Military Tech the United States Thesis

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Indirectly, the technological and industrial endeavors of the First World War led to an increased emphasis on the importance of science knowledge and practical application throughout the country, and when there was no longer a war effort towards which to direct these energies, the fervor did not die away but rather found itself applied in new directions, such as crop dusting, increasing diversification of automobiles, and many other innovations (Highbeam 2010).

The 1920s ended with the market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, and though technology continued to advance its progress was necessarily slowed during this period. World War II saw a similar resurgence in technological and industrial innovations, however, and the following decade of the 1950s saw a major increase in the number and the affordability of many new or newer household technologies. Among these was the all important television, which would change the way the world sees itself and understands the complex relationships that govern it through its profound communicative powers (SCNET 2010). Computer science also develop rapidly during the war, largely as a means of encrypting messages and attempting to decrypt messages of the enemy; though it would be several more decades before computers were a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, the true beginnings of this massive technological change in our world can be unequivocally traced to World War II.

Alternative Views

This understanding of technological developments and their relationship to the military actions of the two World Wars of the twentieth century is not wholly accepted, nor is it the only explanation for the identified technology explosions that has been put forward. It has even been argued that the World Wars had a depressive effect on technology in most sectors, and that the technology explosions of the 1920 and 1950s are actually evidence of this. These technologies could have emerged sooner, this argument contends, had the World Wars not consumed such a large amount of the materials and human resources of the preceding decades.

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There is definitely some merit to this argument, as it is unquestionable that the two World Wars did indeed consume the vast majority of available industrial and technology resources during the years of the war effort. This view is grossly oversimplified, however; though it is true that the war efforts consumed vast amounts of industrial and technological resources, it is equally true that many of these resources were created or at least tapped into because of the war effort. The potential for civilian technological development and massive industrialization might have existed without the war efforts, but it took these military mobilizations of industry and technology to bring these potentials to full realization. One could certainly argue that it would have been somehow better had the civilian technological advancements of the 1920s and the 1950s occurred without the military actions and innovations that preceded them, but this argument is both highly subjective and ultimately moot given the actual trajectory of technology's progress in the twentieth century.

Conclusion

The inevitability of war is a matter of great debate amongst philosophers and historians, but the fact that war has existed for all of recorded human history is indisputable. As war necessarily creates matters of life and death, often on scales unimaginable in other circumstances, it is perhaps unsurprising that war and military actions are such major driving forces behind the advancement of technology. Technology is still changing the face of warfare and of daily life in the current era......

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