Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War'

Some Refections on Technological Idealism

I have recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War. The book tells the story of the US Air Force’s attempts to implement their dream of precision bombing and end the Second World War as quickly and bloodlessly as possible. This is unquestionably a fascinating (and troubling) story which is intelligently and compassionately told by Gladwell. I won’t provide a thorough review of the book here, but I would strongly recommend reading it (or indeed listening to the story as told on Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast). Instead, I reflect on a series of themes that emerge from the volume which appear to be as relevant now as they were in the mid-twentieth century.

I must confess to being a long-term admirer of Gladwell’s writing. Beyond his engaging prose and eye for a good story, he has an uncanny knack of being able to make complex ideas engaging and understandable (as a true academic, my knack seems to be to make engaging and understandable ideas complex and indecipherable). The Bomber Mafia is, however, distinct from most of Gladwell’s previous volumes. Rather than taking an idea and exploring it through multiple stories and vignettes (in Tipping Point he considers the nature of social change; in Blink it is the operation and power of intuitive judgement; Outliers explores the contingencies of success; while Talking to Strangers reflects on questions of trust and judgement), The Bomber Mafia tells a single story from which a series of themes emerge. In some ways the narrative structure of The Bomber Mafia makes it less intellectually satisfying than many of his previous volumes. You don’t quite get the same sense of the sweeping social implications of a powerful insight. But the narrative focus does have its benefits. The book is more empirically grounded and Gladwell makes excellent use of some startling source material. The detailed empirical focus of the book on advances in military technology (specifically the Norden Bombsight and the B-29 Superfortress) enables it to reveal a series of insights that are uncannily relevant to the technological present.

At heart of the story that Gladwell tells is the manifestation of a tension between idealism and pragmatism. The US Air Force’s Bomber Mafia, lead by figures such as Haywood Hansell, theorised that they could transform warfare. They strategised that precision day-time bombing could enable wars to be won from the air with minimal casualties. You want to secure victory over Hitler in Europe, then destroy Germany’s ball bearing manufacturing capabilities. You desire a quick end to the Pacific War, then target Japan’s aircraft manufacturing facilities. Despite their unfortunate nickname, the Bomber Mafia were moral idealists, whose theories were founded on the emerging technologies of the US Air Force. But, as with most idealist moral frameworks, things got complicated when the Bomber Mafia’s ideas encountered reality. In this case reality was the opposition’s air defences over Europe and unexpected winds (which turned out to be the as yet undiscovered Jet Stream) over Japan. And so it was in 1945 that the ultimate pragmatist Curtis (bombs away) LeMay replaced Hansell as commander of strategic bombing operations against Japan. Unlike Hansell, LeMay was not encumbered by a commitment to the best possible way of ending the war. Rather he focused his mind on the quickest practical way of ending the conflict within the limits of the available aviation technology.

From the Marianas Islands in the Pacific, LeMay deployed an area bombing approach in Japan that reflected the methods used by the British in Europe. Instead of the precise, day-light bombing of key strategic targets favoured by Hansell, LeMay opted for the indiscriminate, night time incendiary bombing of large Japanese cities (LeMay’s bombing raids actually deployed the recently developed incendiary mixture know as Napalm). The large scale devastation wrought by LeMay’s tactics is morally repugnant. For LeMay though it represented what he saw as the most pragmatic way of ending the war, preventing the need for an American invasion of Japan, and ultimately saving lives (LeMay would insist that his area bombing campaign was more important to the eventual surrender of the Japanese than the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

In academia the tensions between idealism and pragmatism, and theory and empiricism, revealed in Gladwell Bomber Mafia are all too familiar. Reconciling something which may be theoretically elegant with a much more messy reality, or aligning an idealist position (however morally sound) with the need for contextual compromise is a central aspect of scholarship. To be effective, scholarly inquiry is at its best when it seeks to operate at the interface of idealist theory and pragmatic empiricism. Truth is most likely found at the intersection of the overarching perspective of the expert and the contextual understanding of those on the ground.

Towards the end of the book, Gladwell reflects on the relative moral appeal of Hayward Hansell and Curtis LeMay,

“We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We liven an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way that those technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band for believers insist that they be used to that purpose. That is what the Bomber Mafia tried to do—even as their careful plans were lost in the clouds over Europe and blown sideways over the skies of Japan. They persisted, even in the face of technology’s inevitable misdirection […] (Gladwell, 2021page 198).

It is at this point that I think the implications of Gladwell’s story for our contemporary world become most apparent. In a world of rapid developments in the fields of nanotechnology, biomedicine, AI, robotics, and geo-engineering, the insights of 1945 appear to be relevant now more than ever. Through my own research on digital technology I am keenly aware of the ways in which the idealistic dreams of tech entrepreneurs become corrupted through contact with the real world. The California Ideology once suggested that the internet could be a radical space of social freedom, where the powers of state control and oppression could no longer reach us. Also, remember when it seemed that all Google wanted to do was to helpfully organise the world of knowledge for us and Facebook desired nothing more than to connect everyone, free of charge.

The transformation of modern digital technology from a liberating force to surveillance capitalism is clearly different to Gladwell’s story of the Bomber Mafia. During the Second World War, the dream of day light high precision bombing didn’t work so air force technology was used for other purposes. Google and Facebook’s digital technology appears to work just fine. The corruption of digital technology has emerged as part of the commercialisation process. But, I remain uneasy about the lessons that Gladwell draws from his-story. Ultimately Gladwell’s book is a celebration of idealistic dreamers over pragmatists. He admires the persistent idealism of the Bomber Mafia, as they pressed on in the face of the belligerent obstacles that the real world presented their dream with. Rather than selling out to reality (as LeMay did), Gladwell lauds the Bomber Mafia for it obsessive idealism. He concludes that in the long run, the Bomber Mafia and Hayward Hansell’s persistence won out. In an era of precision guided bombing, warfare can now be more targeted and less destructive. I am not a military expert, by any measure, but it does not seem to me that the use of modern air force technology has made contemporary warfare any less horrific, or indeed has enabled conflicts to been ended more quickly. While military technology has progressed, the ideology of strategic, bloodless warfare still appears to be flawed.

I can certainly appreciate the allure of obsessive idealism. But that idealism will always collide with reality with often unpleasant consequences. While technological development can, undoubtedly, be animated by the energy which obsessive idealism can bring, I do wonder whether less idealism and more realism is needed in the early stages of the development of any new technology. This isn’t a realism which just asks what will work, but also considers if a technology does work how might it be used. As soon as any technology claims idealistic superiority it can be difficult to resist. Rather than relying on idealism it is surely better to candidly reflect on both what technology should be and what it could become. It is only when we hold together the ideal and the possible that we can hope to make effective moral judgements about the role of technology in our world.

I highly recommend this book as a truly fascinating read. But I remain unconvinced that the moral convictions of those who relentlessly pursue technological advances are an effective protection against the corruptions and misuses of the technologies they bring in to the world. What if idealism shields us from the darker sides of technology’s path dependencies? What if idealism is actually the original sin of technological advance.

Gladwell, M. (2021) The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set In War (Dublin, Allen lane).