Abstract
One of the most interesting jobs I had was as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence between 1987 and 2003. The interest was not only in the technical challenges but also in the unbelievably rapid changes in the political and strategic background. When I started the Berlin Wall was still intact and the border between East and West Germany marked by barbed wire, observation towers, and antipersonnel mines. By the end of my time the wall and the Soviet Union had both gone and we had had the first Iraq war.
Along with conventional aspects of the cold war there were some intriguing unconventional aspects. Both the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO spent a great deal of time observing each other closely. Every opportunity was taken to photograph or if possible inspect each other’s hardware and any new bulge on the surface of an aircraft or submarine was carefully studied with a view to guessing why it was there and what it concealed. I often thought that we should add a few new spurious excrescences to pieces of our equipment just to divert effort on the other side in trying to guess what they were for! I wonder if they did it to us - I have a feeling that they probably did.
Over the latter years of the cold war a number of new technologies entered the military scene – arguably the most important was the arrival of solid state micro-devices that made rapid and real-time computation feasible in many operational situations. A great deal of effort went into developing sensors that could acquire data in volumes and at speeds previously unthinkable. This changed how the services operated. A good example is submarine hunting. We have all seen the nail-biting World War II films of submarine warfare in which the captains of the hunter and the hunted try to outfox each other with little to go on beyond a hunch about the other’s next move. One of the challenges in my time in MoD was to convince destroyer captains that they were now acquiring data so fast and from so many different sensors that data saturation was leading to declining performance because it was more than they could handle by experience alone. However, the defining moment came when one our scientists, supported by a small on-board computer that synthesised data and presented options, beat a very experienced captain in an anti-submarine exercise. Similarly I remember some very experienced and hardened special forces describing GPS as a ‘girlie toy’ that no soldier worth his salt would ever use!
I have some sympathy both with the destroyer captain and the marines. They both had traditional ways of doing their jobs that had served them well and they also knew that any device could go wrong. Before long, however, both recognised that once they understood its strengths and limitations, the new technology enhanced rather than undermined their traditional skills. They also knew that situations could arise, even if very rarely, in which they needed to ignore the technology and rely on judgement and experience because the solution offered did not make sense, presumably because the particular circumstances were never envisaged when the software was written. I imagine that we have all had our satnavs select bizarre routes on occasion. Judgement is still needed!