Abstract
It is well-documented that the 1957 launch of Sputnik I initiated a flurry of US government activity aimed at reducing a perceived shortfall in US scientific, technological, and military capacity vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Less well known, however, is that Sputnik’s launch immediately preceded a period of rapid organizational and technological innovation within the US intelligence community. This article investigates the contribution of the Sputnik scare to this innovation. In particular, this article applies Barry Posen’s model of innovation to the historical case of post-Sputnik innovation in the US intelligence community. I find the historiographic and documentary record to indicate that Posen’s theory of innovation has substantial explanatory power in the empirical context examined here. In particular, the US intelligence services’ improved capacity to collect and analyze information regarding Soviet rocket and missile programs appears to have been initiated by a process of external auditing motivated by an increase in the perceived level of threat posed by the USSR.
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Notes
- 1.
Bush is explicit in linking basic science to innovation, stating, “New products and new processes … are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science” (Bush 1945).
- 2.
Posen’s model seeks to explain innovation in military doctrine. Here his model is applied to military and non-military organizations. However, these organizations are similar in that they possess certain traits that should make them (in the absence of external intervention) resistance to change. Specifically, Posen explains that militaries are “parochial, closed, large, endowed with all sorts of resources, and masters of a particularly arcane technology” (Posen 1986: 39). With exception of resources, these traits characterize the pre-Sputnik intelligence community.
- 3.
While the term doctrine is typically not used to refer to the activities of the intelligence services, the changes outlined here largely correspond to changes that would in a military context constitute doctrine. Specifically, the employment of novel means (e.g. imagery collection and analysis) to realize a stated end (understanding Soviet missile capacity) represents the kind of innovation that Posen aims to describe.
- 4.
Posen’s definition of military doctrine innovation refers to a departure from the status quo and not necessarily an improvement. At any given time, a state’s appropriate course of action might be either stagnation (although Posen advocates a sort of intentional stagnation that is the result of careful deliberation) or innovation depending on the external and internal conditions facing the state. Because whether or not a given change will increase military effectiveness can only be determined following the change (i.e. once the change has been tested in the setting for which it is intended), I also use doctrinal innovation to refer to intentional and significant departures from the status quo.
- 5.
On occasion, human intelligence was successfully used to overcome the shortage of technical means of assessing Soviet capabilities. The International Geophysical Year (IGY) was an international scientific research initiative (lasting from July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958) in which Soviet and American scientists (as well as researchers from other countries) collaborated on a variety of scientific research projects. During this project, Hugh Odishaw, the head of the US National Committee for the IGY, required that all American participants send him any Soviet scientific documents that they may have obtained during the course of the collaboration (Bulkeley 1991:151).
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Schmid, J. (2018). Intelligence Innovation: Sputnik, the Soviet Threat, and Innovation in the US Intelligence Community. In: Kosal, M. (eds) Technology and the Intelligence Community. Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75232-7_3
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