294 Chapter Eight
dominated decision-making. The important thing was how closely
public and private motives intertwined. Market and pecuniary consid
erations were not firmly subordinated to political command before
1914; but then, political and military decisions were not subordinated
to profit maximizing by private manufacturers either.^52
The push towards making political decisions into the critical basis of
economic innovation was clearly apparent in the weaker and less in
dustrialized countries of Europe before 1914; and in Japan it was un
mistakable. But Britain and Germany, too, were moving rapidly in
that direction from the 1880s onward. In the politicization of the
decision-making by which they lived, as in high technology, the great
arms firms were far in the lead of other industrial sectors. The arms
firms and the armed forces that dealt with them thus became the pri
mary shapers of the twin processes that constitute a distinctive hall
mark of the twentieth century: the industrialization of war and the
politicization of economics.
The Limits of Rational Design and Management
The rush of new technology that cascaded upon the Royal Navy after
1884 not only put strains on morals, money, and managerial organiza
tion; it also began to get out of control itself. By the eve of World
War I, fire control devices had become so complex that the admirals
who had to decide what to approve and what to reject no longer
understood what was at issue when rival designs were offered to them.
The mathematical principles involved and the mechanical linkages fire
control devices relied upon were simply too much for harassed and
busy men to master. Decisions were therefore made in ignorance,
often for financial or personal or political reasons.
The secrets of steel metallurgy, too, are exceedingly complex, and
admirals presumably never understood the chemistry behind each of
the new alloys that revolutionized guns and armor time and again. But
the tests to be applied to guns and armor were fairly obvious,^53 and after
a test anyone could tell which gun or sample piece of armor plate was
superior. When it came to fire control devices, similar tests could
perhaps have been devised. But there was much room for difference
of opinion about what suitable conditions for trials should be: parallel
- Cf. the acerbic iconoclasm of Peter Wiles, “War and Economic Systems,” in
Science et conscience de la société: Mélanges en honneur de Raymond Aron (Paris, 1971),
2:269–97.
- Even here, the British Admiralty found to its regret at Jutland in 1916 that shells
hitting an armored surface at an acute angle behave differently from shells that hit head
on. Tests had always been conducted for right-angled hits only; as a result many British
