State Building through Mediation: The U.S. Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group in World War II

Abstract

War makes states and states make war. However, state building to mediate among science, technological innovation, and warfare is very different from state building to mobilize people, revenue, science, and industry for war. Where the latter prizes autonomy, authority, and planning, the former values experimentation and learning across plural modalities of practice. This article explains the difference between mobilization and mediation; provides a theory of state building for mediation in wartime and applies that theory to the case of the United States’ Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG) in World War II. ASWORG was born into a crisis in the Atlantic that divided scientists and soldiers, and yet also made them need each other. The U.S. War Department tried to overcome the conflict with techniques designed for mobilization, and it failed. While historical institutionalism can explain why it failed, it cannot explain how ASWORG successfully mediated science and warfare. Drawing on actor-network theory and theories of emergent institutions, and inspired by pragmatism and complexity theory, I explain how scientists and soldiers in ASWORG learned through joint reflection to mediate the incommensurable practices of science and warfare in ways that neither could predict. They transposed techniques from physics to warfare in operations research; recomposed operations research from a scientific control system to a monitoring system that facilitated mutual learning; recombined defensive and offensive military tactics; and circulated themselves between the factory, the laboratory, and the battlefield to speed the adjustment of new technologies and military tactics.