Jennifer Light’s From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America traces the transfer of military techniques, technologies, and experts to city management and organization during the early Cold War. Defense intellectuals approached urban problems using techniques developed during the Second World War; systems analysis, aerial surveillance, and computer simulation Coincidentally enough, From Warfare to Welfare itself originated in the defense establishment. It grew out of a historical brief on information technology decision-making aids that Light wrote while working at RAND.
Initially, mayors criticized the profligate spending of organizations like NASA. Cities, they thought, were in conflict with defense as national priorities. But the defense industry and military think tanks, hedging their bets against the end of the Cold War, desired new markets. And city managers and mayors were drawn to the authority that techniques of command, control, and communications offered them.
Initially, in the early 1950s, the defense community was primarily about the city as a weapon in a potential nuclear war. Effective dispersal of key economic and military assets, many theorists argued, could make a nuclear strike less damaging, and allow the US …show more content…
Had From Warfare to Welfare been more chronologically organized, the way in which defense thinking in urban environments waxed and waned with a number of historical factors, like the Vietnam War and economic regression in the 1970s, would have been easier to notice. So too would have been the opportunistic movement of defense intellectuals, which was so frequently from failed urban initiative to a new, expensive, and soon-to-fail
Initially, mayors criticized the profligate spending of organizations like NASA. Cities, they thought, were in conflict with defense as national priorities. But the defense industry and military think tanks, hedging their bets against the end of the Cold War, desired new markets. And city managers and mayors were drawn to the authority that techniques of command, control, and communications offered them.
Initially, in the early 1950s, the defense community was primarily about the city as a weapon in a potential nuclear war. Effective dispersal of key economic and military assets, many theorists argued, could make a nuclear strike less damaging, and allow the US …show more content…
Had From Warfare to Welfare been more chronologically organized, the way in which defense thinking in urban environments waxed and waned with a number of historical factors, like the Vietnam War and economic regression in the 1970s, would have been easier to notice. So too would have been the opportunistic movement of defense intellectuals, which was so frequently from failed urban initiative to a new, expensive, and soon-to-fail