Han Dieperink: Wars drive innovation
This column was originally written in Dutch. This is an English translation.
War is terrible, but the need to win drives innovation in a way that peace rarely manages to achieve.
By Han Dieperink, written in a personal capacity
The Romans knew it well: necessity knows no law, but it also breaks through patterns, paradigms and the inertia of the status quo. *Mater artium necessitas* – necessity is the mother of the arts – is a sober observation on how people truly function. Not out of abundance, not out of curiosity alone, but out of the compulsion of circumstances that brook no delay and accept no excuses.
In that respect, wars are the most ruthless form of necessity known to humanity. He who loses, disappears. That existential pressure produces something that no subsidy, no five-year plan and no innovation programme has ever managed to replicate: the absolute willingness to give it one’s all, without a time horizon, without a return requirement, and without the inhibiting effect of the existing business model, which always whispers that it can wait until tomorrow.
Every war begins with the weapons of the last. The cavalry that rode into Europe in 1914 was equipped with the mindset of Waterloo. Within four years, the tank had been invented, the aeroplane had found its military purpose, and the blockade had turned the submarine into a strategic instrument. Not because engineers had suddenly become smarter, but because the consequence of inaction was death. Necessity compressed decades of technological development into months.
The Second World War accelerated this pattern to the point of near incredulity. Radar, jet propulsion, the first programmable computer, penicillin on an industrial scale, the first structured operational research. They did not arise from curiosity, but from panic. The Allies cracked the Enigma code because otherwise the Atlantic convoys would have been lost. The Americans built the atomic bomb because they feared the Germans would beat them to it. The urgency was not artificial; it was deadly and real.
The counter-argument is that peacetime has produced its own innovations, and that is true. But if you look closely, you can see the military necessity in the background there too. The internet grew out of ARPANET, a military communications project intended to survive a nuclear war. GPS was developed for nuclear missile guidance. The semiconductor found its first mass market in military systems. The first satellites were military. Even the smartphone, the quintessential symbol of civilian innovation, builds on a stack of technologies that have their origins in defence research. Peacetime inherits more often than it invents.
Peacetime innovates too, but more slowly and selectively. The market solves problems for which people are willing to pay. War solves problems for which people are prepared to die. That difference in urgency translates directly into a difference in speed and radicalism. The market improves what already exists; existential pressure replaces it entirely. And replacement, not improvement, is what truly propels economies forward. Creative destruction in practice.
The productivity gains that result from this are not a by-product, but the core of the mechanism. Technologies developed in wartime trickle down into the civilian economy and structurally increase the growth potential for future generations. The post-war decades of the twentieth century were so extraordinarily productive partly because they were able to draw on a generation of inventions forced by necessity. Scarcity of time, resources and alternatives proves time and again to be the most reliable catalyst for the impossible.