Gautam Mukunda: What D-Day tells us about how tech goes from niche to mass

Today is the 81st anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France that began the liberation of Western Europe. I always mark the date, but this is the first time I’ve been able to commemorate it so personally: Last week, I fulfilled a lifelong dream of hiking the Normandy beaches stormed by those unimaginably brave American, Canadian and British soldiers. Like most who visit, I’ve tried to imagine how they must have felt. Unlike most, I suspect, I also spent the walk thinking about weather forecasting.

Why? The first and most important decision of D-Day wasn’t made on D-Day. It was made two nights before – based on the weather forecast. And the role it played has something to teach us about how revolutionary innovations change the world.

The invasion had originally been scheduled for June 5, but on the morning of June 4 a stormy forecast convinced Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to put it off. That evening Group Captain James Stagg, the head of Eisenhower’s Meteorological Office, told the general that there might be a window of acceptable weather on the 6th.

The invasion could only be launched on days that combined enough moonlight for nighttime operations, a low tide just after dawn to expose German obstacles on the beach, calm enough seas to permit troops and equipment to land safely and good visibility to allow for air support and naval bombardment. Had Eisenhower not accepted Stagg’s prediction, the invasion would have had to wait for the next possible alignment of those conditions, with the soonest possible date in early July.

It’s hard for us to understand what a gamble Eisenhower took by trusting Stagg. Accurate weather forecasting requires satellites, countless ground stations, and supercomputers to solve the complex differential equations needed to simulate the atmosphere – none of which were available in the 1940s.

What Eisenhower did have was Stagg and his team, who used experience, intuition and the sparse data available to spot a one-day break in the weather. German meteorologists, on the other hand, predicted two weeks of unbroken storms, which convinced them that no invasion was possible and meant many German forces were on leave when the Allies stormed the beach.

If Eisenhower had delayed, it would have been disastrous. In late June, the English Channel was hit by some of the worst storms in its history. Had the invasion been spinning up then the results could have been catastrophic. Thousands might have been killed and critical supplies lost. An accurate weather forecast, in other words, helped win the Second World War. Stagg, a former science teacher who got his doctorate for his research on the earth’s magnetic field, played as large a role as anyone in the success of the invasion.

In 1944, weather forecasting was somewhere between difficult and impossible. Predictions were so often wrong most people rarely consulted one. Eisenhower, backed by the unlimited resources of the Allies, might well have been the only person with access to forecasts good enough (barely) to wager the fate of the world on.

Today, accurate weather forecasts are routine. The average American consults one 3.8 times per day. This isn’t just about convenience. Accurate forecasting generates $31.5 billion in economic value annually at a cost of only $5.1 billion.

Scientific advances and significant investments – primarily by the US government – have pushed the technological frontier to places that Stagg would have considered miraculous. In performance terms, weather forecasts improve by roughly “one day a decade”; in other words, every 10 years our ability to make accurate forecasts extends by 24 hours. A seven-day forecast today is about as good as a three-day forecast in the 1980s (and vastly superior to even a one-day forecast in the 1940s). And you no longer need unlimited resources to get an accurate prediction. You can get one for free just by glancing at your phone or watch.

This is the pattern in revolutionary technologies, from steel to computers to GPS to GLP-1 agonists. First, the wealthiest customers spend lavishly to fill a pressing need. Eventually technology advances, making it possible to fill that need at a price accessible to the mass market. When that happens, demand for the new solution increases asymptotically, usually far more than anyone expected. The willingness of people without resource constraints to invest reveals latent demand. Many of these new customers may not even have known they had the need until an affordable solution appeared.

From a business perspective, the D-Day weather forecast is a reminder that the next revolutionary innovation may not initially have clear mass-market appeal. Investing in advances like, say, single-crystal metals, which are expensive to produce and are currently used only in applications like turbine blades, may very likely find countless other applications if and when costs come down.

As Americans, D-Day should also remind us that national power depends every bit as much on technology and science (even in fields as seemingly esoteric as weather forecasting) as it does on tanks, planes and the men who stormed the beaches. The massive cuts to scientific research proposed by the Trump administration, and, ironically, the ones already made to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides the data that makes accurate weather forecasts possible, suggest that this is a lesson in which our current leaders desperately need a refresher.

Gautam Mukunda writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.”