Military, Scientific, and Technological

Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England’s Deliverance in 1588

By Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker. Yale University Press, 2023, 768 pp.

Convoys: The British Struggle Against Napoleonic Europe and America

By Roger Knight. Yale University Press, 2022, 416 pp.

Two new books chronicle British naval successes against foreign adversaries. Martin and Parker’s superb account of the ill-fated Spanish effort to invade England in 1588 is remarkable in its level of detail, drawing on naval archeology and manuscripts to provide a full and vivid history. Readers can follow the decision-making of the Spanish King Philip II and grasp the complexity of his motivations, his deep religious conviction entangled with geopolitical and dynastic imperatives. The Spanish monarch wanted to overthrow his English counterpart, Queen Elizabeth, and return England to Catholicism. To do so, he planned to move his armada of roughly 130 ships into position in the English Channel to escort an invading force of 30,000 troops gathered by the Duke of Parma in Flanders. Almost from the start of the expedition, the armada faced stormy weather. It managed to reach the Channel and face off with the English fleet, but English tactics prevailed. Instead of boarding enemy ships,as the Spanish sought to do, the English bombarded their opponents at close range, helped by their ability to quickly reload guns midbattle. English attacks scattered the armada, which was driven into the North Sea and then obliged to return to Spain, suffering numerous shipwrecks and catastrophic losses.

During the Napoleonic Wars in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy had to protect the United Kingdom’s overseas trade in order to keep the country supplied and able to wage war against France. Knight’s focus is not on the great naval battles such as Trafalgar, in 1805, but instead on the work of convoys, the large fleets of merchant and naval vessels that traveled across the world to and from British ports and were essential to the British military victory. It is a fascinating story well told, for Knight is not only impressed by the commitment, discipline, and seamanship that made the convoys possible but also under no illusion about the misery of life on these ships and the rancor between ship owners, the Royal Navy, and their insurers. The losses were heavy and constant, with ships regularly seized and their sailors killed or taken prisoner. But as with the armada, the weather was the main killer; storms battered ships and often drove them onto rocks.

Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence By Paul Scharre. Norton, 2023, 496 pp.

Information in War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence By Benjamin M. Jensen, Christopher Whyte, and Scott Cuomo. Georgetown University Press, 2022, 266 pp.

Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is not an easy topic to write about. The technology is developing at a rapid pace in ways that lay audiences struggle to understand. Two new books ably take up the challenge. Scharre is a thoughtful, knowledgeable, and capable guide. He explains why AI matters and charts the areas that will determine which country gets the most out of its investments, focusing on data collection, computing power, talent, and the institutional structures able to harness AI technology to real-world applications, including those in military tactics and strategy. Artificial intelligence is now considered to be one of the most important areas of competition between the United States and China, one in which the United States currently has a lead. That advantage cannot be taken for granted; Scharre urges more cooperation among democracies and recommends export controls to limit Chinese technological development. In this respect, AI poses a test of two systems: the more chaotic and disaggregated U.S. model against the centralized Chinese model.The Chinese government wants to use AI to better engineer social control, and Scharre asks Western AI specialists to avoid becoming complicit in that project.

Jensen, Whyte, and Cuomo’s thought-provoking book is less about the promise of the military uses of AI and more about why that promise may not be realized. They argue that new technologies succeed when they fit into existing institutional structures and when they have advocates who can explain how they might make possible new forms of warfare. The authors’ analysis rests on full studies of information technologies that have been adopted unevenly by different countries and different military branches. For instance, the United Kingdom successfully deployed radar in time for World War II because it had the right mix of personalities and a clear strategic need for the technology; France and the United States did not. The construction in the 1950s of the semiautomatic ground environment network, or SAGE, to manage U.S. defenses against a bomber attack faced few institutional barriers. The studies on the revolution in military affairs of the 1990s and the development of the “Global Battle Network,” which combined intelligence sensors with armed remotely piloted aircraft, explore the mixed results of the experimentation of recent times, with the U.S. Army getting higher marks for innovation than the Marine Corps.

Atomic Bill: A Journalist’s Dangerous Ambition in the Shadow of the Bomb By Vincent Kiernan. Three Hills, 2022, 312 pp.

Bill Laurence, a science reporter for The New York Times, was asked to join the Manhattan Project in its final months,

through the July 1945 Trinity Test and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, to help draft the project’s official press communiqués. Thereafter, he traded on his reputation as both an eyewitness to and the first chronicler of these momentous events. He has not been fortunate in his biographer. Kiernan’s research was meticulous, and he finds much to deplore in Laurence’s behavior: the journalist’s zeal for speculative scientific breakthroughs that led him to ignore skeptics; his exaggerated prose and occasional plagiarism; and most of all, his loss of objectivity from getting too close to power. Laurence did not tell the whole story about the bomb, including the effects of radiation.The indictment is compelling, although reporting during a war, as any frontline correspondent could testify, is always full of ethical traps.