For historians, the military–industrial complex presents at least three problematic features: the part that is ‘military’, the part that is ‘industrial’ and the part that is ‘complex’. The literature instead favours a simpler ‘executive–academic dyad’, in which civilian officials conspire with their expert advisers, and thereby short-circuit the vast apparatus of government procurement. A fourth problem is the power of denomination. We remember the ‘military–industrial complex’ from its concern to President Eisenhower, and by extension, Cold War America. Katherine Epstein would like us to forget these historical biases and appreciate their elements at work in the Anglo-American world around the turn of the twentieth century. On this point, her book is admirably consistent. After headlining its first page, Eisenhower reappears only for the final paragraph. What falls between is a rewarding challenge.

Fundamentally, Torpedo is a serious attempt at understanding the weapons of weapons development, which is to say contracts, patents, licence agreements and the like. Its centrepiece is a series of lawsuits between the US Navy's Ordnance Bureau and a pair of multinational arms dealers. Even more ambitiously, Epstein welds the instruments of law to the corresponding instruments of death. In each chapter, the machine itself attains some new brilliance for wars both naval and juridical, with regular voyages into tactics and military doctrine. We learn that the two are related, though not as closely as the top brass would care to admit: ‘Hampered by poor communications with torpedo specialists, and needing to understand myriad technical issues in order to generate sound tactics, they simply did not know or lost sight of some details’ (p. 182). Epstein, on the other hand, revels in these details, and compounds her already impressive task by alternating chapters between the Bureau of Ordnance and the British Admiralty.

By aiming for such a densely packed fleet of rich historical targets, Torpedo cannot help but hit most of them. However, the shapes above the water sometimes get lost in the smoke. The introduction overflows with ideas, not all of which achieve their natural fulfilment by the time the conclusion releases a second deluge. While there is no questioning their fastidiousness, the intervening pages largely forgo the clarity of adumbration. Thus the book mates fitfully to its covers. Soon it does become clear that the theoretical touchstone here is William McNeill's notion of ‘command technology’, in which government monopsony combines with private monopoly in order to design, test and manufacture high-risk technological objects. By the book's climax, the Bureau of Ordnance and the E.W. Bliss Company have sued and countersued even as they reach a mutual agreement to produce path-breaking twenty-one-foot torpedoes in both their respective facilities.

Epstein deliberately ignores the war, the submarine and better-known staples of torpedo warfare. Above all, she is intervening in naval history, and here the Americans provide an insightful foil. For a fledgling colonial power, the torpedo is about getting ahead; for the insuperable Royal Navy, the calculations are more complicated: ‘Torpedo development is at the centre of new interpretations about British tactics and strategy, and it belongs there’ (p. 211). Indeed, the book dismisses the narrative that pits heavy guns against heavier armour in a teleological race towards battleship supremacy. Repeatedly we see the limits of torpedo fire – its range, speed and accuracy – setting new limits for naval gunnery and architecture. Unlike the Ordnance Bureau, the Admiralty prefers flexibility to upstart invention, a wariness that ultimately proves auspicious. While the British avoid the worst pains of teething an immature technology, the multinationals keep evening the states of the art on both sides of the Atlantic.

This story is ‘military’, ‘industrial’ and ‘complex’, and it points up the sophistication that a historian must deploy against such a multifaceted subject. A weapon is a technological artifice, but it is also the object of combat, strategy, business, law, politics and economics. There is no bulkhead to partition one of these from the others; an admiral or an administrator might be concerned with any or all of them at the same time. Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, ‘did not ask himself each day how the Dreadnought revolution was going, as though it were a Platonic form the Royal Navy might emulate; rather, he wondered how to address a bewildering array of financial, technological, tactical, and diplomatic problems within the limiting domestic–political context’ (p. 216). As specialist historians, what hope have we to understand the baroque mentality of weapons development?

Torpedo shows itself versatile enough to reconstruct it. Admittedly, the book is unforthcoming with facts of personal or organizational history that might help save the forest from the trees. It also dangles a few passages that unnecessarily find fault, express grievance, or otherwise pronounce success or failure upon this or that policy or official. Epstein does appeal to interdisciplinarity, but a wonk is unlikely to weather such dense historical narration, which sometimes declines its own medicine. ‘Naval policy makers before World War I did not choose between good and bad options: they chose between better and worse ones' (p. 216). We might have heard more directly from them about how they decided. Nevertheless, unravelling the military–industrial complex demands nothing short of virtuosity. Torpedo shows it can be done.