In 1943, Sidney Hook published The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility, a book that remains controversial but fascinating. Hook wanted to know just how vital a hero is to a nation’s history. There is no simple answer.
In the US, we have had many heroes including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But Washington could have lost the Revolutionary War had he failed at Trenton and Monmouth, after he was defeated in New York and Harlem Heights. And Lincoln’s generals could have seized Washington and put Lincoln in jail, splitting the US in half. Even short of a coup, Lincoln could have lost the 1864 election to General George McClellan, who would have cut a deal with Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his former colleague, Robert E. Lee.
Great scientists can also be heroes but are not always well-treated. The cryptographic genius Alan Turing, whose work decoding Nazi encrypted messages helped win World War II, should have been honored. Instead, he was convicted of homosexuality in 1952 and sentenced to harsh chemical treatments to “cure” him of his “disease.” The brutality of the so-called cure aside, his self-esteem was crushed.
He took cyanide and died in 1954.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, another top scientist, assembled one of the greatest scientific and industrial teams at Los Alamos.
But he was persecuted by the Atomic Energy Commission on grounds that he had communist associations (which he did) which rendered him unreliable (never proven).
The fact that his work gave the US the atomic bomb, which saved tens of thousands of American lives, was disregarded. Oppenheimer lost his security clearances and was humiliated and his service to his country ended.
The truth is that Oppenheimer was an opponent of building a hydrogen bomb, which Edward Teller called the Super. Pulling Oppenheimer’s clearances got him out of the way.
Heroes with social and political problems are nothing new.
Werner von Braun, the brilliant German rocket scientist, ran the Nazi V-1 and V-2 operations at Peenemunde during World War II. As the Tom Lehrer song laments, “The widows and orphans in old London town owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.” Von Braun was a Nazi, and he ruthlessly employed slave labor at Peenemunde and elsewhere to build his weapons.
He was recruited as part of the notorious Paperclip program to the United States and became the key Army rocket scientist at the US Army Redstone Arsenal. Later he headed NASA’s Saturn V rocket development. He thus was a hero for the Nazis and a hero for the Americans.
Elon Musk
This brings us to Elon Musk, today America’s greatest industrialist. He is in a bitter quarrel with President Trump, and his future relationship to the Trump administration is uncertain. While Musk, like other heroes, has his good and bad points, he is needed to help protect American national security, or to put it another way, Elon Musk is a national security asset and probably meets the criteria laid down by Sydney Hook: that is, we need him to save our defense manufacturing system, which is unacceptably costly, slow, inefficient and can’t keep up with demand in times of crisis.
So far Musk has done some incredible things that are changing the security landscape. Space-X, for example, has changed the space launch industry by redefining how rockets are launched and recovered. Prior to Musk, a multimillion-dollar rocket launch was a onetime affair. Again, quoting Tom Lehrer on Von Braun, “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Werner von Braun.”
NASA has long taken the same approach. Launch the rockets and let them, once used, crash into the sea. But Musk thought rockets should be reusable. He devised ways for booster rockets to successfully land either on ships (one of them is named “Just Read the Instructions”) or on land. The recovered boosters could be refurbished and used again – one of them (so far) as many as nine times.
This capability, along with devising a mass-manufacturing system for rockets, enabled Musk to put up the Starlink constellation, a highly innovative broadband communications platform. He already has launched 8,877 satellites into orbit (6,715 currently operating) and plans to put as many as 42,000 in orbit. There is no space manufacturing and launch company anywhere in the world that can launch that many spacecraft.
Starlink & Space-X in warfighting
Starlink has already proven vital to warfighting.
Without Starlink, Ukraine would be without effective battlefield communications and would be limited in the range of its drones and other weapons.
Because there are so many satellites, jamming Starlink is difficult, maybe ultimately impossible. The slow-moving Pentagon is beginning to figure this out.
Space-X is also of great importance if the Defense Department actually develops and deploys a space-based missile defense system. Thousands of spacecraft will be needed for Golden Dome, which may be the only way to counter hypersonic long-range missiles.
Space defense has been talked about since the early 1980s, but one of the reasons projects such as Brilliant Pebbles never got off the ground (literally and figuratively) is because the lift capability to do it was missing. Musk has solved that problem.
Gigafactories
While Space-X and Starlink establish Musk’s bona fides as a national security asset, that is far from everything.
Remember that Musk’s inventions started out as civilian projects. Starlink was to bring broadband Internet to users around the world inexpensively, without any clumsy and costly local infrastructure.
Space-X was to launch Starlink and other commercial spacecraft. The planned Mars mission, if he is ultimately successful, is not a defense project.
But the place to look toward the future is another commercial project, and that is Tesla. Tesla is a car (and truck) company featuring electric vehicles and battery power packs. Musk manufactures his cars, trucks and batteries in what he called Gigafactories.
A Gigafactory is a highly integrated manufacturing site, using lots of robots and advanced processes, capable of producing electric vehicles and batteries.
Tesla, which invented the Gigafactory idea, has six active Gigafactories. They’re in Fremont, California; Sparks, Nevada; Austin, Texas; and Buffalo, New York as well as Berlin and Shanghai. The idea of Gigafactories, at least for batteries, is spreading around the world rapidly: Today there are some 240 of them worldwide making batteries.
Make defense efficient
It is noteworthy that, while electric battery and automobile manufacturing is focused on Gigafactories, this industrial idea has not gained a real foothold in defense manufacturing.
Today, defense companies may have state-of-the-art technology, but their industrial methods don’t measure up even to the standards of production achieved in World War II.
The missing factor is consolidating certain types of defense manufacturing in efficient factories that can produce a variety of components commonly needed for equipping our armed forces.
For example, tactical rockets (small, medium, and large) could be consolidated in a Gigafactory with defense companies owning a share in the business. The advantages would be profound, including a lower cost of production, the ability to switch from one model to another, a consolidated and reliable supply chain (much of it brought in-house) and design commonality, making manufacturing easier and more efficient.
There are many categories where a Gigafactory would make sense. Some examples: armored vehicles, ammunition production, guns of all calibers, drones, “black boxes” (electronics), sensors.
Where Musk fits
The best man to figure all this out is Elon Musk, because he has been immensely successful doing it at Tesla and Space-X and because the current defense industrial establishment cannot do it on its own.
We have already learned from the costly and prolonged Ukraine war that our industrial base is not able to keep up with demand. We also have learned that our efforts are feeding an expensive and inefficient defense industrial system operating deep in the industrial past.
We cannot afford to keep shelling out vast amounts of taxpayer money (this year more than $1 trillion) to buy fewer and fewer weapons, often delivered late and with serious flaws.
Because of the uncertainties in defense procurement and the general lack of automation (some munitions factories are 100 years old), retaining workers is a challenge and there are severe skill shortages across the defense landscape. When you see a sign behind home plate at Yankee’s stadium that reads, “Build Submarines,” you understand there is an employment crisis in the industry.
It would make sense for President Trump to bring Elon Musk back to government, make sure he has the right access and security clearances and put him to work reinventing America’s defense industry.
Stephen Bryen is a special correspondent to Asia Times and former US deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. This article, which originally appeared on his Substack newsletter Weapons and Strategy, is republished with permission.
