When Design Goes to War

The most impressive feats of organisation can also be the most destructive

A photograph of Omaha Beach, Normandy, taken shortly after D-Day, shows the immense scale of the logistical operation.

Next week, June 6^th, will mark the 80 years since D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France in the Second World War. The anniversary may not command a great deal of public attention, especially as the number of surviving veterans dwindles, but it does represent something significant in contemporary life. As myth and as history, the fight against Nazism remains an important source of legitimacy for western liberalism and its institutions. The war’s legacy can be seen in the way that, from high-level international relations to mundane Twitter spats, comparing your opponents to Nazis is the simplest way to assert the morality of your cause.

But there is another reason the Second World War is remembered as an achievement, at least in the United States, Britain and what were then its imperial dominions. For these nations, victory came through the mobilisation of people and resources on an unprecedented scale. It was a monumental demonstration of what we would today call state capacity. Nor should we be surprised that this demonstration came through war: going right back to the seventeenth century, the development of the modern state – the growth of its bureaucratic muscles – was inseparable from the challenges of financing and deploying military power. Few human undertakings, if any, have demanded as much organisational ability, especially since the rise of mass-conscription armies and industrial weaponry in the nineteenth century. To put it another way, military campaigns are among the modern era’s most complex feats of design.

Even 80 years later, the planning, logistics and material production involved in Operation Overlord, as D-Day was codenamed, are simply stupefying. Invading a continent controlled by a hostile power is simply a very complicated thing to do. The ground was prepared with months of air attacks against German transport, fighter planes and radar systems, not to mention a full-scale invasion of Italy to draw defenders away from France. The Allies used intricate deception campaigns to keep the enemy off balance. These involved spies, code breaking, and the creation of an entire fake army, complete with fake tanks, ships and airfields. England was converted into a giant staging ground, ready to launch 155,000 men and 10,000 vehicles on the first day of the operation, and millions more in the following months. Those people needed food, clothes and weapons. They needed ships to get them across the channel – 7,000 ships in fact. They needed fuel for their trucks and blood for their field hospitals. Beach landings were coordinated with parachute regiments, minesweepers and of course weather forecasters.

And June 6^th was only the beginning. Within days, engineers were building airfields, supply depots and fuel dumps. Enormous artificial harbours, known as Mulberries, were specially designed and towed across the channel. The most famous photograph of D-Day shows American soldiers wading towards shore on Omaha beach. But if you want to understand how the war was won, look at another photograph of the same beach a few days later: it has been transformed into a hive of logistical activity.

Not the whole story: a famous photograph of American soldiers wading towards Omaha Beach on D-Day. Compare with the image at the top, taken in the following days.

It is tempting, especially now that horrific scenes of war are crowding in on us daily, to treat this domain of history as something radically separate from normal life. But the twentieth century tells a different story. When the state assumes such expansive managerial responsibilities, it has lasting effects on the ways that people think and live. The experience of mass-mobilisation in the First World War totally transformed Europe’s political horizons. The rise of fascism and communism showed that, to an entirely new degree, society itself had begun to appear as something that could be shaped, directed, and indeed designed by the state and its functionaries. The Second World War was followed by a period of High Modernist ambition in both the United States and the Soviet Union. In Britain, the war left behind a centralised government and a more egalitarian ethos, reflected in institutions such as the National Health Service.

Still more pervasive are the results of enormous military research budgets. Wartime investment helped develop countless technologies that now part of our daily lives: to take just one example, what are commonly cited as the first three modern computers were all designed by British and American technicians during the Second World War.  

During the Covid pandemic, there was a good deal of nostalgia for the twentieth century state, with the Second World War providing the most common point of contrast. Many western countries suddenly realised that essential industries had been outsourced to globalised markets. The shocking phenomenon of entire nations confined to their homes could not dispel the impression that governments had neither the authority nor the competence to coordinate an effective response to a crisis. It is certainly true that, today, the really impressive logistical operations that make our societies function take the form of decentralised supply chains. These webs of extraction, processing, manufacturing and transport span the globe, and typically involve dozens, if not hundreds of different companies in the delivery of a single product, with no single institution understanding how it all works.

In purely economic terms, this a vastly more efficient way of doing things than any centralised, “designed” system. But it is also fragile, and in recent years, we have seen that various disruptive forces, including conflict and tension between states, can cause it to break down. Now, with hostility between the U.S. and China mounting, we have entered a new era of “industrial policy,” meaning that governments will try to identify crucial industries and bring them under direct supervision. Presumably this will involve mapping those unbelievably complex supply chains – something the U.S. Department of Commerce is already trying to do with computer chips. This, incidentally, is one of the challenges where bold claims are being made for the abilities of artificial intelligence.

As we return to a more state-centred world, there will again be dynamics of mobilisation between government, business and wider populations. The relationships between economics, politics and society will become thicker and more apparent. The green transition already provides an example of this (talk of a “green new deal,” harking back to the 1930s, is no coincidence). In America, the EU and Britain, politicians see green industries (like renewable energy and electric cars) as a way to simultaneously improve economic security, ensure access to new technology, harness narratives of progress and, by creating jobs, address political disillusionment. But nowhere will the state of tomorrow resemble that which existed in the first half of the twentieth century. For better or worse, we live in a very different kind of society, without the institutions that used to instil in citizens a sense of loyalty and obedience from a young age. Rishi Sunak’s plan to reintroduce national service will not bring that back.

Still, we can’t avoid the fact that a more assertive state has, once again, emerged in response to international competition and conflict. The D-Day anniversary is a good moment to remind ourselves of the stakes. War is hell, and we should pray it doesn’t return.