The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

by Alexander C. Karp

The structural issue was that those designing the army’s software system at the time, including programmers at Lockheed Martin, in Bethesda, Maryland, were too far and too disconnected from the actual users of the software, the soldiers and intelligence analysts, in the field. The gulf, between user and developer, had grown too wide to sustain any sort of productive cycle of rapid iteration and development. The construction of any technology, including military software systems, requires an intimacy between builder and user—an emotional and often physical proximity that for many government contractors in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland outside Washington, D.C., was as foreign as the Afghan insurgents American troops were fighting a world away. In another era, U.S. fighter pilots during World War II would frequently visit the factory of Grumman Corporation, the predecessor of Northrop Grumman in Bethpage, New York, on Long Island, to provide suggestions on the design and construction of the company’s planes, including the F6F Hellcat, which proved decisive in the air battle over the Pacific, according to the author Arthur L. Herman. In Afghanistan more than half a century later, however, that link between soldier and supplier had withered, if not been severed completely.