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110 so u R c e s o f we a p o n sy s T e m s In n o v a T Io n In T h e depaR TmenT o f defense
Benjamin Chidlaw and Kenneth Wolfe, argued that it was crucial for all of these
functions to remain organizationally unified. Separation, they cautioned, would
limit the ability of researchers in the laboratory to solve critical technological
problems on the factory floor. All sides claimed victory at various points and
times during the Cold War as the Defense Department’s R&D infrastructure
expanded and diversified to meet evolving weapons requirements.
Established in 1946 and modeled on the wartime Office of Scientific
Research and Development, the Office of Naval Research contracted directly
with universities and industrial firms to accumulate new scientific and engineering
knowledge unrelated to specific weapons requirements but broadly correlated to
Navy interests. The Army and the Navy set up contracting offices guided by
the same strategic mission. Meanwhile, the in-house laboratories owned and
operated by the services provided technical support—the solution of shortterm
production problems and the testing and evaluation of complete weapon
systems—to industrial contractors. At the same time, they maintained extensive
internal R&D programs to complement industrial development of electronics,
jet engine, rocket propulsion, and other critical technologies relevant to military
applications. Periodic organizational realignments of these internal laboratories,
however, undermined efforts to maintain a clear division of labor between R&D
and weapons production. In 1961, eleven years after it was founded as a separate
organization, the Air Research and Development Command absorbed the Air
Force’s procurement arm—the Air Materiel Command (AMC)—to form the
Air Force Systems Command. One outcome of this merger was a more intimate
connection between the content and scope of in-house and outsourced R&D
and the weapons requirements handed down by the Air Staff.
The periodic managerial separation and subsequent recombination of R&D
and production functions in the Air Force illustrate the extent to which the Air
Staff struggled to reconcile competing points of view among R&D policymakers
and also maintain the institutional continuity needed to improve the weapons
innovation process over the long term. R&D management policies put in place
by the Air Staff and its counterparts in the Army and the Navy did not always
translate into practice at the laboratory level. In many cases, research, development,
and production proceeded simultaneously in the service laboratories. The
laboratories managed by the Air Force, for example, provided technical support to
the contractors that developed and manufactured aircraft, ballistic missiles, and
other weapon systems. This mandate, however, did not preclude the conduct of
more cutting-edge research in fields that emulated studies underway in industry
and academia. Representative examples include semiconductor and high-energy
radiation research at the Wright Air Development Division and at Kirtland Air
Force Base in the 1970s and 1980s. The program of solid-state physics research
that had originated at Frankford Arsenal during World War II to solve the
problem of season cracking in artillery shells complemented ongoing efforts to
develop stronger and more battle-effective ordnance materials in the other Army
arsenals and university and industrial laboratories after 1945. Similarly, in the
Navy, the technical bureaus were not the sole sources of product-driven R&D
tied to specific weapons requirements, even though that function constituted their