The growth of American engineering and science has affected military technology, organization, and practice from the colonial era to the present day—even as military concerns have influenced, and often funded, domestic engineering programs and scientific development. American Military Technology traces the interplay of technology and science with the armed forces of the United States in terms of what Hacker and Vining view as epochs: 1840–1865, the introduction of modern small arms, steam power, and technology, science, and medicine; 1900–1914, the naval arms race, torpedoes and submarines, and the signal corps and the airplane; and 1965–1971, McNamara's Pentagon, technology in Vietnam, guided missiles, and smart bombs. The book is an excellent springboard for understanding the complex relationship of science, technology, and war in American history.

The American military establishment is intimately tied to its technology, although the nature of those ties has varied enormously from service to service. The air force evokes images of pilots operating hightech weapons systems, striking precisely from out of the blue to lay waste to enemy installations. The fundamental icon for the Marine Corps is a wave of riflemen hitting the beaches from rugged landing craft and slogging their way ashore under enemy fire. How did these very different relationships with technology develop? During the interwar years, from 1920 to 1940, leaders from the Army Air Corps and the Marine Corps recreated their agencies based on visions of new military technologies. In War Machines, Timothy Moy examines these recreations and explores how factors such as bureaucratic pressure, institutional culture, and America's technological enthusiasm shaped these leaders' choices. The very existence of the Army Air Corps was based on a new technology, the airplane. As the Air Corps was forced to compete for money and other resources during the years after World War I, Air Corps leaders carved out a military niche based on hightech precision bombing. The Marine Corps focused on amphibious, firstwave assault using sturdy, graceless, and easytoproduce landing craft. Moy's astute analysis makes it clear that studying the processes that shaped the Army Air Corps and Marine Corps is fundamental to our understanding of technology and the military at the beginning of the twentyfirst century.

War is part of American history. This book examines how military technology both molded and reflected interactions between American military institutions and other American institutions. The growth of engineering and science has reshaped military technology, organization, and practice from the Colonial era to the present day. At the same time, military concerns influenced, and and sometimes channeled, American engineering and scientific development. American Military Technology chronicles the interactions of technology and science with America's armed forces from colonial times to the end of the 20th century. Each period of the nation's history brought new and influential changes to the interaction of the military and technology. The book is an excellent springboard for understanding the complex relationship of science, technology, and war in American history.

explains how the US military transformation failed in the post-Cold war era Harvey Sapolsky is a leading defence scholar in the US will be of interest to students of strategic studies, defence studies, military studies, US politics and security studies in general

In this book, historians of technology bring their special expertise to probing the influence of the military on technological development over a broad range of history and in a variety of cases.

Innovation and the Arms Race investigates the causes and mechanisms of the "technological arms race" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Challenging the commonly held notion that Soviet weapons innovation processes simply mirror those of the United States, Matthew Evangelista shows that the United States usually leads in introducing new military technology, while the Soviets typically react to American initiatives. Evangelista bases his study of pivotal nuclear weapons development decisions on a variety of US and USSR primary sources, including the memoirs of weapons designers and scientists, declassified intelligence analyses, Soviet Academy of Science documents, and Nikita Khruschev's taped reminiscences. He finds that in the United States, impetus for innovation comes "from the bottom" at the initiative of corporate or government researchers and military officials, whereas the centralized Soviet system produces innovations "from the top" in response to foreign developments. A revelatory analysis of US military policy, Soviet-American relations, and weaponry development, Innovation and the Arms Race bears lessons for the study of great power competition and military innovation today.