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ch a p T e R fo u R
Research and Development in the Air Force
The use of atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945 marked the end
of World War II and the culmination of the Manhattan Project—arguably
the United States Army’s most technologically challenging wartime research,
development, and production program. 1 The destruction of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki also signaled the beginning of a new era in aerial warfare, one in which
the strategic and tactical imperatives of an expanding nuclear arsenal would place
increasing technical demands on the operational capabilities of American air
power. In 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, which established
an independent air force to oversee the military aviation functions previously
assigned to the Army. 2 In its new capacity as a separate service equivalent to
the Army and the Navy, the Air Force quickly put policies in place to absorb
the latest breakthroughs in jet propulsion, rocketry, solid-state electronics, and
other state-of-the-art technologies introduced during the war. Such policies
were shaped throughout the Cold War by a recurring tension between those Air
Force leaders, who believed that technological superiority depended upon the
organizational separation of research and development (R&D) from weapons
production, and those who argued that these functions must remain combined
within a single organization to ensure successful weapons innovation. Like the
Army and the Navy, the Air Force enacted policies and created new organizational
structures to maintain the separation of R&D from production. In many cases,
however, research strategies and practices at the laboratory level were driven more
by changing weapons requirements than by sweeping management directives
handed down by the Air Staff.
Before World War II, the Air Force—then known as the Army Air Corps—
maintained most of its research, development, and testing operations at Wright
Field in Dayton, Ohio. R&D at Wright focused on the development of aircraft
1 On the Army’s role in the Manhattan Project, see Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan, The Army and the
Atomic Bomb, in United States Army in World War II, Special Studies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center
of Military History, 1985); and Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson Jr., The New World, 1939–
1946, vol. 1 of A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1962).
2 Roger R. Trask and Alfred Goldberg, The Department of Defense, 1947–1997: Organization and
Leaders (Washington, D.C: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1997), 6–11. On Army
aviation after the establishment of the Air Force, see, for example, Richard P. Weinert Jr., A History of
Army Aviation, 1950–1962 (Fort Monroe, Va.: Office of the Command Historian, U.S. Army Training
and Doctrine Command, 1991); Frederic A. Bergerson, The Army Gets an Air Force: Tactics of Insurgent
Bureaucratic Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Christopher C. S. Cheng, “United
States Army Aviation and the Air Mobility Innovation, 1942–1965” (Ph.D. diss., University of London,
1992); and Matthew Allen, Military Helicopter Doctrines of the Major Powers, 1945–1992: Making Decisions
about Air-Land Warfare (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), chap. 1.