This missile man was a program manager — and helped win the Cold War

North Korea's development of nuclear missiles is part of the history of guided missiles as weapons of war and deserves historical context. Most of missile history occurred in my lifetime — the years since World War II.

The best introduction to this history is Neil Sheehan's "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon," published in 2009. Sheehan is a former reporter who covered some of the Vietnam War for The New York Times.

His history of the war, "A Bright Shining Lie," written in the form of a biography of Lt. Col John Paul Vann, who fought and died in Vietnam, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Bernard "Bennie" Schriever (1910-2005) had as much influence on the American missile program during the Cold War as any man, including the engineers who designed the missiles, the contractors who built them, the technicians who tested them and the politicians who funded them, yet he is almost forgotten outside the U.S. Air Force.

Even at the apex of his power, the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, he was not as well known as Wernher von Braun, an architect of Adolf Hitler's V-2 program whom the American military recruited for its post-war missile program (although Schriever did get his picture on the cover of Time magazine in 1957 as "Missileman Schriever".)

Schriever had an engineering degree from Texas A&M University, and was both a military pilot, with brief combat experience, and a civilian pilot, who briefly flew the U.S. mail. But many men had a similar resume during and after World War II and did not leave a major mark on history.

Schriever's special talent, perhaps even genius, was as a program manager. The fact that he was a tall, handsome man with excellent personal skills no doubt helped him.

The term program manager seems colorless, if not soulless, but large organizations cannot survive without a leader with authority to see the program from inception to completion. In a sense, a program manager is like a sea captain; he (or she) must bring the ship home safely no matter what the challenges.

During part of World War II, Schriever was a senior maintenance manager in the South Pacific. His job was to keep Army Air Corps aircraft flying. He did, and was granted greater authority and responsibility after his success.

Technical competence was required. But so were organizational skills. Schriever also needed a staff of technicians and mechanics below him, and he needed them in a system that repetitively produced the outcome he envisioned.

Envisioning the system required creativity, not the creativity of a poet or painter, but that of an architect or designer who can conceptualize results before setting to work.

It's a credit to Schriever's superiors that they quickly recognized his exceptional talent and promoted him. In the Air Force of his day, glory was reserved for men who flew into combat. Successful program managers were not celebrated as aces.

Schriever was an unlikely candidate to profoundly change military policy as a manager. But he developed a vision of the future his superiors in the Pentagon and the White House eventually shared.

Schriever recognized the intercontinental ballistic missile, not the B-52 bomber of Gen. Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command, was the weapon of tomorrow. And once the Soviet Union showed an interest in ICBMs, the United States had no choice but to pursue them as well.

Sheehan says Schriever proved "the indispensable man in the creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles …" Many of the most famous missiles — the Minuteman for example … came from his program management.

There were delays. There were interservice rivalries. The Air Force, Army, and Navy all wanted their own ICBMs. The Army argued missiles were a form of artillery and should be under its control.

There were developmental setbacks. Schriever tried to use them as learning experiences, but after a failed Thor missile test in Florida in 1957, his staff shipped the officer most responsible to Alaska.

On the way to his new assignment, perhaps the officer read the directory of Air Force facilities, published for airmen, which described every American base. If so, he learned that Alaska, while formally considered overseas, accepted U.S. currency.

The officer also would have found "The Fairbanks area has not been developed sufficiently to provide normal community support of the large military population."

What? This can't be true. I grew up believing all those bars, night clubs, and juke joints on South Cushman Street had been built for our fighting men and were staffed by, in the euphemism of newspaper advertising, "beautiful hostesses" for their pleasure.

Schriever retired in 1965. His missile system, with hundreds of missiles and warheads all over the globe, had been more than an adequate deterrent to war with the Soviet Union, although the nations had come close to war on several occasions, particularly during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

In Sheehan's judgment, deterrence produced the breathing spell during which the limitations and contradictions of the Soviet system eventually led to its economic and political collapse.

When Schriever left the service, his country was involved in a war in which ICBMs could play no role —Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were not going to stop making war because we had the power to obliterate them with missiles launched from a North Dakota wheat field.

They knew we would not use them. International public opinion, aghast at the destruction of a strike, would have universally condemned us. The U.S. would have become a pariah.

That war was not a technical problem requiring engineering solutions. Schriever was probably lucky he was passed over for promotion to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Vietnam War was a political crisis, demanding political skill from our leaders, whether civilian or uniformed. Whatever their skills — and remember both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were at times called brilliant politicians, and the generals, who directed the war had received every award a grateful nation could bestow on them — they could not recognize the one thing they needed to know.

Fighting a war in Southeast Asia in the '60s was a mistake. The wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, as war critics said. That is what you had to know as a leader. And if you did not understand it, no program manager with revolutionary new technology could save you.

Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@alaskadispatch.com.

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