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66 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
solution. The new system command structure was largely a response to this
organizational and technological dilemma. It was also a direct result of measures
taken by leaders in the Pentagon to centralize control of the weapons acquisition
process in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
During this period of transition from material bureaus to system commands,
the organizational division of labor among research, development, and production
remained largely intact. Although a programmatic separation of research from
development had been one of the hallmarks of postwar naval policy since the
early 1920s, it failed to capture the scope of the weapons innovation process in
many of the Navy’s own laboratories. Except for the Naval Research Laboratory
and the establishment of the discretionary funding program in the Bureau of
Ordnance in 1948, the Navy’s laboratories, like those in the Army’s arsenals,
thrived on the multidirectional interactions among research, development,
testing, and prototype weapons production.
By the end of the Cold War, the Navy bureaus and their organizational
descendents, joined by the Naval Research Laboratory and the Office of
Naval Research, had developed a wide range of sophisticated and highly
effective weapon systems, ranging from the Sidewinder air-to-air missile to the
nuclear propulsion systems that powered the fleet’s attack and ballistic missile
submarines. These and other technological successes may well have represented
the pinnacle of Navy R&D during the postwar period. After the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
the Navy was left without a set of clearly stated goals or a coherent mission to
achieve them. Consequently, policymakers in the Navy, Department of Defense,
and the Executive Branch struggled with the difficult problem of how to adjust
the Navy’s R&D establishment to the realities of a radically different geopolitical
environment in which traditional Cold War rivalries no longer persisted. More
historical research on this subject is needed, but the pace at which the Navy
divested its internal R&D functions quickened during the 1990s as military
budgets dropped and the Defense Department enacted sweeping measures to
reduce the size and scope of its force structure. 86
86 See Rodney P. Carlisle, Navy RDT&E Planning in an Age of Transition: A Survey Guide to
Contemporary Literature (Washington, D.C.: Navy Laboratory / Center Coordinating Group and the Naval
Historical Center, 1997); and Philip L. Shiman, “Defense Acquisition in an Uncertain World: The Post–
Cold War Era, 1990–2000,” in Providing the Means of War: Historical Perspectives on Defense Acquisition,
1945–2000, ed., Shannon A. Brown (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History and
Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 2005).