Wotan's Workshop
Military Experiments before World War II
Brian McCue
ABOUT THE BOOK
The resulting lack of understanding of the nature of military experimentation has acted to the detriment of the various efforts now ongoing at the service and joint levels. The outward resemblance of military experiments to the more familiar exercises and field tests, and the outward resemblance of the experiments’ technology surrogates to prototypes, have only served to deepen the misunderstanding. An attempt to better understand military experimentation by detailed examination of some of today’s efforts would be hampered by the need for a considerable background in the technologies that the experiments address. There is also room for concern that discussion of present-day efforts would be seen primarily as praise or criticism of the particular efforts, and thereby rendered useless as a vehicle for discussion of experimentation itself.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Themes
The structure of experimentation
Models, modeling, and a paradox
Surrogates
Artificialities
Theory, hypothesis, and serendipity
“All’s fair in love and war”—What about in experimentation?
Three Idiosyncratic Non-Service Efforts
G. F. Gause’s bugs
Hector Bywater’s wind-up ship models
Fletcher Pratt’s naval war game
Observations on the idiosyncratic efforts
The U.S. Prepares for World War II
The Fleet Problems, 1923–1940
The experiments of Billy Mitchell
Major “Pete” Ellis and USMC inter-war experimentation The Army’s Louisiana Maneuvers
Pacific Fleet Fighter Director Officers’ School Observations on the U.S. experiments
Germany Prepares for World War II
The German Army’s experiments with blitzkrieg
The German Navy’s experiments with wolf packs
A Limited Technical Assessment
Observations on the German experiments
Overall Observations
Recapitulating the themes
The experiments’ points of similarity
The paradox of modeling resolved
References