In practice, there were more dimensions of variation than there were aircraft manufacturers, so I don't think you can prove anything at quite the level of finding feature  differences between civil and military aircraft. For example, civilian airlines tended to require banking accommodation. Air forces did not. They spent money "as if they were printing it,"  which was of course the exact truth. In his autobiography,  Eddie Rickenbacker, who was chief of Eastern Airlines, gives an account of negotiating with Boeing and Douglas for jet airliners. He wanted noise suppressors, and thrust reversers, and interest on his deposit. Boeing took the position that they did not need instruction in aircraft design, and refused financial accommodation point-blank. Classic Rolls-Royce salesman, in short. Douglas agreed about  the financial accommodation, and promised a serious effort on the technical issues (Edward V. Rickenbacker,. _Rickenbacker: His Own Story_,  1967, ch. 19 (pp. 440-41, pbk. edn.). Some of the most important differences between military and civilian work  have to do with this kind of thing. 

I've been looking at James Hay Stevens, _The Shape of the Airplane_ (1953?),  and I note that the one characteristic of a good bomber which he emphasizes is a large unobstructed bomb bay, as exemplified by the Avro Lancaster. The designers of other bombers tended to figure out what was the largest bomb they would want to handle, and then break the bomb bay down into compartments of that size, in the interests of structural strength. This is a long way from the core of an aircraft design of that date, which would be the wings and the engines, and  of course aircraft engines are essentially interchangeable, like automobile tires.  Airplanes were periodically being refitted with  new engines, eventually going turboprop. I think you would need to show some evidence of distinctive design tendencies in bomber wings vis-a-vis airliner wings.

I ran across a couple of  interesting references on Slashdot a while back. The gist of then was that one of the risks of employing ex-military Information Technology people is that they are very sloppy about  complying with software licensing terms. They tend to take the attitude that "it all belongs to Mr. Rumsfeld anyway, and if anyone wants to argue, we've got some  really impressive  guards with submachine guns and attack dogs. The dogs eat a bailiff or process server, and an hour later, they're hungry again." In a civilian business, that is an excellent formula for expensive legal  difficulties.

About the Channel Tunnel, the big point to remember  is that the invasion panic was a showstopper. It blocked the tunnel  for a hundred years, by the end of which time both the British and French empires had collapsed, and both countries had an inferiority complex about the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and who knows what else? Projects of that sort cannot go forward without sustained support at both ends. In any event, civil engineering projects are not mobile in the same sense as airliners. Suppose that Britain had put a lot of money into subsidizing an airline in Canada, operating between, say, Montreal and Vancouver on  the Pacific coast. This would not have been an entirely unreasonable thing. The government of Canada does periodically worry about regions becoming assimilated to the adjoining portions of the United States, and takes measures to bind Canada more closely together. However, European powers would have done sums in their heads about how fast the  airplanes could be flown across the Atlantic. Better and faster railroads would  not have had that kind of potential.

I would differ with you about the extent to which war production can be "saved up." You can put your industrial surplus into  making things like machine tools, which can then be used to make a great variety of things. I ran into an argument in one of the American Machinist  blogs (I'm afraid I don't have the citation at hand) about whether a lathe or a planer is to be considered the primal machine tool, that is, the machine tool with which all other machine tools can be manufactured.  At any rate, given a sufficiently large accumulation of machine tools, you can set them up with jigs and train beginners to do specialized tasks.

Certainly, basic materials such as iron and steel can be produced "on spec," without any clear idea of what they are eventually  going to be used for. If you will recall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the American efficiency expert, and founder of  Taylorism, tested his ideas by supervising a gang of workmen who were engaged in moving, by hand, some tens of thousands of tons of iron "pigs" (each weighing eighty pounds or so) which a steel mill had produced, and had then left lying in a field.

The intermediate products can be accumulated in a defensible central area, as can many crucial tools, workers, etc. I know that in the immediate postwar period, Volkswagen was anxiously concealing  from the French occupation authorities certain essential machinery which had originally been looted from France. Fortunately for Volkswagen, they were in the British occupation zone, and the  British authorities were rediscovering their own long-lost dislike for Frenchmen.
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Dennis   E.   Showalter,   _Railroads   and   Rifles:    Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany_, Archon books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1975

William A. Shurcliff, _S/S/T and Sonic Boom Handbook_, 1970A further sidenote:

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Edwin  A.  Pratt, _The Rise of Rail Power in  War  and   Conquest, 1833-1914_,  P. S. King & Son, Ltd., London, 1915

Old reading note follows:

A  fairly practical book, oriented towards how to  use  railroads for military purposes, illustrated with examples from the wars of  the  nineteenth  century. This is military  history  rather  than history of war.
   While  there is a brief consideration of armored  trains,  the military  uses  of railroads are mostly logistic.  Railroads  can transport troops, either in short flanking movements, or in  long strategic  ones.  They make it possible for  the  whole  economic power  of the home country to be brought to bear in the  form  of supplies,  and  permit the rapid removal of  sick,  wounded,  and P.O.W.s, who would otherwise hamper the army's mobility.
   Pratt  lays stress on the importance of developing a  combined army-railroad  staff.  The soldiers have to set  priorities,  but they  have  no idea how to run a railroad.  Railroaders  are,  of course, the opposite.
   Railroad troops have to provided, to repair and destroy  track at need, and also to operate trains in enemy territory. They  can only  be raised and trained, in practice, with the  collaboration of the civil railroads.
  As  far  as the conduct of operations, Pratt  emphasizes  first that  the  railroads  must be centrally  controlled,  to  prevent individual commanders from disrupting their operations. At  least in  the  early  days  of  the  American  civil  war,  low   grade functionaries would do stupid things (he gives the example of the paymaster who set up shop in a boxcar, ignoring the fact that  he was  thus  blocking the main line).  More  seriously,  commanders tended  to view cars as mobile magazines, much like  the  earlier commissariat wagons, despite their greater value and scarcity.  To add  to this, supply officers at the rear will naturally  incline to  send  off everything they can as soon  as  possible.  Between them,  they can easily throw the forward railhead into  gridlock, and  create an acute shortage of rolling stock elsewhere  in  the system.
   To  prevent this, a rear base must be set up, far enough  back to be clear of the fighting, with associated depots. This is  the boundary   between  the  civilian  railroads  and  the   military railroad.  All shipments are stopped here, unloaded, sorted  out,
and the cars returned to the civilian system. It is important  to have  the manpower to do so immediately. From here, supplies  are dispatched rapidly forward on an as needed basis.
   There  may  have to be an intermediate base  further  forward, especially for the keeping of a reserve of ammunition, loaded  in cars.  This will be the furthest point to which there is  regular service,  which is to say it will be just far enough back  to  be temporarily  immune  to the operations of the enemy.  Forward  of  this  is  an extent of insecure line to the  railhead,  which  is
constantly shifting, according to the fortunes of war. Nothing is  allowed to accumulate here. Trained come forward with stores  for immediate use, are rapidly unloaded, and withdraw immediately.
   Still  further forward are the railroad troops,  repairing  or wrecking  the line as the case may be. In the pursuit,  they  are  expected to keep up with the advance guard.
   In  dealing  with  the  planning  of  railroads  for  military purposes,  Pratt attempts, not wholly successfully, to construct  a distinction  between ordinary railroads, for economic  ends,  and strategic ones. The characteristic traits of a strategic railroad system   are  a  lot  of  lines  running  to  the   border,   for mobilization,  and a lot of lines running along the  border,  for
flanking movement.
   Finally,  he interprets German railroading in Africa  and  the near  east as a central part of a prewar scheme to overthrow  the British Empire.

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Re: Brett Holman, An alternative Battle of Britain -- I

HNN Cliopatria [pseudonym, ], before Aug 3, 2006

  http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/28719.html#comment (now)  https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/28719


(Aug 7,2006)

Here is a book written on the very eve of Pearl Harbor, by one of the very great writers  on strategic studies.

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Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1941

This is a history of the rise of the modern battleship, ironically written in the very hour of its demise. While written in the first days of the second world war, it treats the first world war as the climax of technological development, and the events of 1939 to spring, 1941 as merely  more of the same.

   The sailing ship was restricted by the wind. Most importantly, it could not sail directly upwind. The "high ground" of naval combat was the "weather gauge," upwind from the enemy. Equally to the point, the sailing ship was subject to the variability of the wind. Apart from calm weather, the wind might shift, and the hunter become the hunted. But at the same time a sailing ship could go for indefinite distances under wind power. Before the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Nelson had chased Villaneuve to the West Indies and back. The French navy, while inferior in naval strength, had been able in 1798 to evade British surveillance and put [a force ashore] in Ireland.

   Steam power made naval power far more certain, but also far more local. The steamship could go in any direction in any weather, but it was also tied to its supply of coal, and to the complex repair facilities dictated by its machinery. Global power required a global network of bases, and an empire to go with them. Paradoxically, the steam navy was a navy which was most threatening while in port.

   Steam power, and its concomitants, iron construction and large turret-mounted guns, had been billed as a naval revolution, capable of overthrowing the global dominance of the British navy. However, the industrial requirements of a steam navy merely resulted in the dominant industrial power-- Britain-- becoming the dominant naval power of the steam age.

   At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new innovation appeared-- the submarine. Submarines offered the promise of using stealth to bypass the battleship. However, soon after the submarine appeared, so did submarine detection gear, as well as the use of airplanes to locate submarines. In may 1941, Brodie had heard rumors of ASDIC (sonar) and had it confused with radar, all of which were still secret, but he still had a basic idea of what the equipment did.

   Brodie minimizes the effect of aircraft, treating the aircraft carrier as a battleship by other means. That is, the carrier's airplanes perform the same function as a battleship's guns, only at a greater range, and with a lower rate of fire.

   Writing when he did, Brodie missed the one most striking characteristic of the aircraft carrier-- the near impossibility of designing it in a compartmentalized fashion. This fact, of course, contributed mightily to the decisive character of the battle of Midway in 1942.

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  http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/31329.html#comment (now) https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/31329

(My comment)

(Nov 3, 2006)

What Computerized Games Are Good At

I think the  problem about computer  war games is that they short-circuit the process of working through the game  rules to the point of becoming critically familiar with them, and being able to circumvent them as needed. To a lesser degree, this is also a fault of the Avalon-Hill hex-grid style wargame. The classic staff college war game was one of real maps with acetate overlays, and people measuring distances off on the map, and of course an umpire, or umpires, to keep players from gaming the rules, and the umpires maintaining their own sets of maps, etc.

A different way to use a computer is to manage a  more rigorous game with many human players. This is what happens in frankly fantasy games such as Second Life, and the more advanced multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons-type games. Such a game has very few embedded rules. Pieces can move continuously along prespecified paths, and report back when something happens, so the rules do not  have to be so complex as they would be in the hex-grid game. In short, the  game can do the kind of housekeeping management that blog software does. The goal is to make it easier to assemble the requisite number of people to conduct a war game, not to get the computer to simulate everything.

Now, of course such a game is not going to be attractive to a commercial  publisher in the business of selling many new titles of games. A good  gaming system is going to have the  kind of extended versatility as, say, a pack of playing cards. Practically,  such a system would have to be developed by  an enthusiast, probably in the context of an on-line group.

I should add a qualification. Computer simulation of naval/air warfare and logistics does work very well. The basic tactical issue in air/sea warfare is usually an "intercept," that is, given the speeds, ranges and initial positions of two units, can one intercept the  other, and after what lapse of time? This is essentially a problem in applied geometry. A corollary is that if a computer simulation works well, you can rejig the simulation as an automatic controller. Automatically try out different inputs to the simulation until you get the desired output, and then use those inputs as control signals for the actual machinery. At least ninety percent of the sailors at Jutland or Midway were doing things which are now done  by machines. As for Trafalgar, the figure would be conservatively ninety-nine percent. I don't know whether there's much market for antiquarian naval games. There's always a temptation to introduce, by some pretext, more modern technology. If you try to get a thirteen-year-old  boy to play a Trafalgar game, he will inevitably ask:"where are the machine guns?" Such games may simply be too boring to be played. In these areas, the interesting thing to study is how people moved past "mind blocks," in the planning, equipping and training stages, for example, the decision to launch the Kami Kaze corps. By contrast, medieval land war games can look surprisingly modern.

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  http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/37424.html#comment

Again, irretrievable. But it is apparently a discussion of "pre-Douhet-ism."

Think of Douhet as a Synthesizer or  Popularizer, not an Originator. 

I've noticed something analogous with other figures, eg. Adam Smith. What it turns out is that there were all kinds of people saying much the same thing, for some time, until the movement produced an articulate spokesman. For example, I ran across a man writing circa 1670, who had formulated  the essential ideas of classical economics, a hundred years before Smith. 

 Roger Coke, _A Discourse on Trade. In Two Parts. The First treats  of  the Reason  of  the  Decay  of the Strength,  Wealth,  and  Trade  of England. The latter of the Growth and Increase of the Dutch Trade above  the English_, London, H. Brome, R. Horne,  1670,  facsimile edition, Arno Press, New York, 1972.

Coke was  not remotely as lucid as Adam  Smith, and simply didn't write well enough for best-seller status, but the essential ideas are there, in the age of Colbert and Sir George Downing.

If you wanted to look at early science fiction, eg. Jules Verne,  Felix Robida, and their forgotten contemporaries, you could probably find Douhetism in inchoate form. The  starting point would  be I. F. Clarke's _The Pattern of Expectation, 1644-2001_, 1979.
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HNN Post, Brett Holman, Zeroth World Wars, Sept 10, 2009

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HNN  Post, re: Brett Holman, Nobody could have foreseen this, july 17, 2010