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co n c l u sIo n : RevIew a n d ReTRospecT 111
primary mission. Some work along this line, such as applications-driven materials
testing and analysis, was also carried out intermittently by the technical staff at
the Naval Research Laboratory, which had been established in 1923 as a separate
organization independent of the bureaus to support long-term studies broadly
related to the Navy’s interests. Even the long-range studies supported through
external contracts to private-sector institutions by the chemistry division of the
Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) in the 1950s were expected to
yield results directly relevant to Air Force requirements. 2 In some cases, AFOSR
program managers manipulated the language of the funding categories to meet
these requirements without altering the scope and content of R&D contracts.
Although most likely frustrating to the managers and policymakers who
sought to maintain some degree of organizational continuity in the weapons
innovation process, the institutional vagaries of R&D in the Army, the Navy, and
the Air Force after World War II were nevertheless indicative of broader patterns
of technological change in the United States during the twentieth century. Given
how much the service laboratories relied on industrial contractors to develop
and build weapons to meet service requirements, it is perhaps not surprising
that they adopted, either intentionally or by coincidence, some of the practices
and organizational forms of industrial innovation that had driven the rise of big
business since the late nineteenth century. The conduct of industrial R&D has
always been an inherently messy process, one in which the branches of science and
engineering and the many disciplines they inhabit in the laboratory are constantly
overlapping and fragmenting in accordance with the changing scope, content,
and goals of a given research program. 3 As a general rule, such behavior in the
industrial laboratory militated against efforts to impose a clear division of labor
among research, development, and production, even in cases where corporate
management established specific policies designed to achieve that outcome. 4
The evidence presented in the preceding chapters suggests that similar
constraints guided the conduct of research and development in the laboratories
and testing facilities owned and operated by the Department of Defense after
World War II. In this case, however, the profit motive was replaced by military
2 See R. G. Gibbs, “Chemistry Division of New Air Force Research and Development Command
Will Emphasize Basic Research,” Chemical and Engineering News 30 (3 March 1952): 855. The Air
Staff mandated a similar realignment of AFOSR functions in the early 1970s. See “AFOSR Focuses on
Pertinent Research,” Aviation Week and Space Technology 101 (15 July 1974): 142–51.
3 See, for example, Leonard S. Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research: Science
and Business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); W.
Bernard Carlson, Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric,
1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George Wise, Willis R. Whitney,
General Electric, and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985); David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy:
DuPont R&D, 1902–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Ronald
R. Kline and Thomas C. Lassman, “Competing Research Traditions in American Industry:
Uncertain Alliances between Engineering and Science at Westinghouse Electric, 1886–1935,”
Enterprise and Society 6 (December 2005): 601–45.
4 See David A. Hounshell, “The Evolution of Industrial Research in the United States,” in
Engines of Innovation: U.S. Industrial Research at the End of an Era, ed. Richard S. Rosenbloom
and William J. Spencer (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996), 41–51.