Colonel Hall and Minuteman
From faking an intelligence report of a Soviet super rocket to getting court martialed
Many a heretic’s epitaph could follow the simple template:
“Didn’t work well with others. [Insert world-changing contribution].”
For Air Force Colonel Edward Hall, the second sentence would read “Invented the Minuteman, one third of the United States’ nuclear triad.”
Hall’s career in the Army Air Forces and later the newly independent Air Force was a crescendo, each contribution building upon the last. Several times the bureaucracy tried to stamp him out before he could reach the finale with Minuteman. The hundreds of hardened, underground siloes dispersed across the United States housing relatively low-cost, solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) proved to be an overwhelming deterrent to the Soviets during the fervor of the Cold War.
Although Hall would eventually be regarded as the Air Force’s foremost expert on rocketry, his career got off to a slow start. As a Brooklyn Jew during the Depression, Hall was unable to get an engineering job in the civilian world. Changing his name from Holtzberg to Hall did not do much to mask his Ashkenazi features, and he was forced to settle for sporadic work as an auto mechanic, a plumber, and an electrician. In 1939, he finally decided to join the Army, which, for all its bureaucratic flaws, has so often served as a great equalizer (perhaps as much out of necessity as nobility), the last bastion for talent overlooked by others due to prejudice.
World War II was a time of unprecedented mobility for talented officers. In 1940, Curtis LeMay was promoted to captain after serving nearly 11 years in the lieutenant grades. By 1944, he was a major general in the Army Air Forces. Hall would be the exception to the rule. It is a testament to his abrasiveness that, despite receiving a Legion of Merit in 1943 as a first lieutenant — a true rarity for someone so junior — he did not make major until June 1945, after Germany had surrendered.
Hall distinguished himself during the war leading a new mobile repair service for Boeing B-17s that had crashed in Southern England and the Midlands. Servicing the downed bombers where they were proved much quicker than dismantling the planes and shipping them back to a central depot for repair. One day, Hall encountered a team of English serviceman making a “repair” that would have caused the wing to snap in two under the stress of flight. He told the men to go home immediately, and when they didn’t move quickly enough, he pointed his .45 caliber service pistol at them to enhance the command.
Hall later got an earful from the colonel in charge at the central depot, who wasn’t happy with the headstrong first lieutenant bossing around his men at gunpoint and implicitly questioning his competency. In a moment that would foreshadow John Boyd’s maxim “to be or to do,” Hall eloquently responded “You son of a bitch! I’m not about to put anybody back and kill people and ruin airplanes.” Hall chose doing something (saving lives) over being someone (a promotable officer).
And in fact, Hall risked much more than a promotion. Following in the great tradition of Army Air Corps rebels who accused the organization of incompetence, Hall, like Billy Mitchell before him, was court martialed. Unlike Mitchell, he escaped a guilty verdict by craftily securing the endorsement of the entirety of Boeing’s London engineering workforce. Top cover from the Brigadier General in charge of the mobile unit didn’t hurt, either.
After the war, Hall maneuvered to work on rockets. In 1950, ballistic missiles were not yet the nation’s top national-security priority. The V-2 was a respected piece of technology, but its military utility was considered limited because of its short range and lack of accuracy. Bombers were still the golden child for delivering nuclear weapons. Hall, ever the contrarian, was a true believer in the potential of rocket-propelled engines to enable infinite range. He was a self-taught rocket engineer because the courses did not yet exist when he got his masters in aeronautical engineering from Caltech.
In Hall’s first assignment building rocket engines, he suffered an immediate setback when his program’s funding was cut upon the outbreak of the Korean War. He cajoled an officer friend in Technical Intelligence to fake an intelligence report about a Soviet super rocket. Incredibly, the gambit worked. Funding was restored and Hall evaded what would have been a second court martial, this one likely to be complete with a guilty verdict. Hall went on to lead an effort with Rocketdyne engineers to build a prototype engine that generated an unprecedented 120,000 pounds of thrust. He then innovated on the composition of liquid rocket fuel to reach 135,000 pounds of thrust, producing the engine that formed the foundation for the Atlas ICBM.
Fellow heretic General Bernard Schriever, Director of the Western Development Division (WDD), set Hall loose in 1958 to build the second-generation ICBM that would be known as Minuteman. Where Atlas had been huge, expensive, and liquid fueled, Minuteman would be smaller, cheaper, and solid fueled. While solid-fuel missiles were not a novel idea, the consensus view was that they could not produce sufficient thrust for the range an ICBM required. Hall proved them wrong. His successful innovations on a solid-fuel missile provided critical strategic advantage. Solid-fuel missiles could be pre-loaded and stored underground for immediate launch, without being brought to the surface for a 15-minute fueling, as liquid-fueled rockets required.
Hall’s development of a solid-fueled rocket was just the beginning of his grand vision for superior nuclear deterrence.
In a proposal that would make Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks proud, Hall called for 1,000 - 1,500 cheap missiles that could be rapidly produced. An automated missile farm would disperse the missiles in hundreds of hardened, underground silos capable of launching missiles en masse with minimal human intervention and monitoring. This proposal stood in stark contrast to the dozens of people needed to tend to a given missile at that time. It emphasized affordability at the expense of some accuracy. Hall wanted to generate a numerical advantage that would overwhelm the Soviets. Hall’s briefing of Minuteman was so compelling that what would become the Air Force’s biggest rocket program won approval from top military brass in days, converting the intractably bomber-biased LeMay (his nickname was “Bombs Away LeMay”) from a nay to yay on a missile program for the first time.
Despite the green light to get to work, Hall was unceremoniously removed from Minuteman shortly afterward. Per Schriever, who made the decision, “Col Hall’s inability to work harmoniously with persons with whom he disagrees seriously impairs his competence in the management area.” (A sentence that could describe just about every great engineer...). A devastated Hall was shipped to Paris to help France build an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM). He never forgave Schriever.
Did Schriever make the correct choice by removing Hall? Perhaps. The Air Force got the best of both worlds: 1) Hall’s ingenuity indelibly stamped the Minuteman (although the entirety of Hall’s missile farm vision was never realized, it’s amazing how much did remain intact given his quick removal from the program), and 2) The program was expertly managed by a “straight-as-a-pencil young colonel named Samuel Philipps” who “proved to be a superlative manager of large scale enterprises (source).”
Schriever was by all accounts an excellent manager. Before Minuteman, Hall suffered a failure as the program manager of Thor, a less promising IRBM. Under Hall, there were three launch failures, which damningly resulted from the testing process rather than failures in the missile itself. Hall was arrogant and made sure the prime contractors knew he thought their role was superfluous. He lacked tact to such a degree that he would cheer for the Army’s rival IRBM, Jupiter, to “Blow! Blow! Blow!” during its launches. Where lesser leaders would have taken the path of least resistance and let Hall’s career atrophy after the Thor failure, Schriever fought to retain Hall, knowing the immensely talented engineer had more to offer: “Talented people can be difficult. You have to let them do things their way.”
But uncompromising bureaucracy exposes the limits of good leadership. In the Armed Forces, it’s “up or out.” Schriever’s performance assessment was the death knell to Hall’s career. Like fellow Air Force Colonel John Boyd, Hall was never going to make general officer. With the writing on the wall, he retired and moved to industry.
This was a loss to the nation. We need non-traditional career paths for iconoclasts who can’t—or won’t—follow the script. The first place to start is decoupling position from portfolio. Treat engineers like artists rather than cogs in the machine. It’s messy, but then again, so is pioneering rocketry.
Further Reading
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan
Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance by Donald Mackenzie
One Brother Gave the Soviets the A-Bomb. The Other Got a Medal by Dave Lindorff
History of Acquisition in the Department of Defense: Adapting to Flexible Response (1960-1968) by Walter S. Poole