Lessons Learned from an Earlier Age.

• Author: Lewis, Mark J.
• Position: Emerging Technology Horizons

* The National Defense Industrial Association has established the Emerging Technologies Institute to help our nation's leaders understand the importance of investing in key technologies that will enable us to prevail on any future battlefield.

As previous columns have described, history offers notable examples of leaps in military technology that changed the nature of war. One of my favorites is the development of ironclad warships during the Civil War, a story that provides lessons that are directly applicable to our modern era.

In April 1861, after Virginia seceded from the Union, the U.S. Navy evacuated the Norfolk Navy Yard before the ships there could fall into Confederate hands. The steam frigate USS Merrimack was in the yard undergoing repairs following service as flagship of the Pacific Squadron and could not be sailed. Rather than allow the ship to fall into Confederate hands, the Navy decided to set her afire. The Merrimack was also scuttled, so the masts ignited but the hull sank before it could burn. When the Confederates took Norfolk, they assigned Lt. John Mercer Brooke the task of rebuilding the remains of the Merrimack not as a sailing ship, but as an ironclad ram. The 35-year-old Brooke was an excellent choice; the Naval Academy graduate was an accomplished scientist and engineer who had made important discoveries about the ocean floor that ultimately enabled the laying of early undersea telegraph cables.

First lesson: the military services must have the best and brightest technical minds available. The quality of our scientific workforce matters.

It's also worth stepping back and asking, why did the Merrimack and similar steam-powered ships of her time still have masts with sails in the first place? The answer is that the early steam engines were unreliable, difficult to maintain, and dependent on an unreliable fuel supply. In fact, in the British navy it took the advocacy of one of the Napoleonic era's foremost sailing captains, Lord Cochrane, to introduce steam power against the objections of many of the naval leaders of his day. Second lesson: sometimes it takes a strong advocate to introduce a new technology; even better if that advocate has established credibility with the previous generation of technology. Modern examples of this include Gen. Bernard Schriever and the Air Force's ICBM fleet, and Gen. John Jumper who oversaw the addition of weapons to unmanned aircraft.

Back to the Merrimack. In my mind's eye I always...