stop commanding operations until his forces won.

The battle of Dabburiya embodied Wingate’s heady brew of eccentricity and genius. Wingate struck many as odd in his mannerisms — he enjoyed stringing raw onions around his neck for snacking and drinking tea through his socks — and in his deep Christian faith, which included relying on the Bible as an accurate battlefield guide. Yet he was a brilliant strategist willing to buck his superiors both in his unconventional tactics and in his willingness to support Zionism as much of the British establishment drifted toward appeasing Arab interests. Wingate’s apostasies won him many foes and many admirers, among them Winston Churchill, who called him a “man of the highest quality.”

Wingate imparted his blend of unyielding principle and healthy heresy to a vanguard of Jewish fighters — including future Israeli leaders Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon — laying the groundwork for what would become the Israeli Defense Forces. The resilience and ingenuity that enabled the IDF to recover from the shocks of October 7th, 2023, and reshape the strategic landscape of the Middle East, are, in many ways, a legacy of Wingate's iconoclasm.

II.

On paper, Wingate was a quintessential British imperial soldier. Born in India, the son of Christian missionaries and distant cousin of Lawrence of Arabia (whom he considered a charlatan), he graduated from the Royal Military Academy and served everywhere from Libya to Burma. Yet despite his sterling resume, Wingate was a renegade — a tendency which emerged early in his career. When subjected to the humiliating ritual of "running" by fellow cadets — a hazing ritual where cadets were forced to run gauntlets while being hit — Wingate defied convention by standing before his tormentors, looking each in the eye, slowly removing his clothing, and then diving into the water tank. Not a single cadet dared to hit him.

Following a five-year posting in Sudan, in 1936, Wingate was dispatched to British Mandatory Palestine as an intelligence officer. He arrived at the outset of the Arab Revolt, the most serious uprising against British colonial rule and increasing Jewish immigration. Beginning with a general strike, the rebellion escalated into widespread guerrilla warfare, with Arab fighters sabotaging infrastructure and targeting common British soldiers and high-ranking officials alike.

As the war progressed, British officialdom turned against the Zionist cause, fearful that events in Palestine could alienate the broader Arab world as the Nazi menace grew. Even so, Britain was determined to show resolve by suppressing the revolt. Stretched thin across its vast empire and cognizant of the increasing danger in Europe, London needed help. Reluctantly, it turned to Palestine’s Jewish community, which had not received prior British approval to establish an offensive fighting force of any kind. Wingate would play a crucial role in training this force and establishing it as the nucleus of the future Jewish army.

Unlike many of his peers and superiors, Wingate became a staunch Zionist. Upon his arrival to Mandatory Palestine, Wingate began reading about the history of the land and its continuous Jewish presence and taught himself Hebrew. Inspired by his missionary parents, he saw the words of the Bible coming to fruition as the children of Abraham attempted to resettle their ancestral homeland. Wingate felt it was his duty to defy the British military establishment and support the Jewish cause.

Wingate proposed creating a commando force, relying on flexibility and mobility, that could pressure Arab insurgents that theretofore dominated smaller villages and the countryside. Many British officials blanched at the idea of arming Jews to fight Arabs — still more so at the thought of the unorthodox Wingate in command — but Wingate bypassed the chain of command, obtaining permission directly from the commander of Britain’s forces in the region, General Archibald Wavell.

Wingate established what he called the Special Night Squads (SNS) base at Kibbutz Ein Harod in northern Israel — a decision with operational and religious implications. The Kibbutz (a communal agricultural settlement) is located on a hill opposite Mount Gilboa in the Galilee, providing a full view of the surrounding valley. It was no coincidence that according to the Bible, Wingate’s biblical hero, Gideon, led the Israelites to victory in a battle against the Midianites nearly 3,000 years prior from the same location.

Wingate trained his squad in tactics far different to those employed by British regulars. He taught them offensive maneuvers, such as how to preemptively target villages to achieve complete surprise or how to make two raids in quick succession in disparate parts of the country. It took little time before the rebels began to fear the SNS. The SNS’s ambushes preempted saboteurs targeting the oil pipeline from Iraq to Haifa, a critical source of British fuel, with single squads defeating larger opponents. Wingate’s forces gathered detailed intelligence that enabled them to raid insurgent bases, an unprecedented approach for the British at the time.

Critics said that Wingate’s tactics were particularly severe, in some cases crossing a moral line. Wingate did undertake harsh measures against enemy fighters and civilians. In that regard, he did not significantly depart from wider British practices during the Revolt, in a conflict that featured excesses and brutalities on both sides. Within two years, the SNS ended Arab attacks on the oil pipeline and significantly dampened the insurgency in the north. For his success, Wingate received the Distinguished Service Order.

After his injury in the battle of Daburriya in 1938, Wingate requested home leave. During his absence, British policy toward the Mandate shifted rapidly. As British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain acceded Czechoslovakia to Germany, his government simultaneously sent reinforcements to Palestine to end the rebellion and prepared to end support for a Jewish national home. When Wingate returned to Palestine, he was removed from command of the SNS, and due to his continued advocacy for the Zionist cause — at times more vigorous than that of the Zionist leadership itself — Wavell transferred him to Ethiopia to wage a counterinsurgency against occupying Italian forces.

Wingate never again saw Palestine. Although Wingate succeeded in Ethiopia, his support for Ethiopian independence and disdain for authority irritated his commanders, who exiled him to Cairo. Driven to attempt suicide, Wingate recovered, and Wavell recruited him to command a guerrilla operation behind enemy lines in Burma. Wingate’s forces helped to halt Japan’s advance and demonstrate that Tokyo’s forces could be beaten. Ever on the hunt for mavericks, Winston Churchill called Wingate to London to meet in person, insisting that seniority must not “obstruct the advance of real personalities to their proper stations in war.” Wingate returned to Burma a Major General and launched an ambitious second campaign against Japan that drew on his innovations in the SNS. Three weeks in, however, he died in a plane crash, and without his leadership, the offensive faltered.

III.

Wingate was a polarizing figure, remembered either as “a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny,” in the words of Churchill, or as a vainglorious knight errant by his detractors. Wingate’s eccentricities fueled such suspicions; his religiosity alienated cosmopolitan elements of British leadership. But there is little doubt that his disregard for rank and protocol fueled his creativity.

Moreover, Wingate’s commitment to the Zionist cause — borne from his iconoclasm — proved crucial to its success. Wingate prized experimentation and merit, empowering junior leaders to act independently and seize the initiative. His risk-taking, adaptability, and innovation, which he imparted to key figures like Dayan, defined the ethos of the IDF, enabling its victories against numerically superior opponents in later wars. That same ethos later permeated Israel’s technology sector, helping to seed a technology sector arguably topped only by Silicon Valley in its dynamism. In some way, the Startup Nation can trace its spiritual DNA back to a Christian Zionist borne from missionaries stationed in India, whose biblical faith and tactical heterodoxy made him the consummate heretic and hero.

Lt Col Brian Fredrickson is a Program Manager in the U.S. Space Force.

North American Aviation (NAA) built over 40,000 warplanes during World War II, more than any other United States company. James Howard “Dutch” Kindelberger was the human pile driver behind this juggernaut.

Even as Allied forces battled the formidable Axis war machine in Europe and the Pacific, Kindelberger traded punches with the combat aircraft procurement cabal of U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) headquartered in Dayton, Ohio.

At stake was the legendary P-51 Mustang—an aircraft that the USAAF never intended to buy.

USAAF laid a maze of barriers and obstacles to stop the P-51. Kindelberger adroitly navigated them all. How did he do it? What lessons can be adapted to today? These questions will be answered in this week’s Heretics and Heroes.

Kindelberger traveled a twisting path before assuming the managing directorship of NAA in mid-1934. Of German ancestry, Dutch was born in 1895 into a family of soot-covered West Virginia steel workers. He dropped out of high school to join them at age 16 but shifted direction and became a student of engineering at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. The siren-call of World War I found him as a dropout, an Army first lieutenant, a student pilot, and then an instructor pilot at Memphis.

Freshly married, Dutch separated from the military. Broke and unemployed, Kindelberger found work with the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, an incubator for the next generation of aviation entrepreneurs. Donald Douglas befriended Kindelberger at Martin and then enticed him to move west to join the fledgling Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, CA. Their final project together was a cutting-edge airliner, the DC-2.

Dutch was hired by NAA, the aviation branch of General Motors (GM), in mid-1934. There, he used his considerable willpower and business acumen to develop some of the most iconic airplanes that ever flew. Dutch helped design the ubiquitous NAA trainer, which evolved to become the AT-6 Texan (or SNJ, as the Navy called it). In 1936, the smooth-talking Kindelberger also used his marketing skills to persuade GM’s board of directors to invest $600,000 of scarce Depression-era dollars in America’s largest and most modern airplane factory at Mines Field, now Los Angeles International Airport. His next major project was a fast-attack medium bomber, which evolved into the hard-punching B-25 Mitchell.

That lineup is impressive enough, but the most consequential project of Dutch’s career was still ahead of him.

In August 1939, with war clouds looming, the U.S. Army Air Corps (USAAC) announced a new slate of aircraft, most of which would carry the nation through the entire war. North American was awarded contracts for trainer aircraft and the B-25. To maximize warbird production, NAA was also selected to operate new plants near Kansas City and Dallas. By October 1943, the NAA workforce swelled to 91,000. An unprecedented 46% were female.

The genesis of the P-51 Mustang has been told in books and articles. Kindelberger is at the center of the story, relentlessly navigating bureaucratic obstacles to drive the plane’s rapid development, production, and deployment.

The first obstacle: U.S. and Allied military leaders wanted NAA to perpetuate the status quo via licensed production of legacy aircraft.

The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was then considered America’s best pre-war fighter. France and England were well satisfied with their NAA trainers, so they approached Dutch Kindelberger in April 1940 to ask, “Could NAA build P-40 Warhawks on license from Curtiss?”

Kindelberger opined he did not wish to build obsolete aircraft. Others at NAA also favored a clean sheet solution, instead of taking an easy win and settling for a licensed production contract.

It was a bold move. Contracts were signed, but feathers were ruffled with top brass at Dayton. An export license was granted for the new start aircraft with the stipulation that two units be delivered to Wright Field for flight testing and evaluation.

The pursuit plane project at NAA moved at miraculous speed—an astonishing 117 days from project initiation to fabricated prototype. The prototype first flew in October 1940 under civil registration. The first plane was delivered to Wright Field in August 1941, less than two months after the U.S. Army Air Corps was renamed U.S. Army Air Forces on June 20, 1941.

Which brings us to our second obstacle: The USAAF refused to touch the P-51s.

The godfather of Army combat aircraft procurement at that time was Major General Oliver Echols (1892-1954). When NAA delivered the test articles as promised to Wright Field, Echols was still stewing over Kindelberger’s earlier insubordination.

Echols wanted NAA to build P-40 Warhawks on license from Curtiss; furthermore, Echols’ first choice for a new fighter was the Fischer P-75, a plane that, while promising on paper, was doomed from the beginning as a sinkhole for cash. Like the Great and Powerful Oz, Echols kept himself hidden behind the curtain while boosting the P-75 and strangling (via surrogates) the P-51.

Bureaucrats in Dayton slowed the limited supply of engines to NAA. Airframes without engines began piling up in the lots outside NAA’s factories. Major General Echols wanted trainers and bombers, but no more pursuit planes from NAA.

During this time, NAA test pilot Robert “Bob” Chilton traveled to Dayton. He asked to see the flight log for the P-51 model that the company had provided.

“Why has this airplane never been flown?” Chilton asked.

“Why would we waste effort flying it when there is no plan to purchase any [P-51s]?” a lieutenant responded.

So the first batch of P-51s went to Britain, not to the country of their origin.

The Brits not only named it “Mustang” but also bestowed a fresh engine, giving the plane enduring fame.

The P-51 initially used the same Model V-1710 engine that powered the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, produced by GM’s aircraft engine company, Allison. Unfortunately, the aerodynamics of the Mustang prevented installation of superchargers. Hence, Allison versions were effective only at low altitudes. It was a Rolls Royce test pilot, Ronald W. Harker, who in October 1942 first mated a Merlin engine to a Mustang airframe.

It was an instant match made in heaven.

The performance tuning of twin superchargers boosted peak performance to 25,000 feet. The breakthrough enabled the P-51 to escort and protect Allied heavy bombers, which normally cruised at and bombed from that same altitude.

Luckily for the U.S. and our Allies, NAA and Dutch Kindelberger had an ally in General Hap Arnold, who finally sliced through the procurement sludge at Dayton. Dutch and Hap were good friends as World War I pilots; they remained in frequent dialog during World War II. In August 1942, a frustrated Arnold gave the direct order and Muir Fairchild signed the letter to the Dayton bureaucrats demanding wholesale procurement of the P-51.

Arnold testified during post-war hearings that it was the only time he had intervened in the procurement process. He later stated he had no regrets regarding that decision.

Lacking fighter escorts for the longer-range missions, heavy bomber formations were taking terrible losses. The Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid of August 17, 1943, was especially brutal with the loss of 60 B-17 bombers and 600 aviators on a single mission, a rate of attrition which could not be sustained. Hap Arnold was in frantic need of a solution.

NAA opened the door for long-range missions in the form of an optional 85-gallon fuselage-mounted fuel tank for Rolls Royce equipped P-51s. Only the Mustang had the range to fly non-stop from England to Berlin, dogfight the Luftwaffe, and return to England. The combination of Allied bombers and ground attacks devastated the German homeland, which yielded V-E Day on May 8,1945.

By the end of WWII, 881 P-51s were rolling off assembly lines in Dallas and Inglewood every month. All told, NAA built 15,600 Mustangs.

The aircraft that the USAAF didn’t want is now considered by many to be the best all-around fighter of WWII.

Looking back, it’s clear that Kindelberger mustered the fortitude, tenacity, and allies to overcome Oliver Echol’s ego-imposed obstacle.

Of note, he successfully navigated:

• Absence of U.S. government requirements. The Army Air Forces Material Command did not request the P-51 and refused to fly test articles in their custody. The absence of requirements gave NAA a blank sheet to conceive and maximize what was possible, rather than perpetuate legacy platforms or chase overly detailed requirements issued by well-intentioned bureaucrats with no applied design or industrial experience.

• Leveraging allies and partners to make technological breakthroughs. NAA rapidly developed the P-51 under export license to France and Britain, with Britain operating the initial batch.

• Not being the incumbent. When it came to nimble fighters, NAA at the time was an unproven company forging into new terrain compared to favored market leaders of the era, such as Bell, Curtiss, and Lockheed

• Harnessing a leap in propulsion technology. Turns out liquid-cooled engines did work. Adapting the Packard built Rolls Royce Merlin engine was profound.

The P-51 was arguably Kindelberger’s crowning contribution to the war effort. In five consequential years from 1940-1945, the Mustang blossomed from a glint in Kindelberger’s eye to the gem of America’s Arsenal of Democracy.

But the prolonged bureaucratic battle took a toll on Kindelberger’s health. Chain smoking and drinking aggravated a struggling heart muscle, which led to his early demise at age 67. The P-51 was equally short lived. The surprise arrival of the nimble Soviet MiG-15 during the Korean War rendered prop-driven aircraft obsolete.

However, Dutch was clairvoyant. The only jet in the U.S. arsenal that could match (and sometimes best) the MiG-15 was NAA’s swept-wing beauty, the F-86 Sabre. Over 9,000 were ultimately built and they led the nation’s charge into the Jet Age, along with other great combat and experimental airplanes that followed.

Kindelberger’s legacy is a testament to Americans’ ability to collaborate in achieving breakthroughs that render previous miracles obsolete.

To create a military system with a lasting advantage, you need more than just smart ideas—you need innovators willing to take large, almost unreasonable risks. Because it takes a heretic to build something radically different when the stakes are so high.

Today, AI and unmanned system technology are advancing by leaps and bounds, and their role in future combat is becoming impossible to ignore. Will we take the bold steps to develop software-defined machines with transformative potential, or opt for incremental upgrades to legacy systems? Those choices now have long-term outcomes.

At the dawn of the United States, a comparable reckoning shaped the birth of the US Navy. Joshua Humphreys—now celebrated as the 'Father of the American Navy'—faced widespread skepticism when he proposed a class of warships designed to outmaneuver any contemporary fleet. The brilliance of his designs would become evident during the War of 1812, when the U.S. won multiple decisive victories against the nearly undefeated British Royal Navy—a feat few believed possible.

What truly set Humphreys apart was not merely his technical expertise in naval architecture but his strategic foresight. Unlike many within the War Department and White House, he understood that America needed to secure a “lead in naval affairs” to safeguard its booming maritime economy. While the nation’s immediate focus was on combating piracy and preserving neutrality, Humphreys anticipated the looming threat of conflict with European powers. He believed that, with the right innovations, America’s relatively small Navy could still deliver decisive blows against larger adversaries.

America’s First Major Acquisition Program

When Congress passed the Act to Provide a Naval Armament in 1794, Humphreys was 42 years old. The act authorized the War Office to build or buy six frigates. Despite having never seen a European battleship in his entire life, Humphreys had consumed virtually every piece of literature on shipbuilding and had worked on over 300 vessels since he became an apprentice at 12 years old. During the American Revolution, he had helped build frigates for the Continental Navy. That Navy had since been disbanded and its ships sold off. Now, the U.S. wanted a new fleet built to last.

The shipbuilding experts of the day were a guild of Quakers congregated in the nation’s capital of Philadelphia. In discerning the right design for the new frigates, Secretary of War Henry Knox sought the opinion of these rival shipwrights. Humphreys was the misfit of this crew. During the Revolution, he had rejected the Quaker principle of pacifism and dedicated himself to helping build the Continental Navy. And his proposed model for the Navy’s warships shocked his colleagues.

It’s important to know that in the late 1700s, naval architecture had generally stalled in innovation. Frigates had become the middle tier of warships in speed and firepower, typically armed with 36 or 38 cannons across two decks. They could outrun a 74-cannon battleship or chase down smaller merchant ships or privateers. The British Royal Navy, the undisputed hegemon of the seas, was building vessels exclusively to these “ratings” – and at scale. Their combat effectiveness was also proven. Before 1812, the British had not lost a single frigate to another equally rated warship in over a decade.

Humphreys’ novel design blended the firepower of a battleship with the speed of a frigate, featuring an extended hull and more cannons on the lower deck than the upper one. The increased firepower and stability (cannons on the upper deck raised the center of gravity) gave his frigates the advantage over European ones, and even against battleships in heavy seas, when the lower cannon ports would need to be closed.

His rival shipwrights scoffed and “unanimously” rejected it. Because of this project, Humphreys would become bitter enemies with colleagues like Jonathan Penrose, whose father he had apprenticed under, and Josiah Fox, who, despite being ordered to work within Humphreys’ department at the War Office, is suspected to have changed the hull design of the USS Chesapeake to his own preferences. The other Quakers leveled a number of critiques against the proposed frigate’s structural risks, but the underlying current of consensus was clear: no one believed that Humphreys could out-innovate the shipyards of Europe. Humphreys would defend his position with Knox by pointing out that a squadron of conventional frigates would offer no tactical advantage against a major adversary while also being vastly outnumbered.

Even though the vessels were officially meant to defend against piracy from the Barbary States in the Mediterranean, Humphreys foresaw the politically sensitive reality that the US also needed to deter the European countries that might threaten America’s merchant fleet and coastline. Republicans had only begrudgingly agreed to the bill, seeing a standing Navy as a massive expense that invited a conflict with Europe simply by existing.

Fortunately, Knox and the administration would side with Humphreys. In doing so, the US would embark on building its first of many “exquisite” weapons, designed to create an asymmetric advantage with the Great Powers of the era.

Building the Exquisite Frigate

The advanced nature of exquisite systems often demands the procurement of entirely new raw materials, tools and processes in order to achieve the previously impossible. Lockheed’s Skunkworks division under Kelly Johnson would later face similar challenges in designing an aircraft that could withstand airframe temperatures of over 600°F that would be generated at speeds above Mach 3.

Humphreys’ frigates were no different. As part of his blueprint, he required particular types of wood for each section. His most emphatic requirement was using live oak for critical components of the frame, given its exceptional strength and ability to last up to five times longer than white oak. Procuring enough live oak would be a massive undertaking. It would call for several hundred live oak trees to be cut down and transported from a small coastline region to the six shipyards building frigates.

Live oak’s appeal was also a two-sided coin. The trunk of a live oak can grow to over 5 feet in diameter, and its root system is exceptionally strong. Standard axes simply “bounce” off of them, requiring specialized tools and techniques to fell each tree. To make matters worse, live oaks grow exclusively along the humid, mosquito-ridden coastline of the Southeast. Harvesting them meant teams of lumberjacks had to sail down to Georgia and labor deep within the swamps under grueling conditions. One contemporary observer likened the lumberjack camp to “an army field hospital after battle.” Disease claimed several lives, while others fled, unwilling to wait for their turn to fall ill.

Humphreys’ costly requirements, however, would pay off in the durability and longevity of his frigates. A sailor aboard the USS Constitution once described seeing British cannonballs literally bouncing off the side, earning the ship its nickname, “Old Ironsides.” You can imagine the morale boost that sight would give a sailor who is used to seeing cannonballs rip through a ship and the people inside of it. Old Ironsides still floats today in the Boston Harbor, earning the title of the oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy.

The Psychological Impact of Asymmetrical Advantage

Humphreys’ prediction of conflict came true with the War of 1812. If the US had decided to build its frigates after the war began, it would have been too late to matter.

In the years leading up to 1812, US relations with both France and Britain deteriorated. Neutral American vessels continued to be harassed at sea by both countries, leading to the Quasi-War with France (1798-1800). The British had also struggled to recruit enough sailors to staff its navy, which had exploded to almost 15x its original size since 1792. To solve for that, British captains had increasingly resorted to impressing American sailors, who, as far as they were concerned, were basically British anyways. In turn, American ships were happily accepting British sailors who defected for better wages and treatment. Impressment became a tipping point for war.

Despite British vessels hovering off the American coast and harassing US vessels, President Thomas Jefferson was reluctant to build more of Humphreys’ frigates. Republicans continued to insist that the US should remain neutral and doubted any positive outcome of war with Britain. Instead, Jefferson promoted a more politically palatable alternative: the gunboat. These small vessels, armed with a single forward-facing cannon, were designed for coastal defense and would likely sink in open seas—a limitation that Jefferson considered a virtue. Manned by local militias rather than professional sailors, gunboats reflected the Republican vision of decentralized, minimal military power. In 1807, a friendly Congress approved the construction of 180 gunboats.

On its face, Jefferson’s theory of defense may seem to resemble the Air Force strategy of “affordable mass.” Perhaps large numbers of low-cost gunboats could effectively overwhelm fewer, exquisite battleships. But gunboats were half-measures. A frigate could easily run down a squadron of them. Additionally, gunboats were only seaworthy in calm waters, and they were liable to sink after a single cannon shot (a frigate could often withstand well over 50 shots). Equally important, it was impossible to recruit sailors to live inside their cramped quarters.

While the gunboat program and its cost overruns could have funded a large squadron of Humphreys’ frigates, the existing frigates proved their worth in their first duels with British frigates. On August 19, 1812, the Constitution ran down the British frigate Guerriére. The British captain, like the British public, assumed they would win any fight and told his crew that he would be disappointed if they didn’t dispatch of the American ship within thirty minutes.

Instead, after the first broadsides, the Guerriére had lost critical sections of its masts, “rolling her main deck guns under water” and causing the ship to steer into favorable positions for the Constitution to rake it with more broadsides. The return of the Constitution to Boston with a captured British frigate in tow generated national celebration.

Two months later, the USS United States captured the British frigate Macedonian in an even more lopsided victory. The loss of not one but two frigates, to the Americans no less, sent a shockwave through the British public and military leadership. The upset had broken the “sacred spell of invincibility,” in the words of the future British Prime Minister George Canning. Something was deeply wrong. The Royal Navy ordered its captains to avoid confrontation with US frigates without at least a 2:1 numerical advantage.

While these victories did not decide the outcome of the war, they gave the Americans a major psychological advantage. Their most important contribution was in shifting Republican opinion away from an untenable policy of neutrality. America had discovered, thanks to Humphreys’ heresy and capable commanders, that its little Navy could actually win. And winning felt good. Just weeks after the Macedonian’s capture, Republicans enthusiastically authorized four new 74-gun battleships and 6 new 44-gun frigates.

Thomas Jefferson acknowledged the ineffectiveness of his gunboats during the war. In an 1813 letter to John Adams, his presidential predecessor who had ardently fought for the Navy’s creation in 1794, he gave credit where credit was due.

I sincerely congratulate you on the successes of our little navy, which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls.

Further Reading

• Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, by Ian Toll (2006)

Submit your favorite Heretics and Heroes

And if you’re a great writer and want to submit a guest profile for consideration — we’d love to hear from you. Reach out at firstbreakfast@substack.com

When the atomic bomb dubbed “Little Boy” detonated above Hiroshima with the force of 15,000 tons of TNT on August 6, 1945, it changed warfare like no other technological advance, before or since.

The bomb’s scientific author, J. Robert Oppenheimer, has today achieved a level of fame commensurate with his achievement, in large part due to the blockbuster film bearing his name. The man who hand-picked Oppenheimer, Major General Leslie Groves, if anything deserves greater credit.

Groves was not a scientist. The luminaries he directed during the war outshone him in intellectual wattage. Many actively hated him for his ego, sarcasm, and authoritarian style. But whatever his shortcomings, Groves was a loyal soldier, a shrewd judge of character, and, above all, a master conductor of vast bureaucratic endeavors. As director of the Manhattan Engineer District, these skills would be strained to the limit.

Leslie Groves was given a task thought to be impossible. He did it anyway, ending the world’s most titanic struggle and changing the nature of war forever.

Groves was a military man from the start. The son of an Army chaplain, he spent his early years on a succession of bases, stateside and overseas. In his memoirs, he recalls talking to old Indian fighters on the frontier and “wondering what was left for me to do now that the West was won.” Much later in life, he would learn there were frontiers left to explore.

Groves finished fourth in his class at West Point and was commissioned into the Army Corps of Engineers. Although he missed out on World War One, he was quickly identified as a dynamo of activity and a doer, including by Brehon Somervell, who at various points would be his commander, patron, and rival. When Somervell took charge of the Army’s Construction Division and cleaned house in what became known as the “Somervell Blitz,” Groves was his trigger man, firing complacent officers and hiring hard-charging replacements like a machine.

His ruthless style made few friends, but it commanded respect and got results. As his aide, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, put it: “General Groves is the biggest SOB I have ever worked for. He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make timely, difficult decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know … I hated his guts and so did everybody else, but we had our form of understanding.”

Somervell rewarded Groves with greater responsibility, including the world’s largest construction job at the time: the Pentagon. This project accustomed Groves to the consequential, split-second decisions that executives must constantly make. “It is no exaggeration to state,” Groves later wrote, “that during this period decisions involving up to $5,000,000 were made at the rate of about one every 100 feet of corridor walked.” The job also inured him to the diplomacy such jobs required. Groves spent a great deal of time keeping congressional investigators at bay. He had just finished testifying before Congress in 1942 when Somervell blindsided him with his next task.

Groves, sensitive to his lack of combat experience, yearned for an overseas post. No dice. Somervell informed him he was needed on the home front to oversee a top-secret engineering project that the Army had just acquired. “If you do the job right,” Somervell said, in what he hoped was consolation, “it will win the war.” “Oh, that thing,” Groves responded.

He had heard about the effort—up to that point academic, and quite small—to split the atom and produce a superweapon. From a managerial standpoint, it seemed like a demotion from overseeing thousands of people on the Pentagon project. From a scientific standpoint, it seemed about as likely to succeed as spinning straw into gold. Groves accepted the assignment with stoicism, but secretly felt that Somervell had picked him to sabotage his career.

Certainly, it seemed like a fool’s errand if not a catastrophe from the start. Nuclear physics was then a field at the bleeding edge of science. Until the moment of the Trinity test in 1945, no one, scientists included, knew if detonating an atomic bomb was even possible. If it was, many thought the resulting blast would be far smaller than what the U.S. government hoped. On the opposite pole, a few believed the blast could ignite the Earth’s atmosphere, creating an extinction-level event.

Setting aside such remote speculation, Groves was presented with the immediate challenge of producing large quantities of nuclear fuel without knowing what methods were best for producing such fuel. Because of the compressed time schedule, decisions would have to be made before it was clear whether a method would work. Making matters worse, no one had any idea how much fissile material a bomb would require. His scientists provided an estimate accurate “within a factor of ten.” After the war, Groves wrote with grim humor that, “My position could well be compared with that of a caterer who is told he must be prepared to serve anywhere between ten and a thousand guests.”

Despite these misgivings, Groves threw himself into the project with the same doggedness he had shown in other endeavors. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, Oppenheimer’s biographers, give a sample of his frenetic pace of activity:

On September 18, 1942, Groves formally took charge of the bomb project. … That very day, he arranged to buy 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore. The next day, he ordered the acquisition of a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the uranium could be processed. Later that month, he began a tour across the country of all the laboratories engaged in experimental work on uranium isotope separation.

Days after that, he met his bombmaker: Oppenheimer.

Accounts of the two men always stress their differences. Oppenheimer, then a professor at Berkeley, was intellectual, cosmopolitan, gangly, frail, a secret member of the Communist Party. Groves was practical, nationalist, burly, rugged, a conservative who could barely stomach the New Deal much less the Reds.

Yes, the two were different, but there was at least one critical similarity: ambition. It was partly in recognition of Oppenheimer’s ambition that Groves chose him to lead the team of scientists building the bomb. He sensed Oppenheimer would devote his all to the project—whether for his country, for hatred of the Nazis, or for his own glory, it scarcely mattered.

Groves selected Oppenheimer over the objections of the scientific and military establishments. Said objections were many and diverse. The scientists complained that Oppenheimer was not a Nobel Prize winner and had limited management experience. The military objected that Oppenheimer was a security risk, unreliable due to his intimate connections to communists.

Groves took these concerns seriously, but took his mandate more seriously still. “All procedures and decisions on security, including the clearance of personnel, had to be based on what was believed to be the overriding consideration—completion of the bomb. Speed of accomplishment was paramount.” He believed Oppenheimer was the man to deliver the train into the station. It was possibly his gutsiest call, but it produced a bomb.

Los Alamos now looms large in the popular narrative about the Manhattan Project, but in fact, Los Alamos was one node in a complex, nation-spanning network that worked together to produce the bomb. Groves was effectively city planner, mayor, and dog catcher of them all, from the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge (which produced uranium), to the Hanford Works in Washington State (which produced plutonium), to countless lesser labs and factories making components for the bomb. Some days were spent obsessing over the most efficient method of isolating U-235, while others were spent obsessing over the environmental impact of the project’s work on fish in the Columbia River or the morale of the thousands of scientists, construction workers, secretaries, and families now living in the remote, often grim settlements of Nuketown, USA. These priorities “were not of equal importance,” Groves recounted. “But they all mattered to the job we were trying to do.”

The unique nature of the job also required Groves to make decisions of great strategic and political significance. He served as diplomat and prospector, striking deals with Belgian mining companies for uranium ore from the Congo and negotiating limits on British access to nuclear secrets. He served as spymaster, in charge of counterintelligence on his bases and espionage in Europe, including a 1944 plot to assassinate Werner Heisenberg at a lecture in Switzerland. He even served as targeting officer, preparing the list of Japanese targets for the bombs and their military rationale.

Groves was involved in so much, and gained so much implicit knowledge, that he made himself indispensable—more so perhaps than any person in the war. Secretary of War Stimson denied his request to travel by air to Britain on the grounds that he couldn’t be replaced if he died in transit. “You do it, and General Marshall does it; why shouldn’t I?” Groves huffed. Stimson responded, “You can’t be replaced, and we can.”

By VJ Day, Groves’s empire of atoms spanned the globe, from Congolese uranium mines, to internment camps for German scientists, to the forward operating base on Tinian from which the nuclear raids on Japan were launched. Six hundred thousand people had worked on the project, most without the slightest clue what they were building. Against all odds, this venture produced three bombs, with more in the pipe.

Two were enough to prove to the Japanese leadership, as Groves put it, the “utter hopelessness of their position.” And to usher in the new world that Groves had muscled into existence.


Further Reading

• Now it Can Be Told by General Leslie Groves

• Racing for the Bomb by Robert S. Norris

In a military-industrial complex that overwhelmingly advocates for the most exquisite, most expensive technology, Pierre Sprey was, if nothing else, an important counterbalance to an Air Force and Department of Defense that have often chosen technology at the expense of mass. Given our industrial base’s manufacturing challenges and dependency on China to produce every critical weapon, reorienting towards simpler, affordable designs we can produce at home sounds like a logical hedge. The Air Force’s recent decision to pause and re-evaluate the 6th generation fighter certainly seems like a nod in Sprey’s direction.

Sprey is most closely associated with the A-10, an aircraft he helped design and test as a young Pentagon bureaucrat who had affection for neither the Pentagon nor bureaucracy.

But in the early 1960s, when Sprey was just a Yale undergraduate working at Roy Grumman’s company during the summers, his dream of designing an airplane seemed far out of reach. While he enjoyed the work, he didn’t enjoy staring down the decades of experience he’d need to accrue before he’d be granted the autonomy to — hopefully, maybe — design an airplane. Before he had a chance to quit, the Pentagon’s Whiz Kids poached Sprey in 1965 after meeting him at a Hudson Institute conference.

And so Sprey stepped on the first of many hornet’s nests in his career. By 1965, Robert McNamara had been the Secretary of Defense for four years, which was more than enough time for most of the Department of Defense to resent him and anyone who worked for him. McNamara’s Whiz Kids gained a reputation as smug elitists who believed their data analysis skills and theoretical modeling always trumped the operational experience of the dumb uniformed personnel. If the Whiz Kids thought they’d found a kindred spirit in Sprey — the young, ascot-wearing francophone with a perfect educational pedigree — they were sorely mistaken. While Sprey was a talented analytical mind, he reserved the utmost respect for soldiers and their combat experience.

Sprey would last just nine months before he was fired from his first Whiz Kids assignment to a group responsible for modeling how the C-5A transport would deploy. Sprey mercilessly poked holes in the assumptions — and egos — underpinning the analysis. He was promptly reassigned to the NATO group and tasked with figuring out how much money the Air Force was spending and if it was spending it on the right stuff. There was one Cold War possibility that preoccupied planners: the Soviet Union rolling their tanks through the Fulda Gap into Western Europe. Sprey didn’t think this was the world-ending scenario most others did, stating years later, “The nightmare scenario was that they would sweep to the Atlantic, which was like, utter horse shit.”

But Sprey humored his bosses. If they wanted to stop the Fulda Gap crossing, they wouldn’t do it with long-range bombers and nukes, he wrote in an inflammatory memo. Rather, you would need both a small, maneuverable fighter for dogfighting and a rugged, tank-killing airplane that would protect ground troops while flying low and slow. The former would become the F-16, an effort led by fellow heretic and eventual friend John Boyd. The latter would become the A-10 Thunderbolt II for close air support (CAS). Sprey didn’t realize it, but in proposing a plane specifically for the mission of CAS, he’d kicked another hornet’s nest.

Close Air Support: A Quick Sidebar

CAS was mired in controversy because, essentially, it forced the Air Force to hold a mirror up to itself. Technically, CAS was the Air Force’s mission, but the Air Force didn’t have an aircraft capable of performing CAS well — a fact illustrated by the Vietnam War’s growing casualty list. Heroic F-100 pilots used smoke bombs to mark targets for other aircraft to bomb, but these missions were incredibly dangerous and inaccurate. The F-105 and F-4 were ill-suited to CAS, zipping by targets far too quickly to drop bombs with precision.

Providing timely support to Army troops was harder than it seemed because the aircraft needed to arrive in time for the conflict to still be ongoing, but it also had to fly slow enough to be able to take out the enemy. All while not killing the very troops it needed to protect. The Air Force ended up adopting the Navy’s World War II era A-1 Skyraider for CAS. The rugged, low and slow flying plane would serve as inspiration for the A-10.

Why didn’t the Air Force just invest in a purpose-built CAS platform? A requirement to provide extensive support to ground troops drew the Air Force away from its core mission of air superiority and perhaps represented a tacit admission that air power alone could not win wars. The final word in the phrase, “close air support,” hints at a related reason. The Air Force had fought long and hard to win independence from the Army. It didn’t want to be put back in a box where it was merely “supporting” the other services. Further, the Air Force identified the real possibility of moral hazard: CAS could enable the Army to engage in more risky or unconventional ground operations because the Army didn’t have to pay the full cost of the risk. And so CAS became a red-headed stepchild.

The Army decided to take matters into its own hands and announced the development of the high-speed Cheyenne helicopter. Here was a rival worthy of the Air Force’s attention. Not wanting to abdicate CAS and the associated budget, the Air Force begrudgingly set to work on a CAS aircraft and put Colonel Avery Kay at the helm.

A Warthog is Born

When Kay read Sprey’s widely circulated memo, he offered Sprey the job of designing the very aircraft he’d proposed. But the offer wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded. Kay couldn’t pay him, and the job would confer no status. In fact, joining up with Kay would likely jeopardize Sprey’s career. To his immense credit, Sprey didn’t care. He was a purist. “The reason I came to Washington was because I believed the country needed a much better defense than it had and that we were paying too much for what we had.” So he stayed a Whiz Kid by day, and got to work designing the A-X by the cover of night.

By 1972, Northrop and Fairchild Republic were competing in unusually realistic live-fire tests of the A-X. There would be no gameable computer-model simulations on Sprey’s watch. Instead, the two companies flew their A-X prototypes in makeshift outdoor wind tunnels and were shot at by Russian weapons acquired on the black market.

CAS wasn’t a sexy mission, and Fairchild’s winning A-10 aircraft reflected that. Nicknamed the “Warthog” or, simply, the “Hog,” the A-10 is a beast. The plane is built around a custom, tank-killing weapon called the GAU-8. The Gatling-style gun, built by General Electric, fires 30mm rounds, producing the signature and terrifying A-10 “brrrt.” The A-10 flies low and slow, enabling it to spot targets but avoid friendlies. The large wingspan of 57 feet, 6 inches provides excellent maneuverability as it loiters overhead for hours. When Sprey first saw the massive plane, he unhappily exclaimed, “Oh my god, it’s a fucking bomber.”

Because the A-10 is a juicy target, survivability was an essential characteristic. The two engines are mounted high on either side of the tail, and self-sealing fuel tanks mitigate the chance of fire. The pilot is sealed in a titanium bathtub. Other fail-safes abound. If the hydraulic controls (or the backup hydraulic controls) fail, the pilot can fly the plane manually. The landing gear never fully retracts, removing the need for a dangerous belly landing.

And the price was right. At about ~$3 million per airplane in 1973, the A-10 offered a way for the Air Force to grow its force structure via a “high-low” mix. The expensive F-15s and B-1s could be purchased alongside the A-10 and the F-16. Sprey’s disciplined, first-principles approach to aircraft design produced a plane that integrated existing technology and left no room for R&D rabbit holes. The Air Force would have a CAS airplane in production, after all.

The A-10’s standout performance came during the Gulf War, its first combat deployment. Though not initially included in the plans for Operation Desert Storm, 144 A-10s ended up flying 8,000 combat sorties. Ironically, the A-10 didn’t do much CAS because of limited U.S. ground operations. It would have to settle for a hunter-killer role, destroying thousands of Iraqi tanks, artillery pieces, and combat vehicles. In doing so, the Hog would earn yet another moniker, this one bestowed by its enemies: the “Black Death” imposed psychological terror on Iraqi ground troops for its ability to loiter and perform extended gun runs. Rinse and repeat. That stood in contrast to one-and-done lightning strikes by fighters like the F-16.

Five Hogs were shot down during the Gulf War. But the A-10 flew so many missions that its loss rate translated to just 0.0625%. While this proved Sprey’s A-10 was survivable, its continued existence in the Air Force fleet would prove far more fragile.

Ongoing Controversy

CAS generally and the A-10 specifically remain a topic of contentious debate. The Air Force has been trying to rid itself of the turbulent A-10 for about as long as it has been flying. Right after the Gulf War, the Air Force sent many to The Boneyard. In 2015, it tried in earnest to retire all A-10s, but the plan was foiled by Congressional opposition — opposition Sprey helped generate behind the scenes. Last year, the Air Force finally succeeded in retiring some A-10s for the first time in the 21st century. They are all set to be phased out by 2028 or 2029.

Retiring the A-10 without plans to replace it with a purpose-built CAS aircraft amounts to retiring the mission of CAS, goes one argument. There is important CAS-specific, tribal knowledge that will soon be gone, and the Air Force has not credibly demonstrated how multirole fighters like the F-35 will perform CAS to the same effect. What’s more, the A-10 is a low-cost alternative for the CAS mission and provides optionality for an Air Force with a declining number of wings.

But where Sprey touted the A-10’s simplicity as a feature, critics view it as a weakness for the enemy to exploit. The A-10 lacks speed and stealth in a world where future conflicts will not have permissive environments. Some point to the performance of drones in Ukraine as a further reason to sideline the A-10. The loudest argument is to use the F-35 for CAS: the U.S. has invested in a multirole fighter with a lifetime cost of $2 trillion, this argument goes, so we should put it to work.

Sprey might be the most controversial of our Heretics and Heroes. He’s frequently derided as a misinformed Luddite unable to appreciate technological advancements. And he hardly went out of his way to make friends. As his career progressed, he eagerly kicked every hornet’s nest in his path. Sprey, like Boyd, opposed the F-15. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Sprey expressed skepticism that the F-117 had performed as advertised and called for more testing for stealth (William Perry countered that the need for more testing was “absurd”). Sprey continued to doubt the accuracy of beyond-visual-range and publicly and loudly critiqued the F-35 as a “lemon” during the final decade of his life.

A heretic to the bitter end, Sprey rankled at what he considered illogical and authoritarian government overreach during the COVID lockdowns. He attended monthly dinner parties hosted by an A-10 pilot, writing to her, “The bigger the group, the more satisfying the revolt against stay-at-home...I look forward to an evening well-spent outside the bounds of the law.”

Sprey didn’t believe in sacred cows. That’s one area where even his most vocal critics might find common ground.

Further Reading

• Warplane: How the Military Reformers Birthed the A-10 Warthog by Hal Sundt (2013)

• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram (2004)

In mid 1941, the War Department faced a vexing problem: where to house the thousands of officers, enlisted men, secretaries, clerks, and other workers streaming into Washington to prepare for war.

The D.C. area had grown by more than one-third in the past decade, straining the region’s infrastructure to the breaking point. The military was in especially dire straits, dispersed across countless offices and makeshift structures dating back to the First World War. A new War Department building in Foggy Bottom barely put a dent in the problem.

The man who solved this problem was Brehon Somervell, a genteel Southerner who began the war a brigadier general in the Army Corps of Engineers and ended with four stars, in charge of supplying practically all the Allied forces around the world. Friend and foe alike acknowledged Somervell as a man of immense drive and capability, with eyes that could pierce concrete as swiftly as the jackhammers on his construction sites. When America needed a pharaoh, Somervell answered the call. He is this week’s Heretic and Hero.

Somervell swiftly established a reputation as a breaker of bureaucracies and builder of monuments. During the First World War, then-Captain Somervell was in charge of preparing munitions depots in advance of the American Expeditionary Force. His regiment had no sleeping quarters, so he purchased tents off the shelf without waiting for approval, prompting the Army to threaten to dock the $17,000 from his pay. In retrospect, this would be his least expensive transgression in a long career.

During the Depression, Somervell again distinguished himself as head of the Works Progress Administration for New York City. It was a thankless role, bogged down by labor strife and corruption. But Somervell broke the logjam where previous leaders had failed. LaGuardia Airport doesn’t bear Somervell’s name, but he was the builder who made it happen. His hard-charging demeanor earned the respect even of union leaders who had plenty of reason to resent Somervell. The journalist Steve Vogel, who wrote the indispensable book on the Pentagon’s construction, quotes one such grudging leader: “I suppose the fellow that built the Pyramids was efficient, too.”

Somervell’s reputation as a fast mover and New Deal man brought him to the attention of higher-ups in Washington. Military construction had emerged as the bottleneck in the Army’s mobilization effort. Somervell was brought in to shake up the Construction Division. “I will not talk,” he told his boss upon assuming the position. “I will just move.”

He made good on the promise, cleaning house of slow-moving officers and other relics of the peacetime Army. In a period known as the “Somervell Blitz,” the Construction Corps threw up 50 camps and a host of other facilities—enough to house a million-man Army. Somervell referred to the Construction Division as the “shock troops of preparedness.” Few in the division were prepared for his next coup: the biggest office building in the world.

One Friday in July of 1941, Somervell convened a group of officers and announced they would build a new permanent home for the War Department. He envisioned an office building, more than four million feet square, with 500,000 feet available for use within six months. In typical style, he concluded the meeting by telling his architects to have the general schematics done by Monday morning.

In normal times, approving such a project—much less designing it—might take years. Somervell bulled it through in a week, expertly working political connections and the press to get the green light from the War Department, Congress, and the President. The groundbreaking in southern Arlington, Virginia took place with a minimum of fanfare in September, less than two months after Somervell launched his biggest blitz to date.

Somervell was able to move with such relentless speed in part because he surrounded himself with likeminded talent. His deputies included Leslie Groves, of Manhattan Project fame, and a sparkplug of a general contractor named John McShain, who became known as “The Man Who Built Washington.” Somervell assembled a team that felt the need for speed, and the attitude trickled down to the rest of the workforce.

The building’s design was odd but powerful, a low building with five equal sides in the shape of a pentagon. The shape had originally been chosen to fit an earlier construction site, but it was retained when the site changed because it had a number of advantages. A pentagon was faster to navigate than a rectangle, but easier to build than a circle (which required curved walls). A low building required less structural steel than a skyscraper, saving that precious resource for the naval construction already underway in the nation’s rapidly expanding shipyards. Ultimately the Pentagon was built with enough concrete for six Empire State Buildings; it saved enough steel to build a battleship.

Despite Somervell’s manufactured sense of urgency, construction was slow to start. Bottlenecks emerged in a hundred places. Designers couldn’t put pen to paper fast enough for the growing army of builders. Massive traffic jams developed on Arlington’s underbuilt road network. A November audit found that, at the pace things were moving, the building would take eight years to complete.

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the next month provided a goad to action. Unnecessary regulations were swept aside, such as limitations on how much concrete could be poured at one time to avoid cracks as the concrete set. Cracks were unsightly, but they were a small price to pay—and the Pentagon wasn’t winning any beauty contests, anyway.

Creative methods were soon found to overcome other bottlenecks, as well. Supply constraints were solved, in many cases, by commandeering resources from other projects—or stealing them outright. Design bottlenecks were eased by assigning large teams of designers to stand on site next to the hammer-swingers, serving, essentially, as “forward-deployed engineers” on the world’s biggest construction project. Eventually, blueprints went out the window altogether as foremen who had built previous wings of the building exercised their judgement about how subsequent wings ought to be built. The Pentagon’s 15,000-strong construction workforce “learned by doing.” Soon, the project was back on track.

The first office workers moved into the Pentagon on May 1, 1942, less than a year after the project had been conceived. It was a huge morale boost for the War Department and the nation, despite abysmal working conditions. Air conditioning and heating were virtually nonexistent (many workers didn’t even have walls). Dust choked the air and mud covered the ground. The traffic situation was likened to “a retreat from Singapore.” It didn’t matter. The War Department had a new home.

By that time, Somervell had been promoted and placed in charge of the Army’s Services of Supply—an innocuous-sounding position that essentially meant he was in charge of logistics for the entire Army. The Pentagon would remain his biggest priority, as well as his legacy.

The completion of the Pentagon less than a year later, in February 1943, was a tremendous feat. That fact didn’t stop critics from sniping at it. German propaganda referred to the building as “Somervell’s madhouse.” Closer to home, the Pentagon was subject to not one but several congressional inquiries, including one by Senator Harry Truman’s special committee on war profiteering.

The domestic critics had plenty of ammunition. The Pentagon ended up costing double what Somervell had insisted it would cost—and what Congress had given him to spend. The building also ended up much larger than originally planned, thanks in part to creative definitions of what constituted a basement (the supposed “basement” was really the building’s ground floor). Somervell justified these discrepancies as wartime requirements. “We’re buying time, and time is the most expensive commodity in the world,” he said. But his cavalier attitude created enemies.

When Senator Truman ascended to the presidency, it all but ended Somervell’s chances for higher command. He retired months after VJ Day. As Vogel put it, “War had a way of bringing his like to the fore.” Peace had a way of ushering his like out the door.

However, even Somervell’s harshest critics qualified their assessments with praise for his capabilities. Said Truman: “I will say this for General Somervell, he will get the stuff, but it is going to be hell on the taxpayer.”

Hell or no, General Somervell’s five-sided madhouse stands to this day. It is a testament to what this country can build, when the leadership, the willpower, and the resources mobilize to build it.

Further Reading

• The Pentagon: A History by Steve Vogel

A revived defense industrial base doesn’t just depend on entrepreneurial energy and innovation, or warfighters seeking the fastest and best possible solutions to their problems. 

It also requires government bureaucrats who are willing to take risks, and who use their knowledge and skillset not just to protect their own self-interest, but to protect the nation.  George Spangenberg epitomized that kind of bureaucrat for nearly thirty-five years with the Navy’s Board of Aeronautics and Naval Air Systems Command.  One of the first aircraft he worked on was the Grumman F4F Wildcat before World War Two; the last was the Grumman F-14, the plane that the movie “Top Gun” made famous.   That extraordinary continuity gave Spangenberg a deep understanding of what the Pentagon was doing right in defense acquisition, and where it was going wrong.  Even before the Last Supper, Spangenberg was warning colleagues and defense officials against the rigid, top-heavy institution the Pentagon was becoming, although few were listening. 

Then, no one paid attention.  Now we should. 

Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1912, George Spangenberg studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan before being recruited to join the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia in 1935.  At the time it was the only government-owned aircraft production facility in the country; yet Congress had just passed a law requiring the Navy to build ten percent of its military aircraft on its own.

Facing multiple demands with meager resources, Spangenberg worked on several engineering projects until December 1939, when he was offered a position on the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington DC. 

It was an interesting time to be in the nation’s capital.  War had broken out in Europe between Germany and Britain and France; war was raging on the other side of the world between Japan and China, and was threatening to engulf U.S. interests across the Pacific.

Yet in Washington the mood was so isolationist that it was de rigeur for naval officers not to wear their uniforms in public. “Civilian attire was the norm in order to keep "military presence" in Washington to a minimum,” Spangenberg recalled in his 1990 oral history.1 “There was only one admiral in the bureau then, Adm. Towers. Ramsey wore a pair of slacks and a black cambric jacket all the time.”

Spangenberg added, perhaps unnecessarily, “That policy ended with Pearl Harbor.”

That wasn’t all that changed. In 1939 the BuAer, as it was known, was tiny. On his first day on the job Spangenberg was able to meet all the division heads and still have time for lunch.  Also, “When we arrived in Washington, there was no security to speak of,” he recalled.  “Here were all the secrets of the nation and we didn't even lock file cabinets. It was strange.”

During this pre-war period Spangenberg worked on early versions of aircraft that would become famous: the F4U Corsair, the Consolidated PBY, and the Grumman fighter F4F Wildcat.  It was Spangenberg who told Roy Grumman that his aircraft had been turned down as the Navy’s lead fighter because it was underpowered (a mistake Grumman corrected with the F6F Hellcat).

The relatively leisurely pace of activity at the Bureau changed quickly after December 7, 1941.  As his questioner in his oral history pointed out:

“After Pearl Harbor now did all of a sudden your work intensify or were you already working pretty hard to begin with?”

SPANGENBERG: We were working hard then. When I came down to Washington we were on a five-and-a-half-day week. We worked seven hours a day and four hours on Saturday. In order to park you had to get there at 7:30. So most people were in there at 7:30, 7:45, around that time.”

When war came, however, the schedule moved to an eight-hours a day, six days a week and “we civilians got paid overtime, but at a rate only the government could calculate.”

The buildup of naval aviation was dizzying, with eight new aircraft programs getting launched in 1942, and ten in 1943.  Yet the ground had been prepared beforehand.  Spangenberg remembered, “I went back and tabulated all this stuff and lo and behold in those early days starting in '39, '40 and '41 we had started buying trainers. We bought trainers and transports. We didn't buy very many combat airplanes, but we didn't have anybody to fly them anyway. I was really surprised when I saw how logical the buildup was.”

During the war, a rapidly expanding navy bureaucracy (civilian employees alone jumped nearly sixfold) saw its principal job as expanding resources for mobilization, and drawing in as many companies as possible through contracts, including contracts to build planes.  “We probably bought too many types of airplanes during the war,” Spangenberg later said.  “Once we were into World War II most of the procurement rules got suspended. We didn't run a full design competition until the war was over, but rather tried to keep all the competent contractors busy.” 

Nonetheless, it was a world war and the demands for newer and better, as well as more, aircraft were incessant.  That meant “we had no design competitions, but rather initiated new aircraft by direct negotiation with both our major and minor producers. With the war's outcome no longer in doubt, we returned to our normal method of aircraft acquisition,” based on competition between major plane makers, with peak performance being the goal.

It was a significant shift.   While competitive bidding helped to keep costs down—at least at the outset—and gave the Navy more direct control over requirements, it also meant that it was no longer tapping directly into the innovative designs and energies of the companies themselves.   As postwar turned into Cold War, the growth of requirements at the expense of innovation began to take over the acquisition process.   While the services still demanded peak performance, each service’s bureaucracy spent more and more time protecting their budget vis a vis other services, rather than looking for the best solution to problems regardless of cost.

George Spangenberg watched it happen and was not happy about it.  He drew up a working chart on the number of naval aircraft “starts” (i.e. new programs, usually with an assigned model designation) from 1935 to 1970, and remarked on a disturbing trend.  Compared to the World War II years, and even before, the number of new aircraft starts was steadily declining, as the range of choices of new planes for the Navy narrowed—even as the time for procurement and development took longer and longer.  Spangenberg tried to draw his superiors’ attention to this issue, but with little success. Even his beloved F-14 wound up with half the number the Navy hoped to procure, and all produced at about the rate for which they been initially priced, bringing Grumman to the brink of bankruptcy.

He noticed another unfortunate change within the personal dynamics of the Bureau of Aeronautics itself (which was replaced in 1966 as Naval Air Systems Command).

“In the old [Main Navy and Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue] I'd walk down the passage way and I might see Chuck Francis, the avionics fire control guy or the AEW guy, Leo Puckett, or perhaps the seat guy, Bill Thomas, and we would exchange items and not require a memo,” he recalled. “I might have a question come up or he might have a question of me but just walking down the hall I'd see these guys and we would talk. We might end up going to get a cup of coffee at the snack bar or something like that if there was an issue.

Once we got over to [the new building] in Crystal City we got the elevator between us and you didn't see people. The Electronics Division might have been on the sixth floor, I never went to the sixth floor, I was on the eleventh. It made a real difference to us. It went from the horizontal to the vertical. It was something nobody I think had anticipated but it really cut down on that informal contact. Everybody doesn't need it of course. There are some parts of the organization that probably didn't give a damn. But those of us who were in the coordination business—I would meet the head of the aircraft division when I was still a GS low level something or another. You got to know people a lot better just by seeing them.

Office doors were also always open in the old Constitution Avenue building; that wasn’t the case anymore in the silent new high-rises at Jefferson Plaza.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon bureaucracy was getting progressively top-heavy.  While the actual number of civilian employees remained relatively constant during the Cold War years—1.2 million in 1951,  1.1 million thirty years later in 1981—the Office of the Secretary of Defense produced new executive positions like mushrooms after a summer rain.2  By 1995 OSD personnel practically numbered the same as the entire workforce at Naval Air Systems Command.

"Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians," was Spangenberg’s sardonic comment.  He remembered that the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, wanted his staff to number no more than half a dozen.

However, Spangenberg’s most important battle before retirement in 1973 was over the trend in Navy fighter acquisition.  He had been a keen champion of the F-14 Tomcat, which was designed to rectify the lack of maneuverability and performance of the F-111B—one of Defense Secretary McNamara’s most ill-conceived projects to save money by having all the services buy the same aircraft.

As the Tomcat aged, the question of a next-generation replacement became current.  Spangenberg believed the decision to replace the Tomcat with the F-18 Hornet and then Super Hornet over the Tomcat  was a political decision made at the expense of combat capability.  Why spend more to develop and acquire a plane that can do less, was Spangenberg’s constant refrain regarding the F-14’s replacements. As he told his interviewer in his oral history recordings, “The F-16, F-17, and F-18 programs were clearly not in the best interests of our country. Within the system, we tried, and we failed, to convince those above us to buy the most cost-effective alternatives available. The fleet pilots of tomorrow deserve better.”

Spangenberger was just as dubious—perhaps more justifiably—about the Joint Strike Fighter program, which suffered from the same myopic perspective as McNamara’s F-111 program, i.e. the belief that money could be saved by getting all the services to buy the same plane.  In the case of the JSF, the Air Force convinced the other services to accept a “single engine, single crew” concept with the rationale that a single basic model would save money long-term by producing quantities of aircraft that would lower the cost per plane. 

Today, of course, the JSF program cost has gone through the fiscal roof at $2 trillion at the GAO’s latest estimate—even with other countries buying and building their own versions of the F-35.  At the time, Spangenberg predicted that the only service to gain advantage would be the Air Force, with only minimal improvements over its existing Stealth aircraft, the F-22 Raptor.  As for the Navy, he stated baldly, “The JSF will not improve the situation for the Navy or Marines. It is evident to me that the Navy has elected to give up its one area of advantage in the air-to-air arena.”

Before he died, Spangenberg wrote in a note to his oral history interview: “As I now review the record some 24 years after my retirement and 22 years after my last official testimony on the Navy's fighter/attack programs (October `75, Senate Appropriation Committee), I am more than ever convinced that we, the technical community, were correct in the positions we espoused” about the need to let the Navy buy and build the planes it needed to accomplish its specific missions.  “Of course, we didn't make our case within the Navy, or OSD, or in the Congress.”

Spangenberg died tragically in an automobile crash in November 2000.  He didn’t live long enough to see the arrival of the debate over autonomous systems as the basis for the next generation of American combat aircraft.  Perhaps he would see the fact that the Air Force passed over the big primes and chose Anduril and General Atomics for the next phase of the CCA contract, as a step in the right direction.3

In any case, George Spangenberg remains a shining example of the bureaucrat as hero—the expert who sees serving the public and the truth, as one and the same mission.

Earlier this month we shared the story of Alec Bierbauer, the CIA operative who put Hellfire missiles on the Predator and ushered in the modern era of drone warfare. Today we travel further back in time to share the story of Abraham Karem, the man who invented Predator in the first place.

Karem saw the value in “remotely piloted vehicles” (RPVs), as they were then called, at a time when most viewed them as little more than novelties or expensive model airplanes. He left his homeland and risked his career to prove that drones were the future—and that they could be built reliably and effectively in his own day.

Karem was born in Iraq and emigrated to Israel as a young boy to escape escalating violence against Jews. A tinkerer and engineer from an early age, he graduated from Technion, Israel’s elite engineering school, and served ably in the Israeli Air Force. Then he made a name for himself as an aeronautical engineer, climbing the ladder at Israel Aerospace Industries to become the state-owned firm’s director of preliminary design.

In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Karem was approached by the air force with a vexing problem: Israel was suffering terrible losses of valuable planes and still-more-valuable pilots from Soviet-built surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries. The Egyptians and Syrians had created a sophisticated, multi-layered air-defense network that used long-range radar to detect incoming Israeli fighters; SAM batteries close to the front then activated their targeting radar, illuminated the target, fired, deactivated the radar, and got out of Dodge before Israel could counterstrike. This “shoot and scoot” strategy proved lethally effective. Israel lost more than 100 airplanes and 60 aviators in the Yom Kippur War.

Karem’s solution, cooked up during an all-nighter at the drafting board, was an unmanned, unpowered decoy that could be carried and released from under the wing of an Israeli fighter. This “drone,” if the primitive object deserved the name, could fly at speeds similar to a fighter and was studded with spherical reflectors to increase its radar signature. The idea was to fool the enemy into activating its targeting radars and firing on the drone—allowing Israel’s manned fighters to swoop in for the kill with anti-radiation missiles.

Higher-tech versions of this decoy proved useful on future battlefields, such as the “Bekaa Valley Turkey Shoot” of 1982, where Israel got payback for its losses a decade earlier. But by then, Karem was long gone. Unhappy with IAI’s overly bureaucratic culture, he quit to build his own company, with drones as the focus. And when the IDF proved a fickle customer, he emigrated again to a country he thought might be better prepared to appreciate his ideas.

That’s how, in 1980, Karem became yet another idealistic engineer running a startup out of his garage in California. His logic was impeccable, even though his vision was radical for its time. RPVs had distinct advantages over their manned brethren, in theory. They were lighter and didn’t have to waste valuable space on a cockpit and life-support system. They could also fly as long as their fuel lasted, unshackled to the physical and psychological needs of a pilot. Karem aimed to exploit these advantages to the maximum by creating an RPV that would serve as the ultimate high-endurance tool of reconnaissance.

The only problem is that no RPV of this type had ever been built before. As early as the First World War, armies had experimented with pilotless aircraft, both for reconnaissance and attack. Almost without exception, these primitive drones had been accident prone and unreliable. For instance, the Lightning Bug drones that the Air Force deployed over Vietnam had an average lifespan of four missions. Karem believed, however, drones could become as reliable as jetliners and fulfill missions outside of the niche corners they currently occupied.

He went to work on a prototype, named the Albatross, with a high-aspect-ratio wing and high fuel ratio for endurance, a satellite dish in the nose for navigation, and a go-kart motor and propellor for propulsion. Despite its inauspicious name, the Albatross quickly showed its potential, buzzing in circles for more than a day at a time without landing to refuel.

Karem’s garage project came onto DARPA’s radar, and the agency funneled money to his company for rapid prototyping through a third party. As the journalist Richard Whittle recounts, DARPA used this sleight of hand because it feared DoD auditors “would object to funding an aircraft developed in a garage.” (It seems Karem wasn’t the only heretic and hero involved in this story!)

In the years that followed, Karem worked and advocated relentlessly for his ungainly bird, which underwent many upgrades and a name change, to “Amber.” But despite an impressive track record, Karem was swimming against the tide of opinion about RPVs.

Another RPV, the Lockheed Aquila, was under fire from Congress due to its unreliability. The drone crashed often—and its range and endurance were nowhere near those of Karem’s creations. Ultimately the Aquila was the victim of a broken procurement process: the Army imposed endless requirements on the system, larding it up with unneeded equipment and compromising its performance.

But the damage was done, for Aquila and other RPVs. When Congress slashed the budget for RPVs in 1987, Amber was caught in the crossfire. Despite heroic efforts by Karem to find a mission and a buyer for his drone, his company ran out of money and went bankrupt in 1990. The six surviving Amber prototypes were mothballed in a government warehouse in the desert, like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It seemed for a while like Amber was a technology ahead of its time.

Karem’s inventions were rescued from oblivion by two other inventors, Neal and Linden Blue of General Atomics, who had been working in parallel on a drone they dubbed “the poor man’s cruise missile.” Their drone was primitive, so when they heard a more capable craft was on the market, they bought it on the cheap.

And so Amber was reborn, with a new owner and a more intimidating name: Predator. It had taken a decade, a failed business, and a move halfway around the world, but Abe Karem had built his drone.

The Predator proved his point on countless distant battlefields over the next 30 years.

Further Reading

• Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle

• “The Dronefather,” The Economist