To download as a PDF click here - US Army Center Of Military History

Research and Development in the Navy
ch a p T e R Th R e e
At the end of World War II, the United States operated the largest and most
technologically sophisticated navy in the world. A massive interlocking network
of public and private shipyards drove the wartime expansion of the American
submarine and surface fleets. During the war, the federal government had
invested more than $1 billion in this sprawling complex, while employment in the
shipbuilding industry peaked at 1.7 million workers, up from 102,000 in 1940. 1
Like the Army’s manufacturing arsenals, the Navy’s shipyards handled all phases
of ship construction, equipment installation, repair, overhaul, maintenance,
and eventual retirement. A broad knowledge base in science and engineering
supported these functions, which resided in the research and development
(R&D) laboratories operated by the Navy’s technical bureaus. After the war,
however, the Navy’s R&D and production infrastructure experienced many
of the same institutional pressures that prompted the gradual decline of the
Army’s arsenal system. The Department of Defense shifted ship construction
from the Navy’s own plants to privately owned shipyards. A similar transition
from public to private-sector institutions occurred within the Navy’s R&D
establishment after 1945. 2 This chapter examines how the evolution of the naval
shore establishment during the Cold War altered the institutional landscape of
the Navy’s major in-house research and development laboratories.
What set the Navy apart from the Army in terms of their respective
postwar R&D programs was the extent to which both services separated and
institutionalized the categories of research, development, and production. Whereas
the Army sought to disconnect R&D from production, the Navy had already
taken an important step in that direction before the war. The origins of this
strategy can be traced to the founding of the Naval Research Laboratory in 1923.
Organizationally independent of the Navy’s technical bureaus, this laboratory
had been established to conduct long-term fundamental research in the
physical sciences broadly related to naval applications. Although product-driven
investigations—in electronics, rocketry, and materials testing and analysis, for
example—were not uncommon, especially during wartime, development work
that focused on specific weapons requirements was not part of the laboratory’s
mission; the technical bureaus handled that function. 3 The unique status accorded
1 Philip Shiman, Forging the Sword: Defense Production during the Cold War (Champaign, Ill.:
Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, July 1997), 31.
2 See Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War
Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 250–64.
3 A. H. Van Keuren, “The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory,” Journal of Applied Physics 15 (March
1944): 221–26; B. M. Loring, “Nonferrous Foundry Research at the Naval Research Laboratory,” Foundry
74 (February 1946): 98–101, 247–49; “Navy Believes Cost of R&D Can Be Cut,” Aviation Week 66 (3