---
title: "History of military technology"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_military_technology"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:30:05.083851+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Computing ===
The complex histories of computer science and computer engineering were shaped, in the first decades of digital computing, almost entirely by military funding.  Most of the basic component technologies for digital computing were developed through the course of the long-running Whirlwind-SAGE program to develop an automated radar shield.  Virtually unlimited funds enabled two decades of research that only began producing useful technologies by the end of the 50s; even the final version of the SAGE command and control system had only marginal military utility.  More so than with previously established disciplines receiving military funding, the culture of computer science was permeated with a Cold War military perspective.  Indirectly, the ideas of computer science also had a profound effect on psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience through the mind-computer analogy.

=== Geosciences and astrophysics ===
The history of earth science and the history of astrophysics were also closely tied to military purposes and funding throughout the Cold War.  American geodesy, oceanography, and seismology grew from small sub-disciplines in into full-fledged independent disciplines as for several decades, virtually all funding in these fields came from the Department of Defense.  A central goal that tied these disciplines together (even while providing the means for intellectual independence) was the figure of the Earth, the model of the earth's geography and gravitation that was essential for accurate ballistic missiles.  In the 1960s, geodesy was the superficial goal of the satellite program CORONA, while military reconnaissance was in fact a driving force.  Even for geodetic data, new secrecy guidelines worked to restrict collaboration in a field that had formerly been fundamentally international; the Figure of the Earth had geopolitical significance beyond questions of pure geoscience.  Still, geodesists were able to retain enough autonomy and subvert secrecy limitations enough to make use of the findings of their military research to overturn some of the fundamental theories of geodesy.  Like geodesy and satellite photography research, the advent of radio astronomy had a military purpose hidden beneath official astrophysical research agenda.  Quantum electronics permitted both revolutionary new methods of analyzing the universe and—using the same equipment and technology—the monitoring of Soviet electronic signals.
Military interest in (and funding of) seismology, meteorology and oceanography was in some ways a result of the defense-related payoffs of physics and geodesy.  The immediate goal of funding in these fields was to detect clandestine nuclear testing and track fallout radiation, a necessary precondition for treaties to limit the nuclear weapon technology earlier military research had created.  In particular, the feasibility of monitoring underground nuclear explosions was crucial to the possibility of a comprehensive rather than Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.  But the military-funded growth of these disciplines continued even when no pressing military goals were driving them; as with other natural sciences, the military also found value in having ‘scientists on tap' for unforeseen future R&D needs.

=== Biological sciences ===
The biological sciences were also affected by military funding, but, with the exception of nuclear physics-related medical and genetic research, largely indirectly.  The most significant funding sources for basic research before the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex were philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation.  After World War II (and to some extent before), the influx of new industrial and military funding opportunities for the physical sciences prompted philanthropies to divest from physics research—most early work in high-energy physics and biophysics had been the product of foundation grants—and refocus on biological and medical research.
The social sciences also found limited military support from the 1940s to the 1960s, but much defense-minded social science research could be—and was—pursued without extensive military funding.  In the 1950s, social scientists tried to emulate the interdisciplinary organizational success of the physical sciences' Manhattan Project with the synthetic behavioral science movement.  Social scientists actively sought to promote their usefulness to the military, researching topics related to propaganda (put to use in Korea), decision making, the psychological and sociological causes and effects of communism, and a broad constellation of other topics of Cold War significance.  By the 1960s, economists and political scientists offered up modernization theory for the cause of Cold War nation-building; modernization theory found a home in the military in the form of Project Camelot, a study of the process of revolution, as well as in the Kennedy administration's approach to the Vietnam War.  Project Camelot was ultimately canceled because of the concerns it raised about scientific objectivity in the context of such a politicized research agenda; though natural sciences were not yet susceptible to implications of the corrupting influence of military and political factors, the social sciences were.

== Historical debate ==
Historian Paul Forman, in his seminal 1987 article, proposed that not only had military funding of science greatly expanded the scope and significance of American physics, it also initiated "a qualitative change in its purposes and character."  Historians of science were beginning to turn to the Cold War relationship between science and the military for detailed study, and Forman's “distortionist critique” (as Roger Geiger has described it) served to focus the ensuing debates.
Forman and others (e.g., Robert Seidel, Stuart Leslie, and for the history of the social sciences, Ron Robin) view the influx of military money and the focus on applied rather than basic research as having had, at least partially, a negative impact on the course of subsequent research.  In turn, critics of the distortionist thesis, beginning with Daniel Kevles, deny that the military "seduced American physicists from, so to speak, a 'true basic physics'."  Kevles, as well as Geiger, instead view the effects of military funding relative to such funding simply being absent—rather than put to alternate scientific use.
Most recent scholarship has moved toward a tempered version of Forman's thesis, in which scientists retained significant autonomy despite the radical changes brought about by military funding.