How Does War Fuel Innovation?

For centuries, military conflict has propelled nations to search for technological solutions to end the battle or threat. Often those solutions, from highways to computers, outlast the fight and alter society.

The Cold War’s impact was as pervasive as any declared war, influencing technology from 1945 to 1990.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1950’s program to create highways was originally intended to help move military forces and evacuate cities during a nuclear emergency. It was formally called the Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways — spurred auto travel and laid the base for large suburban migration.

The computer was also greatly influenced by war and its shadow. World War II led the United States to invest $500,000 to develop one of the first electronic computers. Because of the need to make a computation device quickly, the federal government poured an abundance of money into it. 

The result in 1946: the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, a 30-ton behemoth at the University of Pennsylvania whose operation caused brownouts in Philadelphia. Brownouts are an intentional or unintentional drop in voltage in an electrical power supply system.

Its mission was to compute ballistics tables for Aberdeen Proving Ground. Previously, the Army scoured women’s colleges — men were in battle — to locate math majors to compute the tables that soldiers used to mechanically aim large guns. The women’s job title, “computers,” became the name of the machine.

In a sense, the Internet began as a military project. Originating in the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense funded a project called ARPANET. Their intention was to develop the technologies and protocols necessary to allow multiple computers to connect directly to one another. This would enable people to share vast amounts of information with each other at unprecedented speeds.

A computer network could also have another benefit: national security. By creating a robust and flexible network, the United States could ensure that in the event of catastrophe, access to the nation’s supercomputers could remain intact. ARPANET’s protocols allowed information to travel across different routes. If something happened to a computer node along one route, the information could take another path to get to the right destination.

The foundation for the Internet is in the protocols and designs built by the ARPANET team. And while no war directly played into its development, the threat of future conflicts did. Today, the United States Department of Defense funds research and development (R&D) projects across multiple disciplines.