There has been much made (quite rightly) of the Battle of Britain recently whose anniversary was this Summer. In some ways it is ancient history with most of its protagonists now sadly dead, but it can offer us some interesting perspectives on the challenges we face now and how to manage them.
For the Luftwaffe, think Covid: “bombers at 11,000 ft” is similar to “outbreak in Rotherham”. In both instances, the challenge is to identify, vector in some resources and snuff out the problem. Sometimes mythological tale-telling can get in the way of understanding what really happened back in 1940, and so obscure the lessons for today. The abiding image of that campaign is the Spitfire, and the sound of its Merlin engine. Myths also extend to radar: apparently a whizzy new invention, something that utterly dumbfounded the enemy. Actually, the Spit was in many ways inferior to its German counterparts, with old-fashioned carburettors preventing it from keeping up with its fuel-injected foe. It was armed with pea-shooters relative to the cannons in the enemy fighters. Far from being unique and whizzy, Britain’s radar was dramatically crude compared to the German equivalent. This is not to denigrate those extraordinary few: on the contrary, their achievement was all the more impressive given that they enjoyed no structural technological advantage. So why did they win?
The point, of course, is that it was about more than the few (something those gallant flyers always acknowledged). Faced with the threat of bombers in the 1930s, Britain developed a new set of fighters. But, more importantly, they developed an integrated threat warning and interdiction system that allowed the whole to be massively more than the some of its parts. Technology was rudimentary - the Germans stopped bombing the radar stations as they could not see how such Heath Robinson structures could be that valuable - but the governance was world class (to coin a phrase). All resources were connected to a single reporting system with standardised information sets. The patchwork of radar and binoculars fed a single, dynamic mosaic, giving commanders an up to date threat picture which was always ahead of the Germans, ironically still stuck in the “ace” mentality of the First World War and led by a fat buffoon.
Overlay the methods of today onto 1940 and this is what you would have had: A Government that would have done nothing about the threat beforehand, rapidly handing a contract to a member of the big four to run “world class” AI detection centres on the South Coast in an uncontested tender for squillions…. which in reality would be a group of underpaid staffers with a spreadsheet, filling in the columns as they heard something rumble overhead. A clause of the contract (which the Government had not read) would have given said operators the rights to the data, and negotiations would have continued long into the night into sharing any of it (data protection, of course), long after the Spits were destroyed on the ground, surprised by the Germans. The Government, excelling itself, would be terribly proud of its slogan “find, fly, destroy”, pointing to how much money it has spent on things.
The lesson, I think, is that technology matters less than governance. In the week we heard that the Government have been reaching out to Palantir (the Autonomy of the 21st Century) to solve their test and trace problems, the real solutions lie in the more prosaic plod of stitching a single system together, united around a single dataset that is normalised and shared widely. Of course, such efforts are never appreciated as much as whizzy technology by politicians: and to be fair to today, that weakness was evident in 1940. Although he was removed, at least Britain had the architect of the pre-war system in the first place: Dowding was a careful, intelligent man that understood technology and how to marshal it, with a mandate to bash heads together, and in the employ of the Government. They don’t seem to exist anymore.