Building a military airplane required about 1,000 pounds of rubber, a tank needed about 2,000 pounds, and a battleship required about 75 tons. The authors argue that assessing innovation ultimately must go through the crucible of combat to assess and develop the technology for the purposes of ‘securing power at sea. One of the key messages from the book is the need for a combination of scientists and specialists to work in collaboration with the end users to ensure a successful and effective outcome. O’Hara and Heinz studied the development of weapons (mines and torpedoes), tools (radio and radar), and platforms (submarines and aircraft).

Inventions like synthetic rubber, the jeep, the atomic bomb, and even duct tape helped the Allies win World War II by allowing their militaries to wage war on an overwhelming scale. Time was of the essence, and scientists and engineers – backed by governments – rose to the challenge. The Second World War was an arms race: a period of intense scientific activity and technological developments.

O’Hara and Heinz conclude that each new technology offered a window of advantage that could be exploited until countermeasures were developed. In most cases this occurred after the war in which discovery took place, although submarines passed through both a discovery phase and an evolution phase during World War I, and radar did the same in World War II. Modern naval technology is the sum of the elements involved in the invention, development, production, and use of specialized weapons, tools, and platforms to fight at sea.

The first wave started in the mid-nineteenth century as coal-fired steam engines replaced sail, armor was developed, guns and mines were improved, torpedoes appeared, and radio was introduced. Fourth-wave technologies—that is, technologies invented or developed since the end of World War II—will be treated very lightly as they remain largely untested in peer-to-peer combat. Naval professionals throughout the long decades of peace leading up to 1914 expended great effort trying to keep pace with the tactical implications of rapidly changing capital ship technology. But even as platforms and systems evolved, the era of certain knowledge—the knowledge that only comes from observing naval technology used in peer-to-peer combat—ended in 1945. Such a vehicle had to be light—no more than 1,300 pounds—yet it had to be able to carry at least three fully armed soldiers and a large machine gun.Vincent O'Hara and Leonard Heinz approach an important current problem in a valuable an innovative way: they look at key technological advances and ask how and why the different major navies did or did not benefit. Ship propulsion evolved from sail to steam, and fuel from coal to fuel oil to nuclear; guns progressed from muzzle-loaders to automated 8-inch cannons; mechanical fire control was invented and elaborated. Each chapter considers the state of a subject technology when it was first used in war and what navies expected of it. Heinz present new perspectives and explore the process of technological introduction and innovation in a way that is relevant to today's navies, which face challenges and questions even greater than those of 1904, 1914, and 1939. Overall, the book provides useful insights from its analysis and discussion of key tecnological developments during the first half of the 20th century.

Besides these major innovations, there were also plenty of smaller breakthroughs, some of which only gained public attention after the war was over, sometimes as consumer products for civilians. A point that O’Hara and Heinz make to explain this differential in development time is that there is an emotional current to developing technology. As Professor Irving Holley wrote in the early 1950s, The greatest stumbling block to the revision of doctrine was probably not so much vested interests as the absence of a system for analyzing new weapons and their relation to prevailing concepts of utilizing weapons. The difference between the 104-gun first rate ship of the line HMS Victory of 1805 and HMS Dreadnought of 1905 is a clear example of technological progress, but where is the innovation? Where the text refers to aircraft, it includes both aircraft relying on engines to remain airborne (airplanes) and aircraft relying on buoyant gases (airships).This change began in the mid-19th century with the advent of coal-fired steam engines, armor, and mines. Radio expanded the volume and range of naval communications, while radar allowed platforms to see at great distances and in poor visibility.

These human factors all contributed equally, or more so, than the science and engineering did in developing these technologies into effective weapon systems. Neither ProQuest nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the translations. In 1914 the battle instructions of the British fleet specified tactics that were similar to those of a century before, at least in their most distilled form.Soon, the United States was at war and these vehicles, which quickly received the nickname “jeep,” were carrying Allied troops around battle zones all over the globe. Computer based systems whilst bringing efficiencies in operations, also expose users to increasing levels of vulnerability. O'Hara's work has also appeared in many periodicals and annuals including Naval History, Warship, World War II Magazine, and Storia Militare.