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From Warfare to Welfare, by Jennifer Light, September 2, 2005
This review is from: From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Hardcover)
Jennifer Light has written a fine book on the influence of defense intellectuals on urban planning after World War II. The historical narrative is interesting and the scholarship is sound. However, a number of arguments in the book are not persuasive. Most importantly, a number of the alleged legacies of the ideas of defense intellectuals may have been the legacies of something else.
Light states the main thesis of the book in the introduction: "...during the cold war, strategies for urban problem solving were heavily influenced by, and in some cases directly derived from, military techniques and technologies originally used against America's foreign enemies." (p. 7) She argues further that "the application of military innovations and expertise to urban problems rarely served as sources of solutions." (p. 8) She then goes on to demonstrate how specific innovations, particularly ideas about population dispersion, computer simulations of urban dynamics, programmed planning and budgeting systems (PPBS), remote sensing of geographic information by aircraft and satellites, geographic information systems (GIS), and cable television, came out of the cold war defense effort and were applied (or misapplied) to the solution of urban problems. Light correctly identifies the late 1960s and early 1970s as a period of intensification of efforts to do this because of a heightened concern about eradicating "urban blight" in the wake of the riots and increased crime levels of that period. She concludes by noting that defense intellectuals "have left indelible marks, for better or worse, on the nation's urban past." (p. 237)
The main thesis is somewhat surprising since one would not expect defense intellectuals to have much to say about urban planning. But in light of the importance of the role of defense in the long history of the city as an institution, this is perhaps not so surprising. In any case, Light documents well the role of defense think tanks like RAND and MITRE in influencing urban planning in New York, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. Their main lasting impact, however, seems to have been in convincing urban planners to collect quantitative data that would permit them to project demographic changes and to maintain the physical infrastructure of the city.
My main complaint is not with the main thesis so much as with identifying the ideas and technologies applied in urban contexts as essentially "cold war" or "military." It may be true, as the author claims that computer simulation, PPBS, and GIS were first used in military settings, but in fact most of these technologies are "dual-use" - that is, they can be applied to both civilian and military applications, unlike "sole-use" technologies like land mines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, or nuclear submarines. The use of defense spending to subsidize the development of dual-use technologies has a long history that predates the cold war. Examples are the development of propeller aircraft and photographic reconnaissance during World War I and computers, radar, and powerful jet engines during World War II. Just because a simulation model employs computers does not necessarily make it a cold war technology.
Light implies that many of the ideas and technologies that came from defense intellectuals that urban planners tried to employ failed because they were designed for military purposes and not for solving urban problems (which she claims are more complex). However, some of her cases are really examples of failure in applying a dual-use technology before it is ready to be applied to civilian applications, either because it is still too expensive or because it needs further development. GIS is a perfect example of a tool that is widely employed in urban governments now that it is easier to use and less expensive than when it was first introduced. One of my colleagues uses an inexpensive commercial computer simulation, SimCity, to teach her students about the problems of managing a metropolitan region.
The underlying tone of the book is one of regret that anyone ever tried to adapt a dual-use technology funded by the military for civilian use. In my view, this is wrong-headed. If we had followed that advice in the 1990s, we would have missed the benefits of the dot.com revolution and the Internet. Since the U.S. government is rarely empowered to fund technological development other than through the funding of basic research (with the notable exceptions of health, agriculture, and defense), it would be unwise to avoid any technology that has received defense dollars - just as it would be unwise to avoid health technologies funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Still, Light is correct in arguing that a cold war zeitgeist seeped into all sorts of non-military and non-defense activities and institutions. The stress on military spending during the cold war created a demand for finding civilian applications for military technologies to justify that spending even where employing those technologies was not appropriate. Her book is therefore an important contribution to the growing literature on the history and culture of the cold war. It would have benefited, however, from a broader and more historical view of the role of defense spending in U.S. technology policy.
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