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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.
112 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 requirements for weapon systems. Successful weapons innovation, like its commercial equivalent in industry, depended on the efficient allocation of human capital and institutional resources to meet specific product requirements, often without regard to organizational and disciplinary allegiances. Because the development of guided missiles cut across the rigid boundaries separating the Navy’s technical bureaus—in this case, the bureaus of Ordnance and Aeronautics—the Secretary of the Navy established in 1955 a temporary expedient—the Special Projects Office—to develop the Polaris ballistic missile system. A similarly accelerated program to develop the first generation of landbased intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic missiles for the Air Force prompted the Air Staff to set up in 1954 a separate management organization— the Western Development Division (WDD)—within the Air Research and Development Command. WDD merged the research, development, and production functions—a management strategy known as concurrency—to accelerate the entire missile procurement process. So successful were the Western Development Division and its leader, General Schriever, in mediating the often tenuous relationship between ARDC and AMC that the Air Staff authorized Schriever’s proposal for the reintegration of both organizations into the Air Force Systems Command seven years later. It is precisely for this reason—that is, changing organizational and managerial responses to evolving weapons requirements—that the sweeping R&D policy directives handed down by the headquarters staffs of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force did not always align with the division of labor in the individual service laboratories, thereby driving subsequent realignments of those laboratories and programs. An intrinsically muddled process that defied routinization, weapons innovation—from concept to production—continuously recast the institutional landscape of the military R&D infrastructure that nurtured it during the Cold War.
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