Hacker - Engineering A New Order

Engineering a New Order: Military Institutions, Technical Education, and the Rise of the
Industrial State
Author(s): Barton C. Hacker
Source: Technology and Culture, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 1-27
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Society for the History
of Technology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3106453
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Engineering a New Order:Military
Institutions, TechnicalEducation, and the
Rise of the Industrial State
BARTON C. HACKER
Gunpowder began the military revolution that molded the modern

world. Relatively narrow technical changes in weapons and tactics on
early modern European battlefields set in train the transformation of
almost every aspect of Western civilization, argued Michael Roberts in
1956.1 Widely discussed and critically challenged, his version of the
precise nature and timing of change on the equation's military side
now commands only qualified respect.2 But the other side of the
equation, Roberts's claim of great social consequences flowing from
changing military technique, remains substantially intact. It retains
enough plausibility, in fact, to suggest thinking about similar processes
in other eras.
DR HACKER is the historian at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Earlier

versions of this article were presented at meetings of the Pacific Sociological Associa-
tion, Albuquerque, N.M., 1985; International Congress of History of Science, Berkeley,
Calif., 1985; Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology,
Dresden, 1986; Inter-University Centre of Postgraduate Studies, Dubrovnik, 1987;
Columbia History of Science Society, Friday Harbor, Wash., 1987; and Society for the
History of Technology, Raleigh, N.C., 1987. The author wishes to thank the several
friendly critics who helped him reshape and sharpen his argument.
'Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660 (Belfast, 1956), revised and
reprinted under the same title in Michael Roberts, Essays in SwedishHistory (Minneap-
olis, 1967), pp. 195-225, with a second essay on "Gustav Adolf and the Art of War,"
pp. 56-81. For a recent survey of the technology, see Christian Beaufort-Spontin,
Harnisch und WaffeEuropas:Die militiirischeAusriistungim 17. Jahrhundert(Munich, 1982).
2Geoffrey Parker, "The 'Military Revolution,' 1560-1660-a Myth?" Journal of
Modern History 48 (1976): 195-214, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the
Rise of the West,1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988); Bert S. Hall and Kelly R. DeVries, "The
'Military Revolution' Revisited," Technologyand Culture31 (1990): 500-507; Colin Jones,
"New Military History for Old? War and Society in Early Modern Europe," European
Studies Review 12 (1982): 97-108; Simon Adams, "Tactics or Politics? 'The Military
Revolution' and the Hapsburg Hegemony, 1525-1648," in Tools of War: Instruments,
Ideas, and Institutionsof Warfare,1445-1871, ed. John A. Lynn (Champaign, Ill., 1990),
pp. 28-52.
? 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved.
0040-165X/93/3401-0005$01.00
1
2 Barton C. Hacker
Military technological change of vast scope disturbed the 19th
century, beginning with small arms and guns vastly quicker-firing
and longer-ranged than the weapons they displaced. Other changes
followed ever more rapidly, spreading through the military system,
then throughout society. Ultimately, the result was a new social,
political, and economic order. Like its early modern predecessor, this
19th-century transformation deserves the label military revolution
because its consequences far transcended strictly military concerns.
The 20th-century industrial state is no less the product of a
19th-century military-technological revolution than was the 18th-
century nation-state of the classic military revolution Roberts
spotlighted.
The present undertaking is more survey than analysis, the subject
being far too complex for a brief essay. Accordingly, I address only
certain aspects of the 19th-century military-technological revolution,
its 18th-century roots, and its 20th-century fruits. Pragmatism
largely dictates my focus on the United States-the needed material
is more readily available in my provincial outpost-though I do
include comparative remarks where they seem appropriate. Despite
such self-imposed limits, this essay may still prove helpful to readers
seeking an entry to published work on certain relevant topics. It may
also serve as a sounding board for several useful themes, chief
among them the interaction between military and other social
institutions. Only by understanding such interactions may we begin
to explain the course and outcome of 19th-century military techno-
logical change.
My touchstone is the spread of a novel usage to replace, or at least
augment, what had normally in the past been called "the art of war."
During the 19th century, "military science" or "military art and
science" largely supplanted the older term. Methods of educating
officers and training soldiers altered sharply. These changes had
important implications for technical education and the organization
of work outside as well as within the armed forces. Corporate
management, patterns of professionalization in related fields, the very
process of industrialization drew on military models and battened on
military funding. But traffic flowed both ways. Military technology
and organization also reflected outside changes. Becoming visible as
well were early signs of the complementary civilianization of the
armed forces and militarization of society that so marks the 20th
century. Although the nature of military expertise mattered, just as
did the nature of special competence in other fields, military practice
and values played a special role in furthering the process of social
change that created the modern world.
Engineering a New Order 3
Military Education and Professionalization
Military institutions changed dramatically in the 19th century,
driven in large part by technological innovation. Between 1815 and
1914, soldiers traded smoothbores for rifles and grapeshot for
shrapnel. Doffing gaudy colors in favor of field gray or khaki, they left
firing lines and maneuver for ground cover and trenches. Repeating
rifles, smokeless powder, quick-firing long-range field artillery, and
machine guns multiplied firepower and expanded the killing zone.
Runners gave way to telegraph and wireless, muscle to steam and
petrol. Staffs burgeoned to direct vast armies as nations prepared to
put millions of men under arms. Virtually every aspect of military life
was altered if not transformed, and the rate of change seemed always
to increase.3
Innovations so radical scarcely passed unnoticed. Novel weapons
figured prominently, for instance, in popular turn-of-the-century
compendia on the progress of invention.4 Yet assessing their import
surpassed most contemporary imaginations, baffling military and
civilian minds alike.5 Indeed, many have blamed the catastrophe of
World War I on European armies blind to the demands of a swiftly
changing technology, though that judgment may be too harsh.6
3Recent surveys include Trevor N. Dupuy, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
(Indianapolis, 1980), pt. 3, "The Age of Technological Change," pp. 169-335; Rob-
ert L. O'Connell, Of Armsand Men: A Historyof War,Weapons,and Aggression(New York,
1989), chap. 11, "Death Machine," pp. 189-211; Martin van Creveld, Technologyand
War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York, 1989), pt. 3, "The Age of Systems,
1830-1945," pp. 153-232.
4Examples include Edward W. Byrn, The Progressof Invention in the Nineteenth Century
(New York, 1900), chap. 30, "Firearms and Explosives," pp. 394-419; Charles H.
Cochrane, ModernIndustrialProgress(Philadelphia, 1904), "The Race for Supremacy on
the Seas," pp. 147-74, and "The Tools of Destruction," pp. 175-93; Robert Cochrane,
The Romanceof Industryand Invention (London, n.d.), chap. 6, "Big Guns, Small-Arms,
and Ammunition," pp. 152-91.
5I. F Clarke, VoicesProphesying War, 1763-1984 (New York, 1966); Hew Strachan,
European Armiesand the Conduct of War (London, 1983), chap. 8, "Technology and Its
Impact on Tactics," pp. 108-29; Andrew Wheatcroft, "Technology and the Military
Mind: Austria, 1866-1914," in War,Economyand the Military Mind, ed. Geoffrey Best
and Andrew Wheatcroft (Totowa, N.J., 1976), pp. 45-57; Dennis E. Showalter,
"Weapons and Ideas in the Prussian Army from Frederick the Great to Moltke the
Elder," in Lynn, ed., Toolsof War, pp. 177-210.
6John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (New York, 1975), chap. 5, "The
Trauma: 1914-18," pp. 111-47; Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military
Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y, 1984); Michael Howard, "Men
against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914," in Military Strategyand the Origins of the First
WorldWar, ed, Steven E. Miller (Princeton, NJ., 1984), pp. 41-58; Tim Travers, The
Killing Ground: The British Army,the WesternFront and the Emergenceof Modern Warfare,
1900-1918 (London, 1987).
4 Barton C. Hacker
Innovations in 19th-century military technology mostly came from
nonmilitary sources. That made the flood of new or improved arms
hard to control or direct. Military planners did not so much ignore the
problems as misjudge their magnitude.7
Certainly, some observers outside as well as within the armed forces
foresaw what technological innovation might mean at several levels of
military concern. As early as the 1860s, for instance, Frederick Engels
had published shrewd comments on the potential tactical implications
of rifled cannon and small arms.8 By century's end, the outline of still
wider ramifications had emerged. Inevitably, change demanded and
promoted more change, concluded Cornelis de Witt Willcox, a career
officer and turn-of-the-century instructor at West Point: organiza-
tional innovations like the general staff allowed growing armies to be
controlled; production innovations like interchangeable parts manu-
facturing allowed them to be equipped; communications innovations
like railroad and telegraph allowed them to be supplied and directed.9
None of this need be construed as technological determinism: new
weapons are products as well as causes of social change.'? Further-
7Rolf E. Glitsch, "A Record of Civilian Search for Military Innovation," Impact of
Scienceon Society31 (1981): 85-95; Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-Power:
British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-1945 (London, 1982), bk. 1, "The
Fire-Tactics of the Old Army: 1904-1914," pp. 7-58; Howard Bailes, "Technology and
Tactics in the British Army, 1866-1900," in Men, Machinesand War,ed. Ronald Haycock
and Keith Neilson (Waterloo, Ont., 1988), pp. 21-47; Dennis E. Showalter, "Prussia,
Technology and War: Artillery from 1815 to 1914," in ibid., pp. 115-51.
8Frederick Engels, "On Rifled Cannon," New-YorkDaily Tribune, April-May 1860,
reprinted in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 17: Marx and Engels,
1859-60 (New York, 1981), pp. 354-66, "The History of the Rifle," EssaysAddressedto
Volunteers(London and Manchester, 1861), reprinted in ibid., vol. 18: Marx and Engels,
1857-62 (1982), pp. 433-59. See also Sigmund Neumann and Mark von Hagen,
"Engels and Marx on Revolution, War, and the Army in Society," in Makersof Modern
Strategy:From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J., 1986),
pp. 262-80, 890-92.
9C. De W. Willcox, "Changes in Military Science," in The 19th Century:A Review of
Progressduring the Past One Hundred Yearsin the Chief Departmentsof Human Activity(New
York, 1901), pp. 481-94. Compare William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technol-
ogy, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982), chap. 7, "The Initial
Industrialization of War, 1840-80," pp. 223-61; Maurice Pearton, Diplomacy,War and
Technologysince 1830 (Lawrence, Kans., 1984); Christopher Dandeker, "Warfare,
Planning and Economic Relations," Economyand Society 12 (1983): 109-28.
?This theme has figured prominently in my earlier work; see, e.g., Barton C. Hacker,
"Greek Catapults and Catapult Technology: Science, Technology, and War in the
Ancient World," Technologyand Culture 9 (1968): 34-50, "The Weapons of the West:
Military Technology and Modernization in 19th-Century China and Japan," Technology
and Culture 18 (1977): 43-55, and "Imaginations in Thrall: The Social Psychology of
Military Mechanization, 1919-1939," Parameters 12 (March 1982): 50-61. More
generally, see Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social
more, as John Lynn notes, institutions and ideas are just as much tools
of war as hardware."
Military education was one of the areas transformed during the
19th century, in both subject and method. Soldiering had begun as a
craft. Like all crafts, it passed such skills as weapon-handling to novice
practitioners through the example of elders and on-the-job training.
During the early modern military revolution, these "skills were
divided, simplified, rationalized, and systematized to be taught rou-
tinely, quickly, and efficiently."'2 Standardized techniques for impart-
ing basic skills spread to all armed forces.'3 Proving widely adaptable,
they could be extended to less obviously military areas within armies,
training cooks, for instance, or radio repairers.'4 Nor were they
limited to strictly military contexts. Technical training of many kinds
grew from military roots.15 Traces of that origin survive, and to this
Constructionof TechnologicalSystems:New Directionsin the Sociologyand Historyof Technology

(Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
"John A. Lynn, "Preface," in Lynn, ed., Toolsof War (n. 2 above), p. vii.
"Barton C. Hacker and Sally L. Hacker, "Military Institutions and the Labor Process:
Noneconomic Sources of Technological Change, Women's Subordination, and the
Organization of Work," Technologyand Culture 28 (1987): 743-75, on p. 768. Vividly
illustrating the process is Jacob de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghevan Roers Musquettenende
Spiessen(The Hague, 1607), facsimile reprint as The Exerciseof Armes,with commentary
byJ. B. Kist (New York, 1971).
"'Christopher Duffy, The Military Experienceof the Age of Reason (New York, 1988),
chap. 3, "The Private Soldier," pp. 89-136; Alan Ramsay Skelley, The VictorianArmyat
Home: The Recruitmentand Termsand Conditionsof theBritishRegular, 1859-1899 (London
and Montreal, 1977), chap. 2, "Army Education," pp. 85-123; Edward M. Coffman,
The Old Army:A Portrait of the AmericanArmyin Peacetime,1784-1898 (New York, 1986),
pp. 156-66, 336-40, 351-57; John Shelton Curtiss, The Russian Armyunder Nicholas I,
1825-1855 (Durham, N.C., 1965), chaps. 6, 7; Michael D. Stephens, ed., TheEducating
of Armies(London, 1989).
4C. R. Dooley, Final Report of the National Army Training Detachments,Later Known as
VocationalSection S.A.T.C. [Students' Army Training Corps] (Washington, D.C., March
1919); Louis E. Keefer, Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training
Program in WorldWar II (Jefferson, N.C., 1988); Harold Wool, The Military Specialist:
Skilled Manpowerfor the ArmedForces(Baltimore, 1968); Harold E Clark and Harold S.
Sloan, Classroomsin the Military: An Account of Education in the ArmedForcesof the United
States (New York, 1964), chap. 3, "On-Duty Education: Enlisted Personnel Courses,"
pp. 27-42; Martin Binkin, Military Technologyand DefenseManpower(Washington, D.C.,
1986).
5Max J. Okenfuss, "Technical Training in Russia under Peter the Great," History of
Education Quarterly(1973), pp. 325-45; C. R. Day, "Making Men and Training Tech-
nicians: Boarding Schools of the Ecoles d'Arts et Metiers during the Nineteenth
Century," in The Making of Frenchmen: Current Direction in the History of Education in
France, 1679-1979, ed. Donald N. Baker and Patrick J. Harrigan (Waterloo, Ont.,
1980), pp. 381-96; Penn Borden, "The Army and Vocational Education," in her
6 Barton C. Hacker
day military training continues to transfer skills to civil society.'6 In
due course, the techniques devised for military ends proved useful for
still other purposes.'7 Among them, one of the earliest and most
persistent involved the armed forces in modernization, teaching
recruits the basic skills of modern life.'8
Apprenticeship or on-the-job training remained the rule for those
destined by birth to command long after that had ceased to be true for
the lower ranks or technical officers. To officers in the combat arms,
infantry and cavalry above all, war remained an art, proficiency
achieved only by practice. But the 18th century saw such views
challenged, if not overthrown.'9 Reformers conceived the possibility
of a military science allied to improved formal education for officers.20
Civilian Indoctrinationof the Military: WorldWar I and Future Implicationsfor the Military-
Industrial Complex(New York, 1989), pp. 48-71.
"Commission on Accreditation of Service Experiences, A Guide to the Evaluation of
Educational Experiencesin the Armed Services: 1954 Revision, Formal Service Courses and
Schools (Washington, D.C., 1954); ibid., 1969 Edition, ed. Cornelius P. Turner (Wash-
ington, D.C., 1969); A. B. Cherns and P. A. Clark, "Task and Organization: Military
and Civilian," in Taskand Organization, ed. Eric J. Miller (London, 1976), pp. 151-72;
Stephen I. Mangum and David E. Ball, "Military Skill Training: Some Evidence of
Transferability," ArmedForcesand Society 13 (1987): 425-41.
'7Denis Ryan, "Education in the British Army," in Stephens, ed., Educating of Armies,
pp. 75-89; W. H. G. Armytage, "Battles for the Best: Some Educational Aspects of the
Welfare-Warfare State in England," in History and Education: The Educational Uses of the
Past, ed. Paul Nash (New York, 1970), pp. 283-307; Edward Bernard Glick, Soldiers,
Scholars, and Society: The Social Impact of the American Military (Pacific Palisades, Calif.,
1971), chap. 5, "The Military in Civilian Education and Training," pp. 41-61; John A.
Ellis, ed., Military Contributionsto InstructionalTechnology(New York, 1986). See also U.S.
Department of the Army, Techniquesof Military Instruction, Field Manual No. 21-6,
May 19 (Washington, D.C., 1954).
"John Bushnell, "Peasants in Uniform: The Tsarist Army as a Peasant Society,"
Journal of Social History 13 (1980): 564-76; Cornelis M. Schulten, "Armee neerlandaise
et education nationale au dix-neuvieme siecle," in Acta of the International Commissionof
Military History, no. 5: Bucarest 10-17 VIII 1980 (Bucharest, 1981), pp. 142-51;
Thomas M. Duffy, "Literacy Instruction in the Military," Armed Forcesand Society 11
(1985): 437-67; Colin Stevenson, Challenging Adult Illiteracy: Reading and Writing
Disabilities in the British Army (New York, 1985). See also Nicole Ball, "Military as
Modernizer," in her The Military in the Development Process: A Guide to the Issues
(Claremont, Calif., 1981), pp. 2-6, 24-25.
"G. Teitler, The Genesisof the Professional Officers'Corps (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1977);
Lee Kennett, "Tactics and Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Experience," in Acta of the
InternationalCommissionof Military History,pp. 152-59; John Childs, Armiesand Warfare
in Europe, 1648-1789 (New York, 1982), pp. 91-100; Duffy, The Military Experienceof
the Age of Reason; Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to
Clausewitz(Oxford, 1989).
20Kathleen Hardesty Doig, "War in the Reform Programme of the Encyclopedie,"War
and Society6 (May 1988): 1-10, esp. pp. 7-8; David D. Bien, "The Army in the French
This, perhaps as much as any factor, accounts for the founding and
spread of military schools and academies from the mid-18th century
onward.2' During the following century, formal schooling became part
of every officer's career.22
By the later 19th century, the concept of military science had
become a commonplace. In 1878 a professor of military engineering,
Colonel J. B. Wheeler, drew the distinction between art and science
for cadets at West Point: principles, analyses, rules "all these belong to
the 'Scienceof War.'The application of these great principles and rules
belongs to the 'Art of War.'"23 Another officer, Captain Henry Met-
calfe, expressed the meaning of science and art for many 19th-
century thinkers in his classic 1885 management treatise. Science and
art were allied but distinct. "Art seeks to produce certain effects,
Science ... [to investigate] the causes of these effects." Regardless of
the art, he continued, "there always seems room for a corresponding
science, collecting and classifying the records of the past so that the
Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction and Revolution," Past and Present, no. 85 (1979),
pp. 68-98; William O. Shanahan, "Enlightenment and War: Austro-Prussian Military
Practice, 1760-1790," in East Central European Societyand War in the Pre-Revolutionary
Eighteenth Century, ed. Gunther E. Rothenberg, Bela K. Kiraly, and Peter E Sugar
(Boulder, Colo., 1982), pp. 83-111, esp. pp. 95-97; Charles Edward White, The
Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorstand the "MilitdrischeGesellschaft"in Berlin, 1801-1805
(New York, 1989), esp. chap. 4, "An Aristocracy of Education," pp. 87-120.
2'Andre Corvisier, Armiesand Societiesin Europe, 1494-1789, trans. Abigail T. Siddall
(Bloomington, Ind., 1979), pp. 105-9; David D. Bien, "Military Education in 18th
Century France: Technical and Non-technical Determinants," with comments by John
Shy, Thomas P. Hughes, and Gunther E. Rothenberg, in Science, Technology,and
Warfare: The Proceedings of the Third Military History Symposium,United States Air Force
Academy, 8-9 May 1969, ed. Monte D. Wright and Lawrence J. Paszek (Colorado
Springs, Colo., 1971), pp. 51-80; Johann Christoph Allmayer-Beck, "The Establish-
ment of the Theresan Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt," in Rothenberg et al.,
eds., East Central European Society and War, pp. 115-21; E B. Sullivan, "The Royal
Academy at Portsmouth, 1729-1806," Mariner'sMirror 63 (1977): 311-26.
22Militaryeducation at all levels is a major subject in Emory Upton, Armiesof Asia and
Europe: EmbracingOfficial Reportson the ArmiesofJapan, China, India, Persia, Italy, Russia,
Austria, Germany,France, and England (New York, 1878; reprint, New York, 1968). See
also Henry Barnard, Military Schoolsand Coursesof Instructionin the Scienceand Art of War,
rev. ed. (New York, 1872); Hew Strachan, Wellington'sLegacy: The Reform of the British
Army, 1830-1854 (Manchester, 1984), chap. 4.2, "The Rising Professionalism of the
Officers: Education," pp. 121-45; Paddy Griffith, Military Thought in the French Army,
1815-1851 (Manchester, 1989), chap. 8, "The Military Schools," pp. 133-48; Karl
Demeter, The GermanOfficer-Corpsin Societyand State, 1650-1945, trans. Angus Malcolm
(New York, 1965), pp. 73-102; Coffman, The Old Army (n. 13 above), pp. 96-102.
23J.B. Wheeler, A Course of Instruction in the Elements of the Art and Science of War:For
the Use of the Cadetsof the United StatesMilitaryAcademy(New York, 1878), p. 7. Emphasis
in original.
8 Barton C. Hacker
future operations of the art may be more effective." Arsenal admin-
istration, Metcalfe's specialty, provided a concrete example: It "is in
great measure an art, and depends upon the application to a great
variety of cases of certain principles, which, taken together, make up
. . the science of administration."24
Pursuing the art of war could now begin from a solid base, the
underlying principles codified as military science to be taught in the
classroom. Military science gained support as an attempt to abstract
and systematize a body of esoteric knowledge suited to indoctrinating
the 19th century's growing numbers of nontraditional candidates for
officer status. Like other professionalizing fields, notably engineering,
the armed forces of Europe and America faced an influx of middle-
class men seeking careers.25Presumably lacking the genetic predispo-
sition of their aristocratic comrades, they needed concrete and readily
reproducible examples: schematic maps all could see, war games all
could play, rules all could memorize. None of these teaching aids were
new, but their use burgeoned during the 19th century and became a
staple of the 20th.26
Paradoxically, military education also grew more complex and
sophisticated even as some of its subjects became oversimplified and
standardized. The reoriented curricula of older schools in Europe
and the United States added courses in strategy and policy to the
familiar tactics and technology. At new schools founded for that very
purpose, postgraduate military training became first available, then a
24Henry Metcalfe, The Cost of Manufacturesand the Administrationof Workshops,Public

and Private (New York, 1885), as excerpted in Harwood F Merrill, ed., Classics of
Management(New York, 1960), pp. 47-56, quote on p. 47.
25OliverAllen Ray, "The Imperial Russian Army Officer," Political ScienceQuarterly76
(1961): 576-92; Robert A. Kann, "The Social Prestige of the Officer Corps in the
Habsburg Empire from the Eighteenth Century to 1918," in War and Societyin East
CentralEurope, vol. 1: Special Topicsand Generalizationson the 18th and 19th Centuries,ed.
Bela K. Kiraly and Gunther E. Rothenberg (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1979), pp. 113-37;
DanielJ. Hughes, "Occupational Origins of Prussia's Generals, 1871-1914," Central
European History 13 (1980): 3-33; John M. Gates, "The Alleged Isolation of US Army
Officers in the Late 19th Century," Parameters10 (September 1980): 32-45.
26FrankSnyder, "What Is a War Game?" Naval War CollegeReview (Autumn 1989),
pp. 47-54; Peter P. Perla, "War Games, Analyses, and Exercises," Naval War College
Review (Spring 1987), pp. 44-51; Garry D. Brewer and Martin Shubik, The WarGame:
A Critiqueof MilitaryProblemSolving (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pt. 2, "WarGames in the
Past,"pp. 45-74; John Prados, Pentagon Games:Wargamesand theAmericanMilitary (New
York, 1987); Alfred H. Hausrath, VentureSimulation in War,Business, and Politics (New
York, 1971); John I. Alger, The Questfor Victory: The History of the Principles of War
(Westport, Conn., 1982). See also Sally L. Hacker, "The Mathematization of Engineer-
ing: Limits on Women and the Field," in Machina ex Dea: Feminist Perspectiveson
Technology,ed. Joan Rothschild (New York, 1983), pp. 38-58.
required prelude to higher command.7 Strategic and other higher
military studies in the United States proliferated in the context of
turn-of-the-century reform movements that affected military as well
as civil society.28 In the 20th century such studies have become a
central feature of advanced military education.29 All such courses and
programs pointed toward professionalization, with officers educated
to wield sanctioned violence responsibly.30
'Ira L. Reeves, Military Education in the United States (Burlington, Vt., 1914); Timo-
thy K. Nenninger, The LeavenworthSchools and the Old Army:Education, Professionalism,
and the Officer Corps of the United States Army, 1881-1918 (Westport, Conn., 1978);
George S. Pappas, Prudens futuri: The US Army War College, 1901-1967 (Carlisle
Barracks, Penn., 1967); Benjamin Franklin Cooling, "A Suggested Guide to the
Curricular Archives of the U.S. Army War College, 1907-1940," U.S. Army Military
History Research Collection, Special Bibliography no. 8 (Carlisle Barracks, Penn.,
1973); Ronald Spector, Professorsof War: The Naval War Collegeand the Developmentof the
Naval Profession (Newport, R.I., 1977); Brian Bond, The Victorian Army and the Staff
College, 1854-1914 (London, 1972); AureleJ. Violette, "Reforms of Naval Officer
Education in Russia during the Reign of Alexander II," European Studies Review 6
(1976): 427-48.
28PeterKarsten, "Armed Progressives: The Military Reorganizes for the American
Century," in Building the Organizational Society, ed. Jerry Israel (New York, 1972),
pp. 197-232, as reprinted in Peter Karsten, ed., The Military in America: From the
Colonial Era to the Present (New York, 1980), pp. 229-71; James L. Abrahamson,
AmericaArmsfor a New Century:The Making of a Great Military Power (New York, 1981),
pt. 1, "The Military Renaissance," pp. 3-62; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New
American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cam-
bridge, 1982), chap. 4, "Patching the Army: The Limits of Provincial Virtue,"
pp. 85-120; William R. Roberts, "Reform and Revitalization, 1890-1903," in Against
All Enemies:Interpretationsof AmericanMilitaryHistoryfrom Colonial Timesto thePresent, ed.
Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts (New York, 1986), pp. 197-218; Timo-
thy K. Nenninger, "The Army Enters the Twentieth Century, 1904-1917," in ibid.,
pp. 219-34.
2Correlli Barnett, "The Education of Military Elites," in Education and Social Structure
in the TwentiethCentury,ed. Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse (New York, 1967),
pp. 15-35; John W. Masland and Laurence I. Radway, Soldiers and Scholars: Military
Education and National Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1957); Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton,
Schoolsfor Strategy:Education and Researchin National SecurityAffairs (New York, 1965);
Lawrence J. Korb, ed., The Systemfor Educating Military Officersin the U.S., International
Studies Occasional Paper no. 9 (Pittsburgh, 1976); Martin van Creveld, The Training of
Officers:From Military Professionalismto Irrelevance(New York, 1990).
3?MorrisJanowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York,
1960); Jacques van Doom, The Soldierand Social Change:ComparativeStudiesin the History
and Sociologyof the Military (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1975); Bengt Abrahamsson, Military
Professionalizationand Political Power (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1972); Maury D. Feld, The
Structure of Violence:Armed Forcesas Social Systems (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1977); Gwyn
Harries-Jenkins, "The Education and Training of Military Elites," in Stephens, ed.,
Educating of Armies (n. 13 above), pp. 13-38; Charles H. Coates and Roland J.
Pellegrin, Military Sociology: A Study of American Military Institutions and Military Life
(University Park, Md., 1965).
10 Barton C. Hacker
Though probably not the cause, profound and rapid social change
nonetheless strongly colored the professionalization of armed forces,
like other corporate groups during the 19th century. Radical change
justified concomitant claims to special expertise. Elaborating esoteric
bodies of knowledge and technique then allowed practitioners to limit
access to the field. Codified and abstracted knowledge channeled the
entry of candidates properly trained and indoctrinated. During the
19th century many fields shifted from apprentice and other on-the-
job methods of training new members toward school or other more
formal and abstract means of transmitting and perpetuating profes-
sional culture.3' But special knowledge, special skill, and restricted
numbers only counted if a group could claim to serve higher social
purposes. Promoting that claim was the key to professionalization.
Only when society accepted professional training and competence as
socially needed and wanted could the newly defined corporate group
claim special social privilege, which was, of course, the whole point.32
Professionalizing groups all sought to make special schooling a
prerequisite for professional entry, bureaucratic office, or masculine
privilege. Armed forces, however, were not merely one more instance
of a widespread 19th-century phenomenon. Military institutions
regularly pioneered the techniques of discipline, order, and privilege
that other social institutions adopted.33 At one level, the support for a
distinctive military science reflected concerns for institutional survival
during a time of flux in technique and organization.34 More generally,
"Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism:The Middle Class and the Develop-
ment of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976); Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., The
Transformationof Higher Learning, 1860-1930: Expansion, Diversification,Social Opening,
and Professionalizationin England, Germany,Russia, and the United States (Chicago, 1983).
Compare Laurence Veysey, "The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities," in The
Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and
John Voss (Baltimore, 1979), pp. 51-106, esp. pp. 57-64; Dorothy Ross, "The
Development of the Social Sciences," in ibid., pp. 107-38, esp. pp. 116-21.
32Eliot Freidson, ProfessionalPowers: A Study of the Institutionalizationof Formal Knowl-
edge (Chicago, 1986); Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism:A Sociological
Analysis(Berkeley, Calif., 1977); Andrew Abbott, The Systemof Professions:An Essay on the
Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988).
"George A. Kourvetaris and Betty A. Dobratz, eds., WorldPerspectivesin the Sociology
of the Military (New Brunswick, N.J., 1977); Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, "The Sociology of
Military Institutions Today," in Sociology:The State of theArt, ed. Tom Bottomore, Stefan
Nowak, and Magdalena Sokolowska (London, 1982), pp. 129-45; David R. Segal and
Mady Wechsler Segal, "Change in Military Organization," Annual Review of Sociology9
(1983): 151-70; Giuseppe Caforio, "The Military Profession: Theories of Change,"
ArmedForcesand Society 15 (1988): 55-69.
3Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldierand the State: The Theoryand Politics of Civil-Military
Relations (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy:The GoldenAge
however, it showed how institutions might respond to rapid social
change and became a model of such response, often implicit but
sometimes, as in engineering, overt.35Scientific management, medical
science, social science, and a host of other 19th-century coinages, even
science proper, all testify to the widely perceived value of coping with
change by turning lore into systematic knowledge.3 We need not
ignore the practical uses and social value of knowledge so arranged to
see that it benefits its possessors in more ways than one.37
Engineering Education and Management

Engineering education, like engineering itself, had military roots.38
The very term "civil engineer" appeared in the 18th century to name
of Annapolis and the Emergenceof Modern AmericanNavalism (New York, 1972); Ronald
Spector, "The Triumph of Professional Ideology: The U.S. Navy in the 1890s," in In
Peace and War: Interpretationsof American Naval History, 1775-1978, ed. Kenneth J.
Hagan (Westport, Conn., 1978), pp. 174-85; Skowronek, Building a New AmericanState,
chap. 7, "Reconstituting the Army: Professionalism, Nationalism, and the Illusion of
Corporatism," pp. 212-47; Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, "Professionalization in the Victo-
rian Army,"in The Military,Militarism,and thePolity: Essaysin Honor of MorrisJanowitz,ed.
Michel Louis Martin and Ellen Stern McCrate (New York, 1983), pp. 93-112.
S5GoranAhlstrom, Engineers and Industrial Growth:Higher TechnicalEducation and the
Engineering Professionduring the Nineteenthand Early TwentiethCenturies:France, Germany,
Sweden and England (London, 1982); Daniel H. Calhoun, The American Civil Engineer:
Origins and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1960); Monte A. Calvert, The Mechanical
Engineer in America, 1830-1910: Professional Cultures in Conflict (Baltimore, 1967);
Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibilityand the American
Engineering Profession (Cleveland, 1971); C. W. R. Gispen, "German Engineers and
American Social Theory: Historical Perspectives on Professionalization," Comparative
Studiesin Societyand History 30 (1988): 550-74; Kees Gispen, New Profession, Old Order:
Engineers and German Society,1815-1914 (Cambridge, 1990).
3Frederick W. Taylor, The Principlesof ScientificManagement(1911; reprint, New York,
1967); John Harley Warner, "Science in Medicine," Osiris ("Historical Writing on
American Science," ed. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter), 2d ser., 1
(1985): 37-58; Hamilton Cravens, "History of the Social Sciences," in ibid., pp. 183-
207; Don Martindale, The Nature and Typesof SociologicalTheory(Boston, 1960), chap. 2,
"The Birth of the Social Sciences," pp. 29-47; Sydney Ross, "Scientist:The Story of a
Word," Annals of Science 18 (1962): 65-85.
"3SallyL. Hacker, "The Culture of Engineering: Woman, Workplace and Machine,"
WomenStudiesInternational Quarterly4 (1981): 341-53, Pleasure, Power, and Technology:
SomeTalesof Gender,Engineering, and the CooperativeWorkplace(Boston, 1989), esp. chap.
3, "Discipline and Pleasure in Engineering," pp. 35-57; Daryl E. Chubin, "Career
Patterns of Scientists and Engineers," in Terry Connolly, Scientists, Engineers, and
Organizations(Monterey, Calif., 1983), pp. 310-27; Robert Perrucci and Joel E. Gerstl,
eds., The Engineers and the Social System(New York, 1969).
38Bertrand Gille, Engineers of the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); George S.
Emmerson, Engineering Education: A Social History (New York, 1973), chap. 2, "The
Early Engineer, His Work and Education," pp. 22-42.
12 Barton C. Hacker
a new kind of practitioner: one who engineered something besides
fortifications or weapons (though roads, bridges, railways, and other
state-sponsored civil projects may themselves betray more than a trace
of military motive).9 Higher engineering education everywhere be-
gan in military schools.40 Scarcely had the United States achieved
independence when George Washington urged the establishment of
"Academies, one or more for the Instruction of the Art Military;
particularly those Branches of it which respect Engineering and
Artillery, which are highly essential, and the knowledge of which, is
most difficult to obtain."41Although other motives played a part, the
1802 founding of the United States Military Academy at West Point
owed much to such concerns.42
Schools like West Point became and remained the chief way to
recruit and train technical officers: engineers and gunners early,
39S. B. Hamilton, "The French Civil Engineers of the Eighteenth Century," Transac-
tions of the Newcomen Society 22 (1941-42): 149-59; Hans Straub, A History of Civil
Engineering: An OutlinefromAncient to Modern Times,trans. Erwin Rockwell (Cambridge,
Mass., 1964), chap. 5, "The Advent of 'Civil Engineering' " pp. 105-38; Karl-Heinz
Manegold, "Technology Academised: Education and Training of the Engineer in the
Nineteenth Century," in The Dynamics of Science and Technology:Social Values, Technical
Norms and Scientific Criteria in the Development of Knowledge, ed. Wolfgang Krohn,
Edwin T. Layton, Jr., and Peter Weingart (Dordrecht, 1978), pp. 137-58, esp.
pp. 137-39.
4Frederick B. Artz, The Development of Technical Education in France, 1500-1850
(Cambridge, Mass., 1966), chap. 2, "The Age of Enlightenment, 1715-1789," pp. 60-
111; James E. King, Science and Rationalism in the Governmentof Louis XIV, 1661-1683
(Baltimore, 1949; reprint, New York, 1972), pp. 274-83; Margaret Bradley, "Scientific
Education versus Military Training: The Influence of Napoleon Bonaparte on the Ecole
Polytechnique,"Annals of Science 32 (1975): 415-49; C. R. Day, "The Making of
Mechanical Engineers in France: The Ecoles d'Arts et Metiers, 1803-1914," French
Historical Studies 10 (1978): 439-60, esp. p. 440; John Hubbel Weiss, The Making of
TechnologicalMan: The Social Origins of French Engineering Education (Cambridge, Mass.,
1982), pp. 14-16.
4"George Washington to Alexander Hamilton, "Sentiments on a Peace Establish-
ment," May 2, 1783, The Writings of George Washingtonfrom the Original Manuscript
Sources, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931-44), 26:
374-98, as excerpted in Russell F. Weigley, ed., The American Military: Readings in
the History of the Military in American Society (Reading, Mass., 1969), pp. 3-8, quote
on p. 3.
42Sidney Forman, "Why the United States Military Academy Was Established in
1802," Military Affairs 29 (1965): 16-28; Russell F Weigley, Towardsan AmericanArmy:
Military Thoughtfrom Washingtonto Marshall (New York, 1962), chap. 4, "Dennis Hart
Mahan: The Professionalism of West Point," pp. 38-53; Stephen E. Ambrose, Duty,
Honor, Country: A History of WestPoint (Baltimore, 1966), chap. 1, "The Beginning,"
pp. 1-23; Theodore J. Crackel, Mr. Jefferson's Army: Political and Social Reform of the
Military Establishment,1801-1809 (New York, 1987), chap. 3, "The Founding of West
Point," pp. 54-73.
other specialties in later years.43 And, like vocational training tech-
niques pioneered for troops, educational methods devised for tech-
nical officers showed great adaptability. Graduates of West Point
joined, sometimes founded, civil engineering programs and schools
elsewhere.4 Expertise derived from military technical training proved
to have many uses, outside the army as well as within.45 Men trained
at West Point explored and mapped westward across the continent.
They built forts, but they also built the network of roads and
waterways that began to crisscross the United States in the early 19th
century, and then they built railroads.4
In Europe, especially in France, the line between military and civil
engineers often remained indistinct.47 Engineering schools routinely
43PeterMichael Molloy, "Technical Education and the Young Republic: West Point as
America's Ecole Polytechnique, 1802-1833" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1975);
James L. Morrison, Jr., "TheBest School in the World":WestPoint, the Pre-Civil War Years,
1833-1866 (Kent, Ohio, 1986). See also Sidney Forman, WestPoint: A History of the
United StatesMilitary Academy(New York, 1950); Ambrose, Duty, Honor, Country;Joseph
Ellis and Robert Moore, Schoolfor Soldiers: WestPoint and the Profession of Arms (New
York, 1974).
"James Gregory McGivern, First Hundred Yearsof Engineering Education in the United
States (1807-1907) (Spokane, Wash., 1960); Calhoun, American Civil Engineer (n. 35
above), chap. 2, "Creating an Engineer Supply," pp. 24-53; Frederick Rudolph, The
American College and University: A History (New York, 1965), pp. 228-29; Marcus
Cunliffe, Soldiersand Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865 (Boston, 1968),
pp. 170, 258-59; Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution
(Garden City, N.Y., 1968), pp. 219-31; William Phelps Kimball et al., The First Hundred
Yearsof the ThayerSchool of Engineering at DartmouthCollege(Hanover, N.H., 1971), chap.
1, "Sylvanus Thayer Founds a School," pp. 1-17.
45PaulA. Weinstein, "Occupational Convergence and the Role of the Military in
Economic Development," Explorationsin EconomicHistory 7 (1970): 325-46; Terry Mark
Aldrich, Rates of Return on Investmentin TechnicalEducation in the Ante-bellumAmerican
Economy (New York, 1975); Robin Higham and Carol Brandt, eds., The United States
Army in Peacetime:Essays in Honor of the Bicentennial, 1775-1975 (Manhattan, Kans.,
1975); Edward Bernard Glick, Peaceful Conflict: The Non-military Uses of the Military
(Harrisburg, Penn., 1967).
4William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863 (New
Haven, Conn., 1959), Explorationand Empire: The Explorerand the Scientistin the Winning
of the American West(New York, 1966); Francis Paul Prucha, Broadax and Bayonet: The
Role of the United States Army in the Developmentof the Northwest,1815-1860 (Lincoln,
Nebr., 1953), The Sword of the Republic: The United StatesArmyon the Frontier,1783-1846
(New York, 1969); Forest G. Hill, Roads, Rails and Waterways:The Army Engineers and
Early Transportation (Norman, Okla., 1957); Todd Shallat, "Building Waterways,
1802-1861: Science and the United States Army in Early Public Works," Technologyand
Culture 31 (1990): 18-50.
47John H. Weiss, "The Lost Baton: The Politics of Intraprofessional Conflict in
Nineteenth-Century French Engineering," Journal of Social History 16 (1982): 3-19,
"Bridges and Barriers: Narrowing Access and Changing Structure in the French
Engineering Profession, 1800-1850," in Professionsand the French State, 1700-1900, ed.
14 Barton C. Hacker
provided the disciplined training required for those who would
administer the state.48They also trained the indispensable managers
for corporate enterprise.49 The matter was not so clear in the United
States. In his influential study of the 19th-century rise of modern
corporations, Alfred Chandler acknowledges the West Point training
of many of those who helped transform American economic life.
Nonetheless, he explicitly rejects any direct military influence
because few of them had much of an active army career.5 By
century's end, in fact, influence seemed to run the other way.
Lieutenant Colonel William H. Carter, a leader in the fight for a
general staff in the U.S. Army, could liken military leaders to
railroad directors-"groups of men whose principal work was to
observe rival lines, to consider state and local laws, and to prepare
their systems to derive all possible advantage from future growth."51
But this may reflect interaction and merged viewpoints more than
cause and effect.
Several lines of evidence suggest that, even in the United States,
military models played a larger part in molding the corporate order
Gerald L. Geison (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 15-65; Robert Fox and George Weisz, eds.,
The Organizationof Scienceand Technologyin France, 1808-1914 (Cambridge, 1980); Gert
Schubring, "Mathematics and Teacher Training: Plans for a Polytechnic in Berlin,"
Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12, pt. 1 (1981): 161-94.
48WolframFischer and Peter Lundgreen, "The Recruitment and Training of Admin-
istrative and Technical Personnel," in The Formationof National States in WesternEurope,
ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, N.J., 1975), pp. 456-561; Thomas R. Osborne, A "Grand
Ecole"for the "GrandsCorps":The Recruitmentand Training of the FrenchAdministrativeElite
in the Nineteenth Century (Boulder, Colo., 1983); Jean Vidalenc, "Histoire militaire et
histoire de l'administration," in Histoire de l'administrationfrancaise depuis 1800: problemes
et methodes (Geneva, 1975), pp. 17-35, as abstracted in William Serman, "etudes
d'histoire militaire francaise sur la periode 1815-1871," Revue Internationale d'Histoire
Militaire, no. 61 (1985), pp. 121-31, esp. p. 129.
49C. R. Day, Educationfor the Industrial World:The Ecoles d'Artset Metiers and the Rise of
French Industrial Engineering (Cambridge, Mass., 1987); Lenard R. Berlanstein, "Man-
agers and Engineers in French Big Business of the Nineteenth Century," Journal of
Social History 22 (1988): 211-36; Maurice Levy-Leboyer, "The Large Corporation in
Modern France," in Managerial Hierarchies: ComparativePerspectiveson the Rise of the
Modern Industrial Enterprise,ed. Alfred D. Chandler and Herman Daems (Cambridge,
Mass., 1980), pp. 117-60, on p. 133; Jiirgen Kocka, "The Rise of the Modern
Industrial Enterprise in Germany," in ibid., pp. 77-116, esp. p. 97.
50Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 95, 106-7, 205, "The American System and
Modern Management," in YankeeEnterprise:The Rise of the American Systemof Manufac-
tures, ed. Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post (Washington, D.C., 1981), pp. 153-70.
5"Asquoted in Karsten, "Armed Progressives" (n. 28 above), p. 251.
than Chandler allows or Carter implied. Management by staff and line,
a key feature of the rising corporation, had self-evident military
sources.52But that was not all. Engineers in the United States not only
helped devise corporate organization but also came to constitute the
largest share of middle management.53 Furthermore, they instructed
their civilian counterparts, and not only by helping to found colleges
of engineering. The first book on factory management ever published
in the United States was the handiwork of a career army officer who
managed an arsenal; he addressed his 1885 classic less to fellow officers
than to his managerial counterparts.54
Military concerns and money, sometimes direct, sometimes fun-
neled through corporate intermediaries, affected higher education in
many ways. Military training on campus dated to the Morrill Act of
1862 but became institutionalized in the form of the Reserve Officer
Training Corps (ROTC) only in 1916. Engineers figured prominently
among supporters of this contested institution.55 During the era of
World War I, American schools of engineering used military models
in organizing research laboratories, adapted their curricula to meet
military demands, and borrowed military test methods to evaluate
52DallasD. Irvine, "The Origin of Capital Staffs,"Journal of Modern History 10 (1938):

161-79; J. D. Hittle, The Military Staff: Its Historyand Development,rev. ed. (Harrisburg,
Penn., 1949); John Robert Beishline, Military Managementfor National Defense (New
York, 1950); Alvin Brown, The Armorof Organization:A Rational Plan of Organizationfor
the ArmedForcesand, as a PreliminaryThereto,an Inquiryinto the Origins of Existing Military
Organization (New York, 1953).
53Charles Francis O'Connell, "The United States Army and the Origins of Modern
Management, 1818-1860" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1982), Dissertation
AbstractsInternational 43 (November 1982), no. 1654-A, "The Corps of Engineers and
the Rise of Modern Management, 1827-1856," in Military Enterpriseand Technological
Change:Perspectiveson theAmericanExperience,ed. Merritt Roe Smith (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985), pp. 87-116; Robert D. Cuff, "An Organizational Perspective on the Military-
Industrial Complex," Business History Review 52 (1978): 250-67.
4Metcalfe, Cost of Manufactures (n. 24 above). Compare Merrill, ed., Classics of
Management(n. 24 above), pp. 47-56; Chandler, "The American System and Modern
Management," pp. 157-58. See also Russell Robb, "Organization as Affected by
Purpose and Conditions," in his Lectures on Organization (Boston, 1910), pp. 1-21;
Henri Fayol, "General Principles of Management," a 1916 paper reprinted in his
Generaland Industrial Management,trans. Constance Storrs (London, 1949), pp. 19-42.
55JoanM. Jensen, "The Army and Domestic Surveillance on Campus," in Soldiersand
Civilians: The U.S. Army and the American People, ed. Garry D. Ryan and Timothy K.
Nenninger (Washington, D.C., 1987), pp. 153-78, esp. pp. 156-58. See also Edward
Danforth Eddy, Jr., Collegesfor Our Land and Time: The Land-Grant Idea in American
Education (New York, 1957), pp. 41, 64-65, 93-94, 163-65; Gene M. Lyons and
John W. Masland, Education and Military Leadership:A Study of the R.O.T.C. (Princeton,
N.J., 1959), pp. 28-40.
16 Barton C. Hacker
their students.5 Consequences might be as subtle as those entailed in
using personality tests and job specifications created for military pur-
poses during the war.57At the other extreme lay the overt effects of
research channeled by military funding.58 By whatever paths, military
values of order, discipline, and hierarchy pervaded engineering.59
American universities, like much of American society, for the most
part welcomed such values in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries.
After he became the first head of the University of Illinois in 1867,
John M. Gregory regularly cited the value of "military order and daily
chapel ... for discipline, character development, and the general
tone of the campus."6 When the United States entered World War I,
colleges became enthusiastic centers for military training and educa-
tion.6' They were scarcely less eager during peacetime. Youthful
5David F Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology,and the Rise of Corporate

Capitalism (New York, 1977); Frederick E. Terman, "A Brief History of Electrical
Engineering Education," Proceedings of the IEEE 64 (1976): 1399-1407; Borden,
Civilian Indoctrination(n. 15 above), "The Army and Higher Learning," pp. 72-96.
57Paul Davis Chapman, "Schools as Sorters: Testing and Tracking in California,
1910-1925,"Journal of Social History 14 (1981): 701-17; Joel H. Spring, "Psychologists
and the War: The Meaning of Intelligence in the Alpha and Beta Tests," History of
Education Quarterly 12 (1972): 3-15; Richard T. von Mayrhauser, "The Manager, the
Medic, and the Mediator: The Clash of Professional Psychological Styles and the
Wartime Origins of Group Mental Testing," in PsychologicalTestingand AmericanSociety,
1890-1930, ed. Michael M. Sokal (New Brunswick, NJ., 1987), pp. 128-57; Borden,
Civilian Indoctrination (n. 15 above), "The Army and the Psychologists," pp. 25-47;
Martin E Wiskoff and Glenn M. Rampton, eds., Military PersonnelMeasurement:Testing,
Assignment,Evaluation (New York, 1989).
5A. Hunter Dupree, Sciencein the FederalGovernment:A History of Policies and Activities
to 1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957; reprint, New York, 1964), chap. 16, "The Impact of
World War I," pp. 302-25; Paul A. C. Koistinen, "The 'Industrial-Military Complex' in
Historical Perspective: World War I," Business History Review 41 (1967): 380-403;
Thomas P. Hughes, AmericanGenesis:A Centuryof Invention and TechnologicalEnthusiasm,
1870-1970 (New York, 1989), chap. 3, "Brain Mill for the Military," pp. 96-137;
Michael Sanderson, The Universitiesand British Industry, 1850-1970 (London, 1972),
chap. 8, "The Universities and the War, 1914-18," pp. 214-42.
59S. L. Hacker, Pleasure, Power, and Technology(n. 37 above), esp. chap. 4, "Military
Institutions and Gender Inequality," pp. 58-72. See also Richard T. LaPiere, Collective
Behavior (New York, 1938), chap. 6, "Regimental Behavior," pp. 105-29; Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York,
1978).
0Joseph R. DeMartini, "Student Culture as a Change Agent in American Higher
Education: An Illustration from the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Social History 9
(1976): 526-41, quote on 532. On character building and other latent functions of
ROTC, although focused on a later period, see Nona Glazer-Malbin, "The ROTC:
Military Service on the College Campus," in Public Opinion and the Military Establishment,
ed. Charles C. Moskos, Jr. (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1971), pp. 63-97.
6"Dooley,Final Report of the National Army Training Detachments(n. 14 above); Parke
Rexford Kolbe, The Collegesin War Time and After: A ContemporaryAccountof the Effect of
Americans would also come to enjoy such virtues, which spread to
secondary, even primary, schools via Junior ROTC and vocational
education.62 To many Americans, that seemed both worthwhile and
desirable. Discipline derived from military training in public schools
"early impressed upon the mind of the pupil," argued an American
observer in 1903, "the first lessons of civil government and respect for
law."63Such lessons held no less value for adults.64Militarism could be
one side of the coin, but civic virtue and patriotism might be the
other.65In many respects, a similar pattern prevailed in England.6 It
was, of course, even more widespread on the Continent.67
the War upon Higher Education in America (New York, 1919); Carol S. Gruber, Mars and
Minerva: WorldWarI and the Usesof theHigherLearningin America(Baton Rouge, La., 1975).
2WilliamH. Boyer, Educationfor Annihilation(Honolulu, 1972), chap. 5, "Teaching Mil-
itary Values through American Schools," pp. 89-114; J. B. Sweet, ed., TheJunior R.O.T.C.
Manual: For Use in Junior Division R.O.T.C. Units, 2d ed. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1949); Joel H.
Spring, Educationand theRise of theCorporateState(Boston, 1972; paperback ed., 1973), chap.
5, "Vocational Guidance, the Junior High School, and Adolescence," pp. 91-107.
63"MilitaryTraining in Public Schools," in Issuesof theDay; Being a Text-Bookon thePolitical
Situation,Past and Present (Chicago, 1903), pp. 432-34, on p. 432. Compare Harrison S.
Kerrick, Militaryand Naval America(Garden City, N.Y., 1916), chap. 45, "Safety First 'For
the Nation' through Universal Military and Naval Training of Young America," pp. 365-
69; L. R. Gignilliat, Armsand the Boy: MilitaryTraining in Schoolsand Colleges(Indianapolis,
1916), esp. chap. 11, "The Mental Value of Military Training," pp. 94-100, and chap. 13,
"The Merits of Military Training as a System of Discipline," pp. 112-26.
'Ralph Barton Perry, The Free Man and the Soldier:Essays on the Reconciliationof Liberty
and Discipline (New York, 1916). See also John Garry Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers:The
Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913-1920 (Lexington, Ky., 1972); Michael Pearl-
man, To Make DemocracySafe for America:Patricians and Preparednessin the ProgressiveEra
(Urbana, Ill., 1984).
65EliotA. Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1985), chap. 5, "Military Service and Republican Ideology: Civic Obligation and the
Citizen Soldier," pp. 117-33; Peter Karsten, "Militarization and Rationalization in the
United States, 1870-1914," in The Militarization of the WesternWorld,ed. John R. Gillis
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1989), pp. 30-44; Morris Janowitz and Stephen D. Wesbrook,
eds., The Political Education of Soldiers(Beverly Hills, Calif., 1983).
"Olive Anderson, "The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain,"
English HistoricalReview 86 (1971): 46-72; Ann Summers, "Militarism in Britain before
the Great War,"History Workshop Journal, no. 2 (August 1976), pp. 104-23; C. B. Otley,
"Militarism and Militarization in the Public Schools, 1900-1972," British Journal of
Sociology 29 (1978): 321-39; Ian Worthington, "Antecedent Education and Officer
Recruitment: The Origins and Early Development of the Public School-Army Rela-
tionship," Military Affairs 41 (1977): 183-89, "Socialization, Militarization and Officer
Recruiting: The Development of the Officers Training Corps," Military Affairs 43
(1979): 90-95; R. J. Q. Adams and Philip P. Poirer, The ConscriptionControversyin Great
Britain, 1900-18 (London, 1987).
67See,e.g., General Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germanyand theNext War,trans. Allen H.
Powles (New York, 1914), esp. chap. 11, "Training and Education," pp. 206-25. See
18 Barton C. Hacker
Industrialization itself owed no small debt to military interests.
From the late-18th- and early-19th-century development of inter-
changeable parts manufacturing in navy shipyards and army arsenals
to the late-20th-century U.S. Air Force sponsorship of automated
machine tool development, key aspects of industrial technology
emerged from military settings.8 But military example may have been
even more important. Discipline was the key, argued Max Weber,
military practice its inspiration. He thought it self-evident that "mili-
tary discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory."69
Lewis Mumford put the point more emphatically a few years later:
"The regimentation and mass-production of soldiers, to the end of
turning out a cheap, standardized, and replaceable product, was the
great contribution of the military mind to the machine process."70
Even antimilitaristic socialists grasped the merits of military orga-
nization. In 1832 the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier proposed
making the army a school of arts and crafts, training youth to produce
rather than destroy.71Expounding Charles Fourier's system in 1846,
Victor Considerant waxed eloquent over the prospects of phalanste-
rian industrial armies "to carry out, as if by magic, vast projects of
general utility requiring legions of workers."72Military regimentation
also Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861-1979

(New York, 1982); Geoffrey Best, "The Militarization of European Society," in Gillis,
ed., Militarizationof the WesternWorld,pp. 13-29; Michael Geyer, "The Militarization of
Europe, 1914-1945," in ibid., pp. 65-102; Emilio Willems, A Way of Life and Death:
Three Centuries of Prussian-German Militarism, an AnthropologicalApproach (Nashville,
Tenn., 1986).
6Mayr and Post, eds., YankeeEnterprise (n. 50 above); Smith, Military Enterpriseand
TechnologicalChange (n. 53 above); David F. Noble, Forcesof Production:A Social Historyof
Machine ToolAutomation(New York, 1984).
69MaxWeber, Economyand Society:An Outline of InterpretiveSociology,trans. Ephraim
Fischoff et al., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (from the 4th German edition
[1956; revised 1964]), 2 vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), chap. 14.3.3., "The Discipline of
Large-Scale Economic Organizations," 2:1155-56. The book first appeared in 1920,
posthumously; for a fuller discussion, see Hacker and Hacker, "Military Institutions
and the Labor Process" (n. 12 above), pp. 753-56.
70Lewis Mumford, Technicsand Civilization (New York, 1934), pp. 84, 92. See also
Gautam Sen, The Military Origins of Industrialisation and International Trade Rivalry
(London, 1984); Smith, Military Enterpriseand TechnologicalChange (n. 53 above), esp.
Merritt Roe Smith, "Introduction," pp. 1-37.
7"MichelChevalier, "Aux hommes politiques," in Religion saint-simonienne:A tous (Paris,
1832), pp. 7-22, as cited and discussed in Edmund Silberner, The Problem of War in
Nineteenth Century Economic Thought, trans. Alexander H. Krappe (Princeton, N.J.,
1946), pp. 228-29.
72VictorConsiderant, Expositionabregeedu systemephalansteriende Fourier,3d ed. (Paris,
1846), p. 50, as quoted in Silberner, Problemof War, p. 238.
did become a model for rationalized production, though not as utopian
visionaries might have wished. Entrepreneurs and captains of industry
found much to admire, and to adopt, in the regimentation and redivi-
sion of labor imposed on modernizing armies. When Marx and Engels
described the labor process in capitalist factories, they turned naturally
to military metaphor: "Massesof labourers, crowded into the factory, are
organized like soldiers."73
Sociologist Jacques van Doorn has lately sought to link military to
industrial revolution through the motives shared by a major architect of
each.74Maurice of Nassau became a key figure in the military revolution
when he restored drill to armies in the late 16th century.75Frederick W.
Taylor reshaped industrialism when he devised scientific management in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries.76Parallels between Maurice and
Taylor were "not fortuitous," argues van Doom. They faced the same
problem: welding a "goal-attainment organization" from a mass of so-
cially isolated, ill-trained, and poorly motivated proletarians. Sharing a
mechanistic image of human behavior, they found their common answer
in regimented action.77Military and industrial revolution alike "made
their spectacular leap forward,"van Doorn adds, "bya more efficient and
concentrated organization of human effort, not by mechanization."78And
for Taylor, at least, it was a two-way street. Military models influenced his
reforms, and Taylorism found a receptive military audience.79
73KarlMarx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1848), as

reprinted from the English edition of 1888 in Marx and Engels, SelectedWorks:In One
Volume(New York, 1968), pp. 35-63, quote on p. 41. For a fuller discussion, see Hacker
and Hacker, "Military Institutions and the Labor Process," pp. 745-51.
74VanDoorn, The Soldier and Social Change (n. 30 above), chap. 1, "The Genesis of
Military and Industrial Organization," pp. 5-28.
75MauryD. Feld, "Middle-Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism: The
Dutch Army, 1589-1609," Armed Forces and Society 1 (1975): 419-42; Gerhard
Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt desfriihmodernen Staates, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G.
Koenigsberger (Berlin, 1969), translated by David McLintock as Neostoicismand theEarly
Modern State (Cambridge, 1982), chap. 5, "The Military Renascence," pp. 76-89;
Gunther E. Rothenberg, "Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus, Raimondo Monte-
cuccoli, and the 'Military Revolution' of the Seventeenth Century," in Paret, ed., Makers
of Modern Strategy(n. 8 above), pp. 32-63.
76DanielNelson, FrederickW. Taylorand theRise of ScientificManagement(Madison, Wis.,
1980), Managers and Workers:Origins of the New Factory System in the United States,
1880-1920 (Madison, Wis., 1975); Dan Clawson, Bureaucracyand the LaborProcess:The
Transformationof U.S. Industry,1860-1920 (New York, 1980).
77VanDoom, The Soldierand Social Change, p. 15.
78Ibid., p. 17.
79Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), chap. 4, "Scientific Management," pp. 85-123;
Nelson, FrederickW. Taylor (n. 76 above), pp. 154-67; Lieutenant G. J. Meyers, U.S.
20 Barton C. Hacker
Military Institutionsas Social Institutions
The rise of the modern industrial state in the 19th and 20th
centuries is but the latest manifestation of the ancient interplay
between military and other social institutions. Military institutions are
the patterned social relationships between individuals and groups that
organize and control the wielding of coercive force by one segment of
society against others, internal or external. Obviously, this definition
includes armies, perhaps not so obviously, navies and air forces,
perhaps still less obviously, police. Until the 19th century in Europe,
domestic order relied on amateur or part-time constabularies, with
the army on tap if matters got out of hand.80 Police forces evolved
from regular military forces only in the last century or two as
specialized wielders of domestic force.81 Maintaining public order in
the face of social protest or colonial unrest was at least as important as
fighting crime.82 Police and army retained strong links in values,
organization, and technique; donning uniforms, in fact, regularly
Navy, "The Science of Management," in Scientific Management:A Collectionof the More

Significant Articles Describing the Taylor System of Management, ed. Clarence Bertrand
Thompson (Cambridge, Mass., 1914), pp. 132-52; U.S. Army, chief of Ordnance,
"The Taylor System of Shop Management at the Watertown Arsenal," appendix I to
Report of the Chief of Ordnance, 1913, reprinted in ibid., pp. 741-806; Hugh J. G.
Aitken, Taylorism at WatertownArsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908-1915
(Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 17-18; Nicholas J. Griffin, "Scientific Management in
the Direction of Britain's Military Labour Establishment during World War I," Military
Affairs 42 (1978): 197-201.
0Tony Hayter, The Army and Crowd Control in Mid-Georgian England (Totowa, N.J.,
1978); Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850 (Cam-
bridge, 1988); Samuel F Scott, The Responseof the Royal Armyto theFrenchRevolution: The
Role and Developmentof the Line Army, 1787-1793 (Oxford, 1978); Barton C. Hacker,
"The United States Army as a National Police Force: The Federal Policing of Labor
Disputes, 1877-1898," Military Affairs 33 (1969): 255-64.
8"CliveEmsley, Policing and Its Context,1750-1870 (New York, 1984); Elaine Glovka
Spencer, "Police-Military Relations in Prussia, 1848-1914," Journal of Social History 19
(1985): 305-17; Jean Vidalenc, "Armee et police en France, 1814-1914," in L'Etatet sa
police en France (1789-1914) (Geneva, 1979), pp. 135-59, as abstracted in Serman,
"Itudes d'histoire militaire francaise" (n. 48 above), p. 125.
8Gregory J. Pulham, "James Shaw-Kennedy and the Reformation of the Irish
Constabulary, 1836-38," Eire-Ireland 16 (Summer 1981): 93-106; Celina Bledowska,
ed., War and Order: ResearchingState Structures(London, 1983), "Police," pp. 135-64;
John Roach and Jurgen Thomaneck, eds., Police and Public Order in Europe (London,
1985); Anthony Clayton and David Killingray, Khaki and Blue: Military and Police in
British Colonial Africa, Monographs in International Studies, Africa Series no. 51
(Athens, Ohio, 1989); Cynthia H. Enloe, "Ethnicity and Militarization: Factors Shaping
the Roles of Police in Third World Nations," Studies in Comparative International
Development11 (1976): 25-38.
marked the critical, and sometimes contested, point when constables
became policemen.83
But military institutions, as I have tried to suggest, include still
more. Consider the host of scientists, engineers, and technicians who
now draw their funding in greater or lesser degree from military
budgets and how that influences the course of research.84 Military
institutions also must include the ostensibly civilian functionaries who
staff the Pentagon, as well as the academic theorists of nuclear warfare
who provide much of our current grand strategy.85 Yet military
institutions even so broadly defined may still be conceived too
narrowly. Ultimately, the state itself is best understood in terms of
military institutions.
Military concerns shaped the origin of the state at the dawn of
history, chiefly in response to perceived needs for defense against
external threat, for seizing resources, and for quelling internal
dissent. Moreover, because military institutions played such central
roles in the structure of civilized societies, their influence spread
widely through the social system. Civilized societies owe much of their
distinctive character to the constant, if sometimes obscure, interac-
tions of military with other social institutions.86 Such interactions, in
83EricH. Monkkonen, "From Cop History to Social History: The Significance of the
Police in American History,"Journal of Social History 15 (1982): 575-91, esp. pp. 577-
78. See also Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (Cambridge,
1981), chap. 1, "The Historical Development of the Police," pp. 30-64; David H.
Bayley, Patterns of Policing: A ComparativeInternational Analysis (New Brunswick, N.J.,
1985), chap. 2, "The Development of Modern Police," pp. 23-52.
'Davis B. Bobrow, "Military Research and Development: Implications for the Civil
Sector," Annals of the AmericanAcademyof Political and Social Science ("The Military and
American Society,"ed. Adam Yarmolinski) 406 (1973): 117-28; David Dickson, The New
Politics of Science (New York, 1984), chap. 3, "Science and the Military: Knowledge as
Power," pp. 107-62; Paul Forman, "Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as
Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940-1960," Historical Studies in the
Physical and Biological Sciences 18, pt. 1 (1987): 149-229; Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt
Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart, eds., Science,Technologyand the Military,Sociology of the
Sciences Yearbook, vol. 12 (Dordrecht, 1988); Margaret Blunden, Owen Greene, and
John Naughton, "The Alchemists of Our Time: The Weapons Scientists as Scapegoat,"
in Scienceand Mythologyin the Making of DefencePolicy, ed. Margaret Blunden and Owen
Greene (London, 1989), pp. 77-117.
85FredKaplan, The Wizardsof Armageddon(New York, 1983); Gregg Herken, Counsels
of War(New York, 1985); Lawrence Freedman, "The First Two Generations of Nuclear
Strategists," in Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (n. 8 above), pp. 735-78, The
Evolution of Nuclear Strategy,2d ed. (London, 1989); Richard Smoke, "National Security
Affairs," in Handbookof Political Science, vol. 8: International Politics, ed. Fred I. Green-
stein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, Mass., 1975), pp. 247-362.
'Barton C. Hacker, "The Invention of Armies: The Origins of Military Institutions,
Gender Stratification, and the Labor Process" (paper presented at the annual meeting
22 Barton C. Hacker
particular, promoted the rise of the modern Western nation-state,
shaping and reshaping social structures, actions, and values perva-
sively and persistently.87"A professional army,"as Stephen Skowronek
recently observed, came to stand "next to a professional civil service as
an institutional standard of the modern state."88
Militarism once offered a notable instance of this linkage, but the
glorification of armed force and its wielders never told the whole
story.89It may now have become, in fact, merely an outmoded story.
For the modern industrial state, the normal functioning of military
institutions is perhaps better exemplified by the relationships encoded
in the term "military-industrial complex."9 Though the label has lost
some of its former currency, the underlying realities of defense
economics remain as cogent as ever in the industrialized world.91And
of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, Chicago, August 1987); Hacker and
Hacker, "Military Institutions and the Labor Process" (n. 12 above), pp. 757-64;
Michael Mann, The Sourcesof Social Power, vol. 1: A History of Powerfrom the Beginning to
A.D. 1760 (Cambridge, 1986).
s'Tilly, Formationof National States(n. 48 above); Charles Tilly, As SociologyMeetsHistory
(New York, 1981); Ronald W. Batchelder and Herman Freudenberger, "On the
Rational Origins of the Modern Centralized State," Explorationsin EconomicHistory 20
(1983): 1-13; Martin Shaw, ed., War, State and Society (New York, 1984); Anthony
Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence(Berkeley, Calif., 1985); John A. Hall, "War and
the Rise of the West," in The Sociologyof Warand Peace, ed. Colin Creighton and Martin
Shaw (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y, 1987), pp. 37-53; Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thomp-
son, War and State Making: The Shaping of the Global Powers (Boston, 1989).
8Skowronek, Building a New American State (n. 28 above), p. 85.
89Thisrefers to the classic definition of militarism in Alfred Vagts, Militarism: Civilian
and Military, rev. ed. (New York, 1959), esp. "Introduction: The Idea and Nature of
Militarism," pp. 13-37. Compare Kjell Skjelsbaek, "Militarism, Its Dimensions and
Corollaries: An Attempt at Conceptual Clarification," in Problems of Contemporary
Militarism, ed. Asbjorn Eide and Marek Thee (New York, 1980), pp. 77-105.
9Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., ed., The Military-Industrial Complex (New York, 1972);
Benjamin Franklin Cooling, ed., War,Business,and AmericanSociety:HistoricalPerspectives
on the Military-IndustrialComplex(Port Washington, N.Y., 1977), War,Business and World
Military-IndustrialComplexes(Port Washington, N.Y, 1981); Paul A. C. Koistinen, The
Military-IndustrialComplex:A Historical Perspective(New York, 1980); Bruce G. Brunton,
"Institutional Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex,"Journal of EconomicIssues 22
(1988): 599-606. Compare Michael T. Klare, "East-West versus North-South: Domi-
nant and Subordinate Themes in U.S. Military Strategy since 1945," in Gillis, ed.,
Militarization of the WesternWorld(n. 65 above), pp. 141-65.
"Gavin Kennedy, Defense Economics (New York, 1983); Nicole Ball and Milton
Leitenberg, eds., The Structureof the Defense Industry:An InternationalSurvey (New York,
1983); William J. Weida and Frank L. Gertcher, The Political Economyof National Defense
(Boulder, Colo., 1987); Christian Schmidt, ed., The Economics of Military Expenditures:
Military Expenditures,EconomicGrowthand Fluctuations:Proceedingsof a ConferenceHeld by
the InternationalEconomicAssociationin Paris, France (London, 1987).
not only there. Economic order in the Third World now displays
many of the same traits.9
Other aspects of the modern social order likewise reflect the
influence of military institutions. One example is the place of women.
Historically, women played crucial, though largely overlooked, mili-
tary roles, a matter of some significance in understanding their
present status in the armed forces.93More important, the structure of
gender in modern society cannot be fully explained without recourse
to links between military and other social institutions.9 Scouting will
perhaps serve as an obvious example.95 Yet it is hardly unique. Since
the late 19th century, military models have shaped social action as
diverse as evangelism and conservation. The military model for the
Salvation Army is self-evident.6 Less obvious, or perhaps merely less
well-known, the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s likewise
9David K. Whynes, The Economicsof Third WorldMilitary Expenditure (Austin, 1979);
Saadet Deger, Military Expendituresin Third World Countries (London, 1986); Miles D.
Wolpin, Militarization, Internal Repressionand Social Welfarein the Third World (London,
1986); A. F. Mullins, Born Arming:Developmentand MilitaryPower in New States(Stanford,
Calif., 1987); Nicole Ball, Securityand Economyin the Third World(Princeton, NJ., 1988).
9Barton C. Hacker, "Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A
Reconnaissance," Signs 6 (1981): 643-71, "From Military Revolution to Industrial
Revolution: Armies, Women and Political Economy in Early Modern Europe," in
Womenand the Military System,ed. Eva Isaksson (New York 1988), pp. 11-29; Nancy
Loring Goldman, ed., Female Soldiers-Combatants or Noncombatants? Historical and
ContemporaryPerspectives(Westport, Conn., 1982); Judith Hicks Stiehm, Arms and the
Enlisted Woman(Philadelphia, 1989), "Women, Men, and Military Service: Is Protection
Necessarily a Racket?" in Women,Power and Policy, ed. Ellen Boneparth (New York,
1982), pp. 282-93.
'William Arkin and Lynne R. Dobrofsky, "Military Socialization and Masculinity,"
Journal of Social Issues24 (1978): 151-68; Cynthia H. Enloe, "Beyond Steve Canyon and
Rambo: Feminist Histories of Militarized Masculinity," in Gillis, ed., Militarization of the
WesternWorld, pp. 119-40; Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of
Defense Intellectuals," Signs 12 (1987): 687-718; Paul N. Edwards, "The Army and the
Microworld: Computers and the Politics of Gender Identity," Signs 16 (1990): 102-27;
Isaksson, ed., Womenand the Military System.
95Kerrick, Military and Naval America (n. 63 above), chap. 43, "The Boy Scouts of
America," pp. 347-60. See also David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American
Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison, Wis., 1983).
Compare Michael Rosenthal, The CharacterFactory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the
Imperativesof Empire (New York, 1986); John Springhall, Youth,Empireand Society:British
YouthMovements,1883-1940 (London, 1977).
9For the founding of the Salvation Army and its early deployment, see St. John
Ervine, God's Soldier: General William Booth, 2 vols. (New York, 1935); Richard Collier,
The General Next to God: The Story of William Booth and the Salvation Army (New York,
1965). For its invasion of America, see Herbert A. Wisbey, Soldiers without Swords: A
Historyof the Salvation Armyin the United States (New York, 1955); Edward H. McKinley,
Marching to Glory: The History of the Salvation Army in the United States of America,
1880-1980 (San Francisco, 1980).
24 Barton C. Hacker
adopted military forms and employed military officers to organize its
forces and direct its efforts.97 The recent creation of so-called boot
camps to impose military discipline on youthful offenders and so save
them from their own disorder testifies that the spirit still flourishes.98
As products of the later 20th century, we tend to find such intimate
links between military and other social institutions somehow aberrant,
a recent product of unique, or at least unusual, factors. But only our
failure to see the significance of military institutions for civilized
society is new. "All state organization was originally military organi-
zation, organization for war," commented Otto Hintze in a 1906
Dresden lecture. "This can be regarded as an assured result of
comparative history."" Originating in antiquity, that view revived in
the Enlightenment, especially among the Scottish social philosophers
from David Hume to Adam Smith.l? It eclipsed all others during the
19th century as a way to explain crucial features of political, eco-
nomic, and social organization. Why that insight faded after World
97Michael W. Sherraden, "Military Participation in a Youth Employment Program:

The Civilian Conservation Corps," Armed Forcesand Society 7 (1981): 227-45; E. Kay
Kiefer and Paul E. Fellows, Hobnail Boots and Khaki Suits: A Brief Look at the Great
Depressionand the Civilian ConservationCorps as Seen through the Eyes of Those Who Were
There (Chicago, 1983); John C. Paige, The Civilian ConservationCorps and the National
Park Service, 1933-1942: An AdministrativeHistory (Washington, D.C., 1985); Alison T.
Otis, The ForestServiceand the Civilian ConservationCorps,1933-1942 (Washington, D.C.,
1986).
98Les Crabtree and Peter Douglas, "Military Discipline: Young Offenders Learn
Accountability," CorrectionsToday47 (December 1985): 38-39; Bascom W. Ratliff, "The
Army Model: Boot Camp for Youthful Offenders," CorrectionsToday 50 (December
1988): 98-102; Dale K. Sechrest, "Prison 'Boot Camps' Do Not Measure Up," Federal
Probation 53 (September 1989): 15-20. Alternatively, police and the courts have
sometimes allowed young men to choose between enlistment and imprisonment; see
David Gottlieb, Babes in Arms: Youth in the Military (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1980),
pp. 23-24. On military service as last resort for disadvantaged youth, see Doyle
Shackelford, "The Youthful Offender and the Armed Forces," National Probation and
Parole Association Journal 4 (April 1958), as reprinted in Military Law Review 2
(September 1958): 97-106; Morris Janowitz, "Basic Education and Youth Socialization
in the Armed Forces," in Handbookof Military Institutions, ed. Roger W. Little (Beverly
Hills, Calif., 1971), pp. 167-210.
9Otto Hintze, "Military Organization and the Organization of the State" (lecture
before the Gehe Stiftung, Dresden, 1906), as published in The Historical Essays of Otto
Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert with Robert M. Berdahl (New York, 1975), pp. 180-215, quote
on p. 181.
'??BartonC. Hacker, "'Regularity, Order, and Prompt Obedience': On Military
Institutions in Enlightenment Thought," in Actas del XVII Congreso Internacional de
Ciencias Hist6ricas, Madrid, 1990, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1992), 1:159-67. See also John
Robertson, The ScottishEnlightenmentand the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985); Richard B.
Sher, "Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense" Journal of
Modern History 61 (1989): 240-68. Compare Michael Howard, War and the Liberal
War I is an interesting question, but one beyond the scope of this
article. Suffice to say the answer appears more likely to involve
changing intellectual fashion than counterevidence.l0'
Illuminating interactions between military and other social institu-
tions may offer one of the best reasons for studying military technol-
ogy. It can provide the visible links between enduring (though not
immutable) institutions and the more superficial history of events.'02
Technological innovation has historically answered more to military
purpose than commonly allowed, ingenious weapons having held
Western imaginations in thrall since the Middle Ages.'?0 Unfortu-
nately, guides to the history of technology tend to obscure the links by
making "military technology" a residual category: fortifications dis-
appear into architecture, battleships and bombers into transportation,
explosives into chemical technology."04Military technology took little
space in his Bibliographyof the History of Technology,Eugene Ferguson
explained, "because so much of it is buried under other rubrics."105
Another problem compounds this shortcoming. Military roots can
wither as change ramifies throughout society, the military voice
coming to seem merely one among many others. The crucial role of
early military sponsorship may then vanish from sight and mind:
Conscience(New Brunswick, N.J., 1978), chap. 1, "The Growth of the Liberal Con-
science, 1500-1792" pp. 13-30.
'?Barton C. Hacker, "Military Institutions and Social Order: Transformations of
Western Thought since the Enlightenment," War and Society 11 (1993), in press.
i'This formulation of course derives from Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean,and
the MediterraneanWorldin the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York,
1972-73). See also J. H. Hexter, "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien ...,"
Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 480-539.
'03I know of no work that directly addresses this fascinating strand in Western
thought, but see Bert S. Hall's discussion of the medieval military technological
tradition in The TechnologicalIllustrations of the So-called "Anonymousof the Hussite Wars,"
Codexlatinus monacensis197, Part 1 (Wiesbaden, 1979), "Introduction," pp. 11-25; Gille,
Engineers of the Renaissance (n. 38 above). For more recent manifestations, see Mary
Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (New York, 1981); H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The
Superweaponand the AmericanImagination (New York, 1988).
04See, e.g., the annual compilations of "Current Bibliography in the History of
Technology" in Technologyand Culture, or compare the annual indexes published for
thatjournal with Barton C. Hacker, ed., "Annotated Index to Volumes 1 through 25 of
Technologyand Culture, 1959-1984," Technologyand Culture, vol. 32, no. 2, pt. 2 (April
1991), s.v. "Military Technology" and cross-references.
"'SEugene S. Ferguson, Bibliography of the History of Technology(Cambridge, Mass.,
1968), p. 295. See also Brooke Hindle, Technologyin Early America:Needs and Opportu-
nitiesfor Study (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), p. 47; James J. Stokesberry, "The Army and
the Development of Technology," in Higham and Brandt, eds., United States Army in
Peacetime(n. 45 above), pp. 149-65.
26 Barton C. Hacker
witness the career of electronics, especially computers.'06 Few who
adopt technical or organizational innovations know, or care, about
their ultimate source, and higher education continues to bear the
burden of military purposes.'07
Historically, limited resources forced careful choices on a profes-
sion already prone to caution by the life-and-death stakes it dealt with.
Adopting new weapons remained a chancy affair when choosing one
foreclosed another. Since World War II, however, military managers
have gained control of unprecedented resources and have learned to
harness technological innovation.'08 Imperfect as yet and far too
costly, the techniques suggest still another military revolution in the
making.'09 The automation of warfare may remain a more distant
prospect than enthusiasts claim or critics fear, but we have clearly
come around nearly full circle."?
"6Robert DeGrasse, "The Military and Semiconductors," in The Militarization of High

Technology,ed. John Tirman (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 77-104; Thomas J. Misa,
"Military Needs, Commercial Realities, and the Development of the Transistor,
1948-1958," in Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and TechnologicalChange (n. 53 above),
pp. 253-87; I. Bernard Cohen, "The Computer: A Case Study of the Support by
Government, Especially the Military, of a New Science and Technology," in Mendelsohn
et al., eds. Science, Technologyand the Military (n. 84 above), pp. 119-54; Margaret
Blunden, Chris Bissell, and John Monk, "Policy Making in Civil and Military Electron-
ics: The Limits of Pragmatism," in Blunden and Greene, eds., Science and Mythology
(n. 84 above), pp. 167-204.
'07Glick, Soldiers, Scholars, and Society (n. 17 above); Barbara Barksdale Clowse,
Brainpowerfor the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958
(Westport, Conn., 1981); Carl Barus, "Military Influence on the Electrical Engineering
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eds., The WorldMilitary Order: The Impact of Military Technologyon the Third World(New
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"'Frank Barnaby, The AutomatedBattlefield(New York, 1986); Allan M. Din, ed., Arms
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Work?(Boston, 1987); editors of Time-Life Books, UnderstandingComputers:The Military
Military technological innovation transformed 19th-century armies.

During the century, engineers trained in military schools, working in
military settings, and funded with military money spread change
throughout the social system. The reordered industrial state of the
late 20th century now floods the world with novel arms, and military
technological innovation once again promises (or threatens) sweeping
changes in the social order. This assumes, of course, that the 20th
century's most remarkable innovation in the means of destruction,
nuclear weapons, allows the future to happen.
Frontier (Alexandria, Va., 1988); Stephen J. Andriole and Gerald W. Hopple, eds.,
Defense Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Lexington, Mass., 1988); Les Levidow and
Kevin Robins, eds., CyborgWorlds:The Military InformationSociety(London, 1989).

Hacker - Engineering A New Order

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Engineering a New Order: Military Institutions, Technical Education, and the Rise of the

Gunpowder began the military revolution that molded the modern

DR HACKER is the historian at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Earlier

Constructionof TechnologicalSystems:New Directionsin the Sociologyand Historyof Technology

24Henry Metcalfe, The Cost of Manufacturesand the Administrationof Workshops,Public

Engineering Education and Management

52DallasD. Irvine, "The Origin of Capital Staffs,"Journal of Modern History 10 (1938):

5David F Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology,and the Rise of Corporate

also Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861-1979

73KarlMarx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (1848), as

Navy, "The Science of Management," in Scientific Management:A Collectionof the More

97Michael W. Sherraden, "Military Participation in a Youth Employment Program:

"6Robert DeGrasse, "The Military and Semiconductors," in The Militarization of High

Military technological innovation transformed 19th-century armies.

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