It may look like it does. With most wars there go magnificent inventions - rockets, nuclear energy and so on … on the other hand it may be just an illusion - it is possible they would exist even if there was no war, it is just coincidence they were created during war (or war might have speed up them a little but at the cost of other endeavors)… So what do you think?
I believe that wars tend to lend urgency to developing technologies. More money and resources are thrown at a problem that needs solving in order to achieve/advance one’s supremacy in conflicts. Wars also tend to be good labs for testing newly developed weapons under various real situations which lead to subsequent improvements in defensive and killing efficiency.
Seems like it both stimulates and stifles progress. It directs science in certain ways to aid the war effort, but that, by necessity, diverts it away from other areas. Not to mention the fact that lots of people are killed who might otherwise have contributed to the advancement of science.
QuickSilver pretty much hit it, I think. The conditions under which rapid progress occur aren’t unique to war, but war makes great circumstances under which to have rapid progress. For one, there’s that sense of urgency. Not just if you’re under attack, but even if you’re fighting somewhere else for an ideal there’s a sense of “we really, really need to figure this out or something bad might happen.”
Then, as mentioned, a lot of money gets thrown at anything that could give the slightest edge in wartime. So that combination of money+urgency is what really gives the kick.
The RD of this question is yes. As noted above, any situation that combines real world pressures and an unfettered means of innovation will always spark progress in both the theoretical and practical application of all the sciences, not merely the ones that have a direct application to weaponry. The Crimean War resulted in many advances in medicine, WW 1 gave us the first plastics and electronic communication on a broader scale than just Marconi’s transmissions across the Atlantic.
For this reason, the threat of war is a better stimulus than war itself. Much of the technology we enjoy today–weather satellites, microcomputers, cellular telephony, GPS, embedded controllers, et cetera–were directly developed as a result of weapons development during the Cold War.
Stranger
Necessity is the mother of invention.
You might say that ICs were developed under the threat of war - but not microcomputers. The first Intel processors had no military impetus at all, I know of no architectures driven by military needs, and defense use of microprocessors lags civilian use because of Rad-hardening and reliability requirements - to the extent that a place like Sandia has a fab to make processors obsolete in the outside world.
Pure research suffers greatly, as does Anthropology & Archaeology.
All war does is provide a definite direction for certain aspects of research and development. Consumer demand can do the same thing. I doubt if war could have made the personal computer or the cellular phone evolve at a faster rate.
True, but it was the need for on-board guidance computers and other microcontrollers for fly-by-wire control that led to both the development of compact, low energy microprocessors and firmware architecture that led to both commercial microcomputers and interchangeable peripherals.
On the country; war, or the threat of war (as in fear of nuclear confrontation of the Cold War) can be an impetus to dedicate fiscal and technical resources to a degree that is without precedent in commercial products. The Global Positioning System is a prime example; while the system has fostered a commercial industry of on the scale of tens of billions of dollars a year for receivers and software, the initial cost of developing and establishing the system (for the primary purpose of making missile guidance solutions more accurate, and secondary for military navigation) would be far beyond any individual commercial enterprise, even today. The same can be said for the nuclear industry, space launch vehicles and satellites, telecommunications, et cetera. We are–for better or worse–far more willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money on a perceived threat than we are on a fanciful notion of future luxury. This is particular true in areas where the benefit–such as cellular telephones or the Internet–was not an a priori conclusion, or even considered feasible for commercial use at the time it was conceived.
Stranger
^
Ok. This next case is not really during wartime, but I doubt if the DOD network system would have become the world wide web without civilian consumer demand.
War!
UNH
What is it good for?
It stimulates scientific progress
…nah, doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
To be clear, the “World Wide Web” was developed at CERN, specifically by the proposal of Tim Berners-Lee. The American DoD had nothing whatsoever to do with the development of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and the other associated developments that make up the modern “Web” as we know it, e.g. browser technology, streaming video, et cetera. The Internet, which is the intrastructure which supports the WWW (as well as numerous other services) was developed from ARPANET, CSNET, and NSFNET.
Stranger
While certainly wars or the threat of wars encourage progress in some field, they stifle progress in others. The Second World War set TV back 10 years, the BBC was already broadcasting in 1936, this was stopped in 1939 and did not restart until 1946.
So there is a confirmation bias. If you look at fields where war has caused progress then you might be concluded to answer in the affirmative. If you look at fields where the reverse has happened then you must say no. I think a wholistic picture is needed.
Investment stimulates scientific progress. War stimulates investment, but it isn’t the only thing. There was no imminent threat of war in the United States in the late 1800s, but that’s when we had our great flowering of Yankee Ingenuity. It was simply a profitable place for financial investment; Edison was raking in the dough and spending it on having people invent stuff.
I’m with those who say any stimulation in war-related fields is more than offset by the stifling of non-essential science and the loss of potential future scientists.