False Economy - Alan Beattie [109]
But the new technology did not get adopted all on its own. It needed a couple of pushes from government—both, as it happens, largely to do with the military. Projects of huge benefit to private business several times had a military objective, or at least claimed a military pretext, not least because that was a way of allowing the federal government to play a leading role. The states may have claimed some jurisdiction over commerce, but the armed forces were indisputably a federal concern. The National Interstate Highway System, without which America would hardly be America, was introduced by President Eisenhower in 1956 through the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The ostensible rationale was that it would allow soldiers and military equipment to be moved rapidly around the country, and the populations of large cities to be evacuated quickly in case of enemy attack. During his days as an Army general, Eisenhower had apparently been impressed by the autobahns built by Hitler to get the armies of the Reich rapidly around Germany.
As far as the ships were concerned, the same link between the merchant and military navy that had inspired the Navigation Acts in seventeenth-century England endured into twentieth-century America. To this day, a federal law known as the Jones Act stipulates that all cargo being carried from one U.S. port to another must be taken in U.S.-built, U.S.-registered ships with crews that are at least 75 percent American—a restriction that America's partners in trade negotiations like to refer to when being lectured by Washington about opening their markets to U.S. competitors. (Then again, the U.S. Navy does do everyone a big favor by patrolling the world's shipping lanes to try to keep them free of pirates.)
The government's first helping hand was to give a spur to the containerization system by adopting it to transport military cargo. The American armed forces, seeing the efficiency of the system, started contracting McLean's company Pan-Atlantic, later renamed Sea-Land, to carry equipment to the quarter of a million American soldiers stationed in Western Europe. To begin with, ships on the return journey seem largely to have carried Scotch whiskey, not least because of the introduction of stainless-steel tank containers to carry it in bulk, which ended the problem of pilferage. One of the few benefits of America's misadventure in Vietnam was a rapid expansion of containerization. Because war involves massive movements of men and materials, it is often armies that pioneer new techniques in supply chains. Napoleon was a logistical genius as well as a military one, yet it was his misjudging of his army's ability to live off the Russian countryside that forced its disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812.
The other role was in banging heads together sufficiently to get all companies to accept the same size container. Standard sizes were essential to deliver the economies of scale that came from interchangeability— which, as far as the military was concerned, was vital if the ships ever had to be commandeered in case of war. This was a significant problem to overcome, not least because all the companies that had started using the container had settled on different sizes. Pan-Atlantic used thirty-five-foot containers, because that was the maximum size allowed on the highways in its home base in New Jersey. Another of the big shipping companies, Matson Navigation, used a twenty-four-foot container, since its biggest trade was in canned pineapple from Hawaii and a container bigger than that would have been too heavy for a crane to lift. Grace Line, which traded mostly with Latin America, used a seventeen-foot container that was easier to truck around winding