Engineering and War:

Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives

 iii

Synthesis Lectures on Engineers,

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Engineering and War: Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives

Ethan Blue, Michael Levine, Dean Nieusma
December 2013
Engineers Engaging Community: Water and Energy
Carolyn Oldham, Gregory Crebbin, Stephen Dobbs, Andrea Gaynor
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iv
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Randika Jayasinghe, Usman Mushtaq, Toni Alyce Smythe, Caroline Baillie
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A Hybrid Imagination: Science and Technology in Cultural Perspectives

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Tragedy in the Gulf: A Call for a New Engineering Ethic

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Needs and Feasibility: A Guide for Engineers in Community Projects—The Case of Waste for Life
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Caroline Baillie, George Catalano
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Engineering and Society: Working Towards Social Justice, Part II: Decisions in the 21st Century
George Catalano , Caroline Baillie
2009

Engineering and Society: Working Towards Social Justice, Part III: Windows on Society
Caroline Baillie, George Catalano
2009
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Engineering and War: Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives

Ethan Blue, Michael Levine, and Dean Nieusma
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ISBN: 9781608458776 ebook

DOI 10.2200/S00548ED1V01Y201311ETS020

A Publication in the Morgan & Claypool Publishers series

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Engineering and War:
Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives

Ethan Blue
University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Michael Levine
University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

Dean Nieusma
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, U.S.

SYNTHESIS LECTURES ON ENGINEERS, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY

#20

M
&C MORGAN & CLAYPOOL PUBLISHERS
viii

ABSTRACT
This book investigates the close connections between engineering and war, broadly understood,
and the conceptual and structural barriers that face those who would seek to loosen those connec-
tions. It shows how military institutions and interests have long influenced engineering education,
research, and practice and how they continue to shape the field in the present. The book also pro-
vides a generalized framework for responding to these influences useful to students and scholars
of engineering, as well as reflective practitioners. The analysis draws on philosophy, history, critical
theory, and technology studies to understand the connections between engineering and war and
how they shape our very understandings of what engineering is and what it might be. After provid-
ing a review of diverse dimensions of engineering itself, the analysis shifts to different dimensions
of the connections between engineering and war. First, it considers the ethics of war generally and
then explores questions of integrity for engineering practitioners facing career decisions relating
to war. Next, it considers the historical rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, especially
from World War II to the present. Finally, it considers a range of responses to the militarization
of engineering from those who seek to unsettle the status quo. Only by confronting the ethical,
historical, and political consequences of engineering for warfare, this book argues, can engineering
be sensibly reimagined.

KEYWORDS
engineering reform, engineering profession, history of engineering, epistemology, ethics, just war,
integrity, military-industrial complex, non-lethal weapons, peace, social justice
 ix

Contents
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ��xi

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

1 The Close Alignment of Engineering and Warfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ���1

1.1 Direct and Indirect Connections: Engineering, Warfare, Militarism���������������� 1
1.2 What Is Engineering? �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3
1.2.1 Engineering As a Domain of Knowledge�������������������������������������������� 6
1.2.2 Engineering As a Set of Practices�������������������������������������������������������� 7
1.2.3 Engineering As a Profession���������������������������������������������������������������� 8
1.2.4 Engineering As an Ideology���������������������������������������������������������������� 9
1.3 Engineering's Surprising Silence on Warfare ������������������������������������������������ 12
1.3.1 Why the Silence? ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 14

2 The Ethics of War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  19

2.1 Do Engineers Have Special Ethical Responsibilities around Warfare?���������� 20
2.2 Just War Theory���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 21
2.2.1 Jus ad Bellum – “Justice of War”: When is it just to go to war?�������� 21
2.2.2 Jus in Bello— “Justice in War”: How can war be fought justly?�������� 27
2.2.3 Just War and Engineering Ethics������������������������������������������������������ 29

3 Engineering Integrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  31
3.1 What Is Integrity?������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 31
3.1.1 Integrity As Self-Integration ������������������������������������������������������������ 33
3.1.2 Integrity As Maintenance of Identity������������������������������������������������ 35
3.1.3 Integrity As Standing for Something������������������������������������������������ 36
3.1.4 Integrity As Moral Purpose�������������������������������������������������������������� 37
3.1.5 Integrity As a Virtue�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 39
3.2 Integrity and Social Structure ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 40
3.2.1 Structures of Alienation�������������������������������������������������������������������� 41

4 Historical Entwinements: From Colonial Conflicts to Cold War. . . . . . . . . . . . .  47

4.1 Birth of the Military-Industrial Complex������������������������������������������������������ 47
4.2 The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex�������������������������������������������������� 50
4.2.1 Long Histories, Global Histories������������������������������������������������������ 50
x
4.3 Social History of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex���������������������� 53
4.3.1 From Military Technologies to Socio-Economic Practices �������������� 54
4.3.2 From Socio-Economic Practices to Technoscientific Research �������� 55
4.3.3 Big Social Science������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 56

5 Historical Entwinements, Post-Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  59

5.1 “Soft Kill” Weapons Research ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 59
5.1.1 The Rise of Non-Lethal Weaponry �������������������������������������������������� 60
5.1.2 Civilian Crowd Control�������������������������������������������������������������������� 61
5.2 Non-Lethal Weapons Research Comes of Age���������������������������������������������� 62
5.2.1 Second-Generation Soft-Kill Weaponry ������������������������������������������ 64
5.3 The Increasing Depersonalization of Violence������������������������������������������������ 64
5.4 DARPA’s Spiral of Innovation������������������������������������������������������������������������ 65
5.4.1 Military Technology Proliferation ���������������������������������������������������� 66
5.4.2 Contemporary Military Research Funding���������������������������������������� 67

6 Responding to Militarism in Engineering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  69

6.1 Historic Responses: Anti-War Engineers ������������������������������������������������������ 69
6.1.1 Anti-Militarism Reform Efforts�������������������������������������������������������� 70
6.1.2 Humanitarian Reform Efforts ���������������������������������������������������������� 73
6.2 Ethical Challenges of Contemporary Warfare������������������������������������������������ 76
6.2.1 The Hidden Violence of Depersonalized War���������������������������������� 77
6.2.2 The Blurring of Military Targets ������������������������������������������������������ 78
6.3 Contemporary Responses to Engineering and War���������������������������������������� 80
6.3.1 Engineering for Peace and Justice ���������������������������������������������������� 80
6.3.2 Engineering for Sustainable Community Development�������������������� 84

7 Conclusion: Facing the Entwinement of Engineering and War . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  89

Additional Resources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  93

References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  95

Author Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

 xi

Preface
This book is the result of a fortunate alignment of interests among three scholars with very distinct
research profiles, analytic inclinations, and even conceptual styles. The prospect of the book came
through our joint participation in Caroline Baillie’s research project, “Engineering Education for
Social and Environmental Justice.” This project brought together scholars from a wide variety of
disciplines—across engineering, the social sciences, and the humanities—with the goal of forging
common ground around the project’s theme. While the participants’ primary goal was the cre-
ation of innovative interdisciplinary educational content intended specifically for the engineering
classroom, our interdisciplinary collaboration in the larger project resulted in heady conversations,
occasional clashing of perspectives, and even some wild ideas for collaborative mini-projects that
forced us out of our comfort zones and into spaces of genuine intellectual exploration. This book
is one such example.
None of the authors of this book has expertise precisely at the intersection of engineering
and war/militarism, yet all of us have expertise that intersects with engineering or militarism. This
project required each of us to put on the table what we thought best contributed to answering the
question: How can engineers, engineering students, and engineering educators better understand and
respond to the many explicit and subtle forces steering engineering work toward the ends of warfare?
While none of us could provide a convincing answer to that question on our own, together, we
thought, a more persuasive response could be formulated. This book is our answer to the question.
We acknowledge our answer remains partial, that there are major forces left unaddressed, that other
scholars have offered contributions that we have neglected. This is necessarily the case, a condition
of both the ambitiousness of the question we sought to answer and the intersections of our own
scholarly expertise. But to say that our answer is partial is not to say that it isn’t necessary, tackling
as it does dimensions of engineering militarism that are rarely treated together.
The writing of this book has not been without its challenges, not least of which were con-
fronting the very disciplinary differences that animated the collaboration. Rather than attempting
to wash out those differences, we have chosen a structure for the book that puts them into relief.
Each of us has put his mark on the entire manuscript, but individual sections also highlight each
of our distinct approaches and styles. Michael Levine, a philosopher, provided the philosophical
background on the ethics of war in Chapter 2 as well as the deep analysis of integrity to provide
guidance for individual engineers’ career decision making in Chapter 3. Ethan Blue, a social and
cultural historian, provided the historical analysis of Chapters 4 and 5, which highlights the
remarkable influence—both direct and indirect—of the military-industrial-academic complex
xii PREFACE
in steering the work of huge numbers of engineers in the U.S. and beyond over seven decades.
Dean Nieusma, whose background is in science and technology studies, provided the material on
engineering reformers for Chapter 6. He also constructed most of the scaffold for the book in
Chapters 1 and 7, weaving together content and insights from all three authors into an overarch-
ing analytic framework.
The challenges of bringing this diverse material together were compensated by the commit-
ment each author brought to the project and, not least, the learning that resulted from disciplinary
button-pushing and the need to interrogate one’s own assumptions as scholar and would-be re-
former of engineering. We hope and expect that our readers will follow a similar journey—some-
times finding useful insights and sometimes experiencing disquiet, sometimes identifying produc-
tive tensions and sometimes disagreeing outright, but always challenging the too-easy dismissal of
that which diverges from one’s own worldview.
 xiii

Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge all those who contributed to the completion of this book. First,
we acknowledge Caroline Baillie’s effort to bring us together as part of her widely multidisciplinary
research grant titled, “Engineering Education for Social and Environmental Justice.” We acknowl-
edge financial support for that grant (CG10-1519) from the Australian Teaching and Learning
Council, which made possible early research for the book. In the context of this larger initiative,
Caroline encouraged us to collaborate on this project and to set our collective expectations high in
terms of producing a full manuscript for her series, Synthesis Lectures on Engineers, Technology
and Society. Caroline provided on-going support for the project, stepping in when necessary to
help keep the project moving forward and stepping back when appropriate to allow us to sort out
for ourselves the shape of the final project. Caroline, as Series Editor for the book, and Morgan and
Claypool editor, Andrea Koprowicz, both exercised great patience and provided valuable assistance
in moving the book into publication.
We also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful critique and helpful sug-
gestions on a prior version of the manuscript. Many of their insights have been integrated into the
book’s present version, and while some of their feedback extended beyond the scope of this project,
they have helped us to be more explicit in framing our work to make clearer what we have sought
to achieve with the book. In addition to these formal reviews, George Catalano and Camar Díaz
Torres provided thoughtful criticism and insightful suggestions that have greatly improved this
present version. Our thanks also go to Damian Cox and Marguerite La Caze, whose co-authored
work with Michael Levine on integrity contributed greatly to Chapter 3. Michael Levine is grateful
to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Durham University for a Senior Fellowship in 2013.
Finally, we wish to thank the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace community for providing
an intellectual home for the sort of work carried out here. Deeply interdisciplinary work of this sort
is difficult in most academic institutional contexts. The ESJP community provides both refuge and
a model for balancing high expectations regarding analytic rigor with great generosity in terms of
research approach and scholarly style.
 1

CHAPTER 1

The Close Alignment of Engineering

and Warfare
Military values and goals have long played a significant role in shaping engineering, and that influ-
ence remains today even though it is often hidden. This book explores the nature of that influence,
focusing on its subtler structural dimensions as well as important ethical implications that arise from
such structures. The structural dimensions of influence we will explore span individual values,
disciplinary problem-solving protocols and assumptions, organizational missions, and even entire
national research enterprises. These structures are patterns of social arrangement that repeat across
diverse domains and often impact people, as individuals and as actors embedded within larger or-
ganizations, in ways that escape their awareness.
We will focus our attention throughout this book on two such structures: the conceptual and
institutional frameworks that direct much engineering activity toward the purposes of warfare even
when many of the engineers participating in this activity never explicitly decide to pursue careers
advancing warfare technologies. Conceptual frameworks are the mental models people use to deter-
mine the possible, reasonable, and preferred courses of action in any given situation. In a way, they
are filters we use to make sense of complex circumstances or environments in order to coordinate
our actions with those of others. Institutional frameworks, on the other hand, are the logics and
rules that operate at the level of social systems—from economic incentive structures to formalized
political procedures to informal social norms.
Using these tools, we investigate how military interests and values have become insinuated
into engineering in ways that go far beyond individual engineers choosing careers to advance war-
fare technologies. But those who choose such careers are part of our story, too.

1.1 DIRECT AND INDIRECT CONNECTIONS: ENGINEERING,

WARFARE, MILITARISM
While it is difficult to determine the exact number of engineers doing military-related work, Papa-
dopoulos and Hable provide a useful baseline. Using federal employment and research statistics in
the U.S., they calculate that “8.8% of professional engineering effort is devoted to defense-related
activity [which is] about 3 times higher than for the overall workforce defense effort (2.8%)” (2008,
4). Since this percentage is of “full-time equivalents,” and many engineers work only part-time
on military projects, “in reality, a much higher percentage of engineers are likely to be engaged in
defense-related work as part of their employment” (2008, 5). Papadopoulos and Hable go on to
2 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
estimate that, for the period 1986 to 2006, “US defense R&D accounted for approximately 57% of
all federal R&D expenditures” (2008, 3) and “about 51% of federally funded engineering research
is defense related” (6). Ultimately, estimates of the total percentage of U.S. engineers involved in
military research range from 30 to 60% (Papadopoulos and Hable 2008; Meiksins 1996).
Determining what constitutes “military” work is even more complex. The interconnections
between the military, industry, and universities, in particular, have become so encompassing that
even engineering education, practice, and research that may appear to exist apart from military ap-
plication is implicated either as growing out of military goals and interests or as potentially usable
for military purposes. As engineering historian David Noble (1979) has shown, U.S. educational
reforms after World War I, particularly in engineering, were designed to leverage the perceived
positive educational results of military training, namely to provide disciplined engineers who were
ready and willing to serve corporate and military interests. Cornell University Dean of Engineering
William Streett similarly reflected on the “intriguing bond between military enterprise, with its
emphasis on discipline, loyalty, and uniformity, and other institutions, including science, engineer-
ing, government, and education” (1993, 3).
These are some of the explicit connections between engineering and militarism. As our
analysis unfolds, we will pay increasing attention to the implicit connections, those that are more
difficult to identify and even trickier to characterize. While most of our empirical material focuses
on the two extremes—engineers working for war and those working for peace—our analysis will
show how that larger group of engineers “in between” these poles is also implicated. To do this, we
will highlight how the subtler connections between engineering and militarism implicate a much
broader community of engineers in advancing militaristic values and goals, even though they do so
indirectly and unintentionally.
Given the intertwined nature of engineering and militarism, it can be difficult for engineers
who have a clear commitment against participating in war-related activities to manage their ca-
reers in a way that honors their values. For others who have no particular commitment against
engineering for warfare, considerable incentives exist to pull them in that direction. Drawing on
traditions in history, technology studies, critical theory, and the philosophy of ethics, this book ex-
plores the nature of the connections between engineering and militarism, focusing particularly on
the conceptual and institutional frameworks that make the alignments between the two appear to
be “natural,” if not inevitable. While the predominant thrust of this book is conceptual—seeking
to better understand and characterize subtle connections and alignments—we hope the conceptual
contributions produced can be applied, reflectively if not didactically, in the practical settings in
which engineers, engineering students, and engineering educators find themselves.
This chapter begins our investigation into the intersections of engineering, warfare, and mil-
itarism by reviewing some of the ways engineering is defined, starting with the birth of the term
“engineer” and then working through several different definitions that are in circulation today. Un-
 1.2. WHAT IS ENGINEERING 3
derstanding the comfortable fit between engineering and militarism requires first looking at what
engineering is understood to be.

1.2 WHAT IS ENGINEERING?

Many books on the topic of engineering start with definitions, as does this one. But our purpose in
reviewing definitions of engineering is less to formulate the “correct” definition and more to identify
a range of definitions as well as the various dimensions of engineering that those definitions convey.
Before looking at some of the specific characteristics of engineering that facilitate its alignment
with militarism, we will show how different definitions of engineering enable different types of
analysis into the nature of engineering.
The term “engineer” dates from the 14th century and explicitly ties engineering to warfare:
Engineer (origin): Middle English (denoting a designer and constructor of fortifications
and weapons; formerly also as ingineer). (O.E.D.)

...early 14c., "constructor of military engines," from O.Fr. engigneor… sense of "inventor,
designer" is recorded from early 15c.; civil sense, in ref. to public works, is recorded from
c.1600 (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/engineer)
Insofar as one understands “engineering” to entail the design and making of technology,
it can be connected to military purposes even earlier. Egyptian, Mayan, Greek, Roman, Aztec,
and other ancient civilizations were built, in no small part, upon technologies of fortification and
weaponry. Surely, the history of technologies of warfare is even older, likely dating from the very
beginnings of civilization, or at least from the time human or even pre-human species began to
make and use tools of any sort.
In contemporary definitions of engineering, direct connections to technologies of warfare
have been lost. What remains in these definitions illustrates the widely varying terrain of what
“engineering” is understood to be. While some common definitions may seem reasonable as far as
they go, they often hide as much as they explain. For example, consider this historical but frequently
used definition:
Engineering is the application of science to the common purpose of life.1
Here we see two widely identified facets of engineering. Its method is the application of
science, and its domain of application, in contemporary language, is everyday life. Both of these seem
reasonable enough. Engineers do, in fact, apply scientific principles to address problems of everyday
life. Yet this definition hardly seems sufficient to capture how engineers are distinct from many
other professionals—applied scientists, doctors, organizational theorists, or even market researchers.

1
  Widely attributed to Count Rumford, 1799.
4 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
A more contemporary definition expands on both the methods employed by engineering and
its domains of application:
Engineering: The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends
such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures,
machines, processes, and systems.2
Here, method is expanded to include the application of mathematical principles alongside
science. Similarly, “practical ends” are elaborated to include common categories of engineering
practice: design, manufacture, and operation. Further, the domains of application of those practices
are specified according to categories of engineered technologies: structures, machines, processes,
and systems.
In this definition, the lines between engineers and other professionals who draw upon science
are more clearly drawn. The ways in which engineers “apply science and mathematical principles”—
that is, through design, manufacture, and operation of technologies—are identified, but so too are
the overarching goals: making technology efficient and economical. As a result, this definition ap-
pears to be more robust than the prior one, in part because it is more specific in identifying common
methods, practices, applications, and goals of engineering.
But this definition also contains important ambiguities. For example, “efficiency,” in generic
terms, means doing more with less. At first glance, this seems to be both an obvious and a universal
good. Attempting to apply the principle in engineering practice, however, requires determining
what, exactly, it is that we want more of and by using less of what else. More energy out of the same
size solar panel certainly seems desirable, but at what cost in terms of financial, material, and labor
resources? What cost in terms of environmental impact of production? Disruptions to global supply
chains in the fragile solar market? Reparability and serviceability in poor, remote regions? Ulti-
mately, efficiency is calculated as a ratio, and it matters what the numerator and denominator are.
Making engineered systems “economical” is another near-universal, but generic goal. Eco-
nomical is simply another type of efficiency goal, focusing specifically on financial resource effi-
ciencies, and the same questions apply: Cost savings may sometimes be achieved through technical
refinements exclusively, with limited upstream financial pressures. More commonly, however, cost
savings are achieved by tightening margins at each stage of the production process, which is often
financially disadvantageous to upstream laborers—miners, factory workers, transportation workers,
etc. Indeed, following Noble (1979), one of the driving forces behind technological innovation
since the industrial revolution has been factory owners’ effort to cut labor costs or else to lessen the
bargaining power of unionized workers.
The economics concept of externalities refers to costs occurring as a result of a transaction
that are not reflected in its price. For example, the pollution created by a person’s car is not reflected

2
  The Free Dictionary. Accessed 19 November 2012 at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/engineering.
 1.2. WHAT IS ENGINEERING 5
in the price of the car or its gasoline. The “cost” of pollution is borne not by the individual driver
directly but by society at large, including future generations, through negative health impacts, en-
vironmental decline, lowered quality of life, etc. Most economic transactions entail externalities of
some sort—some immediate and others distant in time and geography.
The same type of analysis can be applied to any type of efficiency improvement, such as a
higher-efficiency solar panel that, say, relies more extensively on rare earth elements. Whereas the
high financial cost of these materials may be included in the price, the global depletion of such
strategically important yet finite materials is not. Similarly, in today’s world, significant technical
and economic efficiencies have been achieved through massive reliance on petroleum derivatives in
multiple domains of human life, but with equally significant externalized costs in terms of environ-
mental degradation, geopolitical instability, and long-term energy insecurity.
Despite the ambiguities, we suspect most engineers would feel comfortable with a defini-
tion of engineering that includes the goals of efficient and economical technology development.
Certainly, they are desirable goals, the nuances and trade-offs described above notwithstanding.
In fact, we agree. Yet, we raise the question of terminology to make a point. An important part of
understanding any social phenomena in the world—including understanding what engineering is
in people’s minds and actions—is identifying the assumptions that underlie and motivate them.
And part of what makes engineering so intriguing is the extent to which goals such as “efficient and
economical” output can be included in its definition without raising eyebrows.
Part of what makes these particular characteristics so intriguing is that they help to establish
boundaries around what is and is not “engineering” when it comes to technology development.
While we agree with the sensibility of striving for efficiency and economical technologies, we posit
that they are patently “social” concerns that exist beyond what might be considered the “technical
core” of engineering expertise. Systematic exploration of such concerns requires following paths
that soon diverge from the technology at hand, as indicated in the analysis above. Quickly, one
is stepping into fields traditionally defined as sociology, history, philosophy—the disciplines that
have more commonly dedicated themselves to exploring entire economic systems, forms of social
organization, international trade relations, even capitalism itself. Such analyses do not seem to fit
comfortably with ordinary understandings of what engineering is or what engineers are expected
to know how to do.
Let’s look at one more definition to further explore how boundary setting around engineer-
ing can help us better understand the terrain upon which our analysis will unfold:
Engineering is the science, skill, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific,
economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and also build structures,
machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.3
3
  Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia. First sentence of entry on “Engineering.” Accessed 17 November 2012 at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering.
6 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
Compared to the prior definition, a little is lost—mathematical principles, practical ends, and
operation of technologies—but a lot is gained: skill, the profession, acquiring knowledge, social and
practical dimensions of engineering knowledge, and materials as an engineering output. We have
entered terrain far more contoured than “the application of science.”
In the most general terms, this definition points to what engineers know, what they do, and
how they relate to one another and society at large (i.e., as a “profession”). Each of these dimen-
sions can help us understand the nature of the alignment between engineering and militarism, and,
hence, each will be elaborated in turn.

1.2.1 ENGINEERING AS A DOMAIN OF KNOWLEDGE

Understanding what engineering is obviously requires engaging the types of knowledge that con-
stitute it (Vincenti, 1990). Epistemology is a term scholars—from philosophers to anthropologists—
use to identify a specific way of knowing the world. There is not a single way of understanding the
world, but many; therefore, there are many epistemologies. In each of the definitions above, we
see different facets of what might be called an engineering epistemology: first as one founded in
science, then as founded in science plus mathematics, and then in scientific, economic, social, and
practical (see, e.g., Ferguson 1992) domains. The epistemology identified in the last definition is
noteworthy because it adds “social” knowledge domains alongside the more typical scientific, eco-
nomic, and practical ones, which is particularly relevant to the analysis that this book embarks on.
The addition of “social knowledge” to a definition of engineering may appear to be somewhat
paradoxical. After all, stereotypes play on the extent to which social expertise—from interper-
sonal communication skills to social analytic abilities—is absent among engineers. The preceding
consideration of efficiency and economic externalities also supports an assessment of engineering
knowledge that sticks close to the “technical core” of technology development. Nevertheless, a wide
range of social knowledge is clearly required for successful engineering practice in any context,
from communicating effectively with clients to understanding how to navigate large, bureaucratic
organizations to working collaboratively on multidisciplinary teams.
There is a long and rich history of debate surrounding which types of social knowledge
should be included as constitutive of engineering and which should be excluded as potentially im-
portant but not really “engineering knowledge” (Pawley, 2012; Christensen et al., 2009; Law, 1987).
These debates shed some light on how engineering has come to be understood as it is in the present,
namely, technical at its core with “social knowledge” relegated to the context of engineering work and
not the work itself.
Here and throughout this book, we will challenge this simple distinction—between the tech-
nical core and social context of engineering work—to show how military influences on engineering
are not limited to one particular application of engineering knowledge, but are built into the very
assumption of a “technical core” at the heart of an engineering epistemology.
 1.2. WHAT IS ENGINEERING 7
1.2.2 ENGINEERING AS A SET OF PRACTICES
Beyond the familiar if abstract domain of disciplinary knowledge lays the wide range of activities
engineers engage in while doing engineering work—what we will call engineering practice. Whereas
a philosopher might start with epistemology in answering with the question, “What is engineer-
ing?,” a sociologist is likely to start instead with practice: “Engineering is as engineers do.” Of
course, what engineers do is conditioned by what they know (and what they do not know!) as well
as the other dimensions of engineering that we will discuss below. Furthermore, starting with those
who are recognized as engineers necessarily limits consideration to engineering “insiders,” and ignores
those who are arguably doing engineering work but are not so recognized (Cockburn and Ormrod,
1993). Still, looking at prototypical engineering practices helps to shed light on the nature of the
connections between engineering and militarism.
Engineering practice has been studied from a variety of perspectives to illuminate different
facets of engineers’ work, including the gendered dimensions of engineering practice (Tonso,
2007, Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993), the everyday activities of wide-ranging practicing engineers
(Bucciarelli, 1994; Vinck, 2003), the particular organizational contexts in which engineers work
(Kunda, 1992), and the broad employment patterns evident by looking across the entire field of
engineering. Some of the broad patterns identified by looking across the field include its close
alignment with state and corporate priorities, including nationalist expansion efforts (Lucena,
2005), obedience training through rigid hierarchy and regimentation of daily life (Hacker, 1989),
control over labor (Noble, 1979), and a tendency toward highly fragmented and compartmentalized
work (Meiksins, 1996, 83) that insulates narrow technical problem solving from concerns over
systems integration and technology application.
The close alignment between corporate and state interests and engineering is created most
directly through patronship, where corporate and state organizations employ engineers to work
toward corporate or state goals. Simply put, these interests provide the financial resources and set
the agenda for engineering projects. Because they employ such a large percentage of engineers,
as described above, they also shape the nature of the field as a whole. Especially in the U.S. post-
World War II, the “strong relationship between engineers and the state-controlled defense sector”
both contributed to “a rapid growth in the numbers of engineers” and “increased the percentage
of engineers who were directly or indirectly involved in government and/or defense-related work”
(Meiksins, 1996, 81–82).
Apart from defense-related work specifically, a major theme across studies of engineering
practice is the extent to which engineers are employed by large, bureaucratic firms, regardless of
sector. As of 2008, over 60% of scientists and engineers in the U.S. were employed by organizations
with more than 100 employees and nearly 20% by organizations with over 25,000 employees (NSF,
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/pdf/c03.pdf ).
8 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
While the number of engineers—in total and in military-related work—grew rapidly in
the U.S. post-World War II, military perspectives have informed engineering since its creation
and have influenced engineering practices far beyond the character of employment patterns.
Among the work practices that define engineering and distinguish it from other professional
groups are its comfortable integration within hierarchical organizations, its heavy reliance on
command-and-control problem solving, a high degree of division of labor and expertise within
the field, and its notably masculinist culture. As Noble’s (1979) history of engineering shows, these
attributes are not coincidental, nor are they shaped exclusively by postwar employment patterns,
but instead they were designed into the field from its beginning and as it evolved alongside the
growth of corporate capitalism.

1.2.3 ENGINEERING AS A PROFESSION

Related to employment practices and the nature of engineering work—as well as questions around
what knowledge is appropriate to the field—is the status of engineering as a profession. The termi-
nology surrounding the status of different occupational groups is often used loosely, including the
use of the word “profession.” As with the definition of engineering itself, we do not seek to pro-
mote or enforce any particular definition of profession or to weigh in on the question over whether
engineering should properly be understood as a profession. Instead, we identify the question over
engineering’s status as a profession itself as constitutive of the field of engineering over its history and
in the present.
Casual use of the word “profession” in describing engineering often simply refers to engineer-
ing as an occupational group—people identify as engineers, are identified by others as engineers,
and are often formally employed with the title “engineer.” Increasingly, these people are graduates of
educational programs in various recognized sub-disciplines within engineering, many of such pro-
grams being accredited by national or international accrediting bodies (such as ABET4 and others).
The extent to which engineers are certified by standing professional bodies varies considerably by
industry and national context (see, e.g., Meiksins & Smith, 1996), but in the U.S. only roughly 20%
of engineering program graduates are certified as Professional Engineers by the National Society
of Professional Engineers.
A more formal use of the word “profession” invokes the degree to which the occupational
group has the autonomy to self-regulate, including in setting educational or training requirements,
certifying educational institutions and licensing individual practitioners, and generally constraining
the nature of work employed engineers are allowed to do using codes of ethics and the like. There

4
  ABET—formerly the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology—is the dominant accreditation
body for engineering and related programs in the U.S., and it has increased its reach internationally over the past
decades, particularly in Latin America.
 1.2. WHAT IS ENGINEERING 9
is a rich history of efforts to advance professionalization within engineering in diverse settings and
with diverse motivations.
Because of engineering’s historical close alignment with corporate and state/military inter-
ests, the field has never achieved the same degree of self-regulation as the prototypical professions
of medicine and law. Contrasted with these occupational groups, there is also a stronger historic
division within engineering along disciplinary boundaries, so disciplinary professional societies’
membership exists somewhat in tension with occupation-wide agenda setting. Engineering, for
instance, does not have an organizational equivalent of the American Medical Association. While
the National Society of Professional Engineers aspires to represent engineering as a profession, this
organization has neither the membership nor the influence of the American Medical Association.
Advocates for strengthening engineering’s professional standing commonly identify two
distinct goals. First, professionalization promises to improve working conditions and benefits
for engineers. Second, and perhaps a loftier goal, professionalization offers some assurances that
engineering—as a whole—will be able to contribute more effectively to “the social good” than
atomized individual employees. Edwin Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers (1986) documents early-
20th-century professionalization efforts in the U.S. that were largely motivated by a desire to elevate
“social responsibility” within the field. “While certainly not a principled critic of capitalism, Layton
famously argued that engineers might serve in ‘loyal opposition’ to corporate interests” (Nieusma
and Blue, 2012).

1.2.4 ENGINEERING AS AN IDEOLOGY

Not fully captured in the three dimensions of engineering identified above, yet essential for under-
standing engineering as a social phenomenon, is the set of values and the belief systems that are
widely shared across engineering sub-communities. We refer to this domain as the ideology of engi-
neering, and we seek here to identify some threads of such an ideology that have circulated widely
in scholarship on engineering. Of course, as with epistemologies, there is not a single ideology of
engineering that is shared equally by all engineers. Nevertheless, components of a broadly shared
dominant ideology—and the existence of competing but marginalized alternative ideologies—can
be identified across the field. Here we characterize this dominant ideology of engineering, even as
we recognize its contingent nature and seek to contribute to its erosion.
In her influential book, Engineering and Social Justice (2008), Donna Riley explores the ter-
rain of ideologies—what she calls “worldviews” and the “engineering mindsets” that accompany
them. She describes five engineering mindsets:
• A desire to help and the persistence to follow through on that desire

• The centrality of military and corporate organizations to engineering practice

10 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
• A narrow technical focus (and weakness in other areas)

• Positivism and the myth of objectivity

• Uncritical acceptance of authority

We have alluded to manifestations of most of these above, but will elaborate on Riley’s third
and fourth dimensions: the narrow technical focus and positivism/myth of objectivity. Positivism
contends that all rational assertions (i.e., “truths”) can be verified by empirical scientific means and/
or logical or mathematical proof. In other words, science equals truth, and claims that cannot be
scientifically verified should not have legitimate standing. The myth of objectivity suggests that,
because (technical) engineering work rests on science, and because science rests on truths, engi-
neering—when done properly—is politically neutral. Engineering, like science, is taken to speak
truth to (political) power, or, at least, to operate on another dimension of life that is considered
unrelated to politics.5
Despite their important role in shaping the dominant ideology of engineering, terms like
“positivism” are not often used by engineers and do not always translate well to the ways they under-
stand their own values and beliefs. Instead, as suggested above, engineers understand engineering
in terms of its foundations in science and math, its goals of advancing technology and improving
efficiency, and its parallel service to both business interests and a broader social welfare. Certainly,
for most engineers (and many others), technology innovation in itself advances social welfare.
Technology advance is progress, a storyline complicated only by illegitimate or inappropriate “appli-
cations” of the technology but not attributable to “the technology itself.”
The decoupling of “the technology” from its “application” is an important foundation for the
ideology of engineering and is central to engineers’ myth of objectivity. In this understanding, “tech-
nology” can refer to an underlying idea or set of abstracted components for solving a particular sort of
problem as well as a particular material instantiation of that idea (i.e., one particular application).
For example, no one car or gun captures the totality of cars or guns as technologies. In other words,
an actual car in the world is just one instantiation of car technology and captures neither all that is
car technology nor the essence of that technology. At the same time, each instantiation of a car or
gun entails lots of additional elements or features that are not constitutive of the underlying tech-
nology. Hence, a particular car and a particular gun are both less and more than their underlying
technologies in engineers’ expansive and sometimes conflicting understanding of the term.
At its core, this assumption captures an organizational reality of engineering employment:
engineers are typically hired and paid to make technologies “work,” not to decide or even weigh
in on how those technologies will be applied—by end users, their employers, their clients, their

5
  Granting positivist assumptions, however, would not translate to “neutrality” the way many engineers profess it.
Even if it were possible, political neutrality would de facto support the status quo, which itself is a non-neutral
political position.
 1.2. WHAT IS ENGINEERING 11
sponsors, or their patrons. However, an important contradiction is bubbling under the surface here.
The narrative that engineers design and enable the production of abstract technologies that are
somehow independent of their real-world applications is fraught for many reasons, as the following
chapters will elaborate. This rejection of empirically verifiable conditions also verges on the unsci-
entific, but to see this requires moving from the physical and into the social sciences. This move
fits uneasily—but, we hope, productively—with the dominant ideology of engineering as “neutral.”

Social-Technical Dualism

Foundational to every dimension of the dominant ideology of engineering is a dualism between the
technical and the social, where the two domains are understood to be independent from one another
if not mutually exclusive. Insofar as engineering is defined as constituted by its “technical core”—
the underlying (physical but not social) scientific and mathematical principles—and not by how,
when, and where such principles are deployed in the creation of specific technologies embedded in
the real (social and physical) world, engineers can insulate themselves from the consequences of
their work.
According to this model, engineers are to be held accountable only if their technical work
is deficient. Outcomes attributable to social domains are neatly outsourced from engineering, with
users, clients, or “politics” usually having responsibility for deleterious results. (Note here the cu-
rious exception of a given technology’s economic dimensions, as described above; profitability is
a patently social concern but fitting comfortably within the engineer’s domain.) As will be clear
through the book, we argue that a richer knowledge and practice of engineering must draw on the
social sciences and the humanities along with the physical sciences and mathematics. Ultimately,
this integration demands reconsideration of the social-technical dualism that serves as foundation
to the dominant engineering ideology.

Masculinist Values

Another important dimension of the dominant engineering ideology is its masculinist un-
derpinning. Describing engineering as masculinist, as opposed to merely masculine or even
male-dominated, serves to highlight the purported or assumed superiority of masculine attributes
or characteristics—at least within the field. To be sure, engineering is and historically has been
dominated by men. Even as participation by women in engineering has trended upward in recent
history, the percentage of women in engineering remains far below 50, and the percentage drops
precipitously as rank increases. While there has been considerable attention to—and consterna-
tion over—the underrepresentation of women (and other groups) in engineering, the problem
endures, and for a variety of reasons that includes masculinist values and the exclusion and hos-
tility they create for women.
12 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
The role of masculinist values in the dominant engineering ideology is not limited to its neg-
ative impact on women’s participation, and in fact shapes the experience of all engineers, male and
female (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993). In fact, it is an important component of gatekeeping within
the field—the process of determining who is and who is not allowed to become an engineer. Argu-
ably, the very presence of a “weed-out” culture in engineering (Seymour and Hewitt, 1997)—where
extensive and deliberately punitive testing predominates—derives from a masculinist value system
that valorizes an individualistic, “sink or swim” approach to learning, where students must prove
themselves worthy, not only to their professors but also to their peers and even themselves as well.
The parallels between engineering and military institutions concerning masculinst values has
not been lost on feminist scholars of engineering and technology, even as it remains under recog-
nized in broader culture. As feminist theorist Sally Hacker puts it, “Although many other forces
mold both gender and technology, the effects of military institutions are as important as they are
ignored” (1989, 60). Hacker goes on to describe some of the ways that military institutions—and
their particular assumptions around gender, both of masculinity and femininity—provided mod-
els for engineering and engineering education. Going back to the earliest engineering schools in
Europe, she argues that “Curricula fused technical training with cultural socialization that stressed
hierarchy, discipline, loyalty, and self-control to a male-only student body” (1989, 61). With the
exception of the qualification “male-only,” this quotation arguably remains accurate in describing
engineering education to this day.
While many opponents of reform to engineering are likely to dismiss the entire idea of a
dominant engineering ideology at play in the field, such hard-nosed posturing is precisely indicative
of that ideology in practice: Engineering is hard; toughen up, suck it up, and get back to work. Iden-
tifying and exploring this underlying value system are necessary steps in confronting the intimate
intertwining of engineering, militarism, and warfare.

1.3 ENGINEERING'S SURPRISING SILENCE ON WARFARE

Given the kinds of close, substantial, and pervasive connections between engineering and the mili-
tary identified in our opening, one might expect considerable attention paid to questions of warfare
within engineering, or at least within engineering educational settings. This is generally not the case.
As Vesilind avers, “The effect of military research at engineering schools has largely been ignored
by the disciplines that study engineering and engineering education…[despite its key role in] the
greatest single decision engineers have to make—whether or not to work in the armaments indus-
try” (Vesilind, 2010, 151). It is debatable whether such a broad claim is analytically justifiable, but
clearly Vesilind believes the decision deserves considerably more attention than it is given at pres-
ent, not least because the relationship between engineering and warfare goes largely unaddressed
within engineering education.
 1.3. ENGINEERING’S SURPRISING SILENCE ON WARFARE 13
Where coverage of engineering and warfare is most likely to exist in engineering education—
within engineering ethics textbooks—the theme is sometimes included but rarely systematically
explored. Issues of sustainability, whistleblowing, liability, risk assessment, ethical codes of conduct,
global ethics, and even matters of social justice, human welfare, and human rights are all elaborated
in the engineering ethics literature; however, war in relation to engineering is often referenced in
passing but infrequently elaborated. For example, in their introductory text, Ethics, Technology and
Engineering: An Introduction, Van de Poel and Royakkers say:
[E]ngineering is not just about better understanding the world, but also about changing
it…. There is an increasing attention to ethics in the engineering curriculum. Engineers
are supposed to carry out their work competently and skillfully but also be aware of the
broader ethical and social implications of engineering and to be able to reflect on these.
(2011, 1)
And yet, war is mentioned neither in their table of contents nor the index, and questions of
warfare and militarism are not otherwise systematically addressed.6
In Engineering Ethics: Peace, Justice, and the Earth, Catalano identifies several pertinent issues
surrounding engineering and warfare—lack of attention to war in ethics codes, the influence of mil-
itarism on engineering, and weapons systems—but then focuses his attention on the environment
and ecology, sustainability, and the like (2006; 62). He does not systematically explore the many
questions surrounding warfare in engineering. In Ethics and Professionalism in Engineering, McCuen
and Gilroy (2010) also discuss engineering ethics in relation to sustainability and the environment,
and layer in treatment of climate change, cyber-ethics, food, leadership, business, and risk among
many other topics, but again largely skip over challenges surrounding warfare and militarism.
Luckily, there are also some exceptions to the trend. Vesilind’s (2010) Engineering Peace and
Justice, quoted above (and elaborated in Chapter 6), is one of the few recent texts on engineering
ethics that systematically addresses warfare, with a chapter on “Military Engineering” as well as
an additional section on “War,” but this book is not widely circulated and remains infrequently
cited. Similarly, W. Richard Bowen’s (2009) Engineering Ethics: Outline of an Aspirational Approach
explicitly covers militarism and warfare, with sections on military technology and, in more detail,
cluster munitions, and another section providing a humanistic reflection on the violence of war.
Unfortunately, neither Vesilind nor Bowen open up the wider-ranging and subtler alignments
between engineering and war, thereby risking to underplay its significance even as they promote
paying more attention to this area.
One book in the domain of engineering ethics that more systematically tackles the
wide-ranging influence of militarism on engineering is Donna Riley’s Engineering and Social Justice
(2008). In this book, Riley squarely addresses the pervasive role of military interests in engineering,
6
  Van de Poel and Royakkers (2011, 209–210) do include a short discussion of military robots and reference the
ethical challenges that arise in their deployment.
14 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
citing it as part of one of five prevalent mindsets in engineering, as noted above (and also elaborated
in Chapter 6). She dedicates a section to militarism’s influence on engineering, exploring both its
structural dimensions and how it shapes “engineering culture.” She also provides a case study of
engineering activism against campus military research. As do many engineering ethics scholars
who identify militarism as a challenge for engineering, Riley shares our concern with the taken-
for-granted status of the relationship and the paucity of systematic reflection regarding its roles
and influence.

1.3.1 WHY THE SILENCE?

It may be impossible to identify the source of engineering’s broader silence on warfare, but the
matter is important enough that some exploration is in order. Here we consider a range of concep-
tual and institutional structures that are likely to make the connections between engineering and
militarism particularly murky for engineers and others.

Psychological Repression

One possible source of silence, admittedly speculative, is what we might identify as a type of dis-
ciplinary repression. As generations of psychological researchers have made clear, people tend to
deflect, self-deceive, or repress those things about themselves that they are unable to rationally
and consciously deal with in order to minimize cognitive dissonance and protect their self-images
(and egos). That which is repressed—beliefs (whether true or not), desires, and so on—must be im-
portant enough to challenge self-conceptions or there would be no need to repress them (see, e.g.,
Freud, 1919). On this view, the reason for the silence on war in engineering—and in ethics texts
in particular—may not be because it is regarded as a small or insignificant problem, but precisely
because it is so important. It may well be recognized as an issue that pervades engineering practice
in a way that worries and challenges engineers about the ethical implications of their work. Indeed,
it may even challenge engineers’ conceptions of their own self-worth with regard to what they do.

Political Convictions

Another possible explanation for the relative silence on warfare in engineering is that engineers
as an occupational group tend to be politically conservative and are more likely to support hawk-
ish approaches to global politics. Existing research identifies engineering as among the most
politically conservative of disciplines. Spaulding and Turner (1968) laid the groundwork for such
analyses. They showed that engineers tended to be the most politically conservative among col-
lege professors in nine academic specialties: botany, engineering, geology, history, mathematics,
philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. Their study controlled for a range of envi-
ronmental factors, including parents’ political orientations, and concluded “an important element
 1.3. ENGINEERING’S SURPRISING SILENCE ON WARFARE 15
in explaining the differences is the degree of orientation toward social criticism or the application
of knowledge in the business world” (1968, 262), where engineering fell far along the “business
world” extreme of the spectrum.
A more recent 1984 study by the Carnegie Foundation had similar findings. It showed that
engineers were more politically conservative than any other disciplinary grouping, including nat-
ural sciences, medicine, economics and business, law, arts and humanities, and social sciences (see
Figure 1.1). In this study, engineers self-reported the highest percentage of strongly conservative
(15.7%) and moderately conservative (41.9%) political views as well as the lowest percentage of
leftist political views (1.4%). Engineers self-reported being liberal (i.e., moderately leftist) at a rate
of 20.3%, with only economics and business academics self-reporting a lower percentage in this
category at 15.3%.

Figure 1.1: Percentage distributions of self-reported political views of U.S. academics by highest de-
gree achieved, males only. (Adapted from: Gambetta and Hertog, 2009 elaborating data from the Car-
negie Foundation National Survey of Higher Education, 1984)

An even more recent study found that academic engineers were less conservative than found
in the prior studies, but still amongst the most conservative of academic disciplines. Rothman et al.
(2005) argue that the academy is overwhelmingly left-leaning relative to other large institutional
sectors, but then go on to rate engineering less liberal than 20 other disciplines, with only business
ranked as more conservative (see Figure 1.2).
16 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE

Figure 1.2: Engineering ranks second-least liberal among 22 disciplines. (Adapted from: http://blogs.
discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2006/06/math-makes-you-more-conservative/. Accessed June 25,
2013.)

Some authors have gone even further in characterizing the political orientation of engineer-
ing, suggesting engineers are over-represented among political and religious fundamentalists (see
Bergen and Pandey, 2006). Gambetta and Hertog studied wide-ranging data around Islamic radi-
calization in order to identify trends surrounding educational type. Careful not to misrepresent the
extent of radicalization within engineering as a field, Gambetta and Hertog find: “the number of
militant engineers relative to the total population of engineers is miniscule—yet engineers, relative
to other graduates, are overrepresented among violent Islamic radicals by three to four times the
size we would expect” (2009, 212).
They go on to consider why this might be the case, first dismissing two hypotheses—the
structure of existing terrorist networks and that engineers are sought for their technical skills—and
then providing two hypotheses they believe are more likely to be the cause—“engineers’ peculiar
cognitive traits and dispositions [i.e., mindsets], and the special social difficulties faced by engi-
neers in Islamic countries” (Gambetta and Hertog, 2009, 213). The dissemination of these claims,
 1.3. ENGINEERING’S SURPRISING SILENCE ON WARFARE 17
including by the popular press (see, e.g., Popper, 2009), produced considerable skepticism within
engineering communities, even though much of the resistance to Gambetta and Hertog’s research
was directed at claims they do not make, specifically regarding the extent to which violent radicals
are present among engineers.

Patronage Structures

Existing somewhere between psychological repression and political conviction is implicit ac-
knowledgement of the role war plays in undergirding engineering’s patronage structures—who
pays for engineering work and in order to achieve what ends. The modern Westphalian world
political system that came into being after 1648 saw the slow replacement of European dynastic
empires with emergent sovereign nation-states. In this modern system, nation-states tend to see
one another as competitors for territory and resources (Held, 1996). Because nation-states are the
largest funders of engineering research, engineers’ goals and politics become aligned with those of
the state (Roland, 2001).
In Defending the Nation, Juan Lucena (2005) provides a compelling cultural history of the
alignment between engineering and the fortification of the U.S. nation-state since the Sputnik era.
Lucena’s work focuses on U.S. policy making aimed at boosting the number of engineers and sci-
entists, highlighting the extent to which the state has intervened in incentivizing their education,
and hence the development of these occupational groups. Such policies exist prior to and apart
from the flow of engineers into lucrative military research positions, which are also sponsored by
the state, both directly and indirectly.
We will elaborate in detail the connections among state, corporate, and academic institutions
in the creation and employment of engineers in Chapters 4 and 5. For now, we will put the issues
of patronage structures in the simplest terms: engineers, like many other occupational groups, are
reluctant to bite the hands that feed them.

Dominant Ideologies

Another explanatory approach to understand engineering’s relative silence on war is to start from
engineers’ own conceptions of engineering. Extending from engineering’s dominant ideology—par-
ticularly its commitment to neutrality and objectivity—provides a different sort of explanation for
the silence. For many engineers, “politics” is a word used with derision, often referring not merely
to questions about the distribution of power in society or formal political decision-making pro-
cesses but also to wholly irrational and usually illegitimate decision-making processes. In this sense,
politics is almost a dirty word. Such thinking results in many engineers who could be characterized
not merely as apolitical but as anti-political—aspiring to a world without political power. To an
important degree, such an anti-political orientation is venerated within engineering culture. This
18 1. THE CLOSE ALIGNMENT OF ENGINEERING AND WARFARE
position, along with the technical-social distinction that enables it, divorces engineering (read,
technical) matters from the “social” issues of militarism and warfare.
When we combine skepticism about political decision making with the assumed neutrality
of technology, engineers’ lack of professional autonomy, and a high degree of participation on (in-
herently political) military projects, then it is not surprising that many engineers have difficulty re-
sponding to the deep-seated contradictions surrounding the field. Hence, perhaps the most sensible
if least evocative explanation for the lack of explicit and systematic critical reflection on militarism
in engineering is that the connections are so pervasive, the issues so broad and entwined, that they
remain somewhat hidden. They cannot be considered as just one topic among many in engineering
ethics, but require a separate and distinct kind of ethical consideration that interrogates the much
broader question of what engineering is understood to be.
We intend this book to provide an opportunity for such consideration, at least for those en-
gineers, students, and educators who wish to confront the challenge in their own lives and for their
own work. Given the general silence about war in engineering, we seek to stimulate more systematic
reflection on this important area. While we will not advise how individual engineers should come
down on the issue of whether to participate in the making of military technologies, we do hope
to provide a set of questions, historical perspectives, and theoretical insights that will help readers
make their own decisions in a deliberate and informed way. And more to the point of our approach,
we hope to highlight how disentangling engineering from militarism and war requires sustained,
broad-based effort and cannot be achieved solely by variously motivated individuals opting out of
military projects.