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78 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
Kármán’s recommendation, but he added one important caveat: The proposed
organization should be managed by AMC and located on-site at Wright Field,
the hub of Air Force R&D and procurement.
Chidlaw’s opinions were shared by other Air Staff officers, such as Lt. Gen.
Kenneth Wolfe, deputy chief of staff for materiel, who believed that R&D
functions should be intimately connected to the aircraft procurement process.
In their view, such a connection guaranteed the most effective use of technical
expertise to solve problems arising in all stages of aircraft development and
production. Von Kármán and other civilian experts, by contrast, believed that
maintaining a direct link between R&D and procurement would sacrifice research
on the scientific frontier—the anticipated source of major innovations—in favor
of work on short-term production problems, thereby limiting the development
of a technologically advanced Air Force. Early in 1948, the Applied Research
Section (renamed the Office of Air Research the following year) was set up in the
Engineering Division of the Air Materiel Command. Although it was transferred
out of the Engineering Division in 1949 and assigned the same organizational
status as its parent, the new Office of Air Research did not operate as a wholly
independent unit reporting directly to the Air Staff, as von Kármán and the
Scientific Advisory Board had envisioned. 29
OAR’s existence in the Air Materiel Command was short-lived, however.
Von Kármán’s aborted attempts to institutionalize all of the recommendations
listed in Science, The Key to Air Supremacy were recast by Brig. Gen. Donald
Putt, who in September 1948 became director of research and development in
the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Materiel at Air Force headquarters
in Washington, D.C. Prior to taking this position, Putt had earned a master
of science degree in aeronautical engineering under von Kármán at Caltech
and had risen through the engineering ranks of the Air Materiel Command.
In consultation with Gen. Muir Fairchild, vice chief of staff, Putt asked the
Scientific Advisory Board to assemble a committee of experts to review the
status of Air Force R&D and recommend policies for long-term programming.
The committee, under the direction of physicist Louis Ridenour, dean of the
graduate school at the University of Illinois, submitted its report to Gen. Hoyt
Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff, in September 1949. The Ridenour Report,
as it came to be known, reiterated prior recommendations made by von Kármán
and the Scientific Advisory Group back in 1945. It also included some sweeping
changes. In addition to appointing a new deputy chief of staff for research and
development at Air Force Headquarters (to coordinate planning and policy)
and maintaining a contracting arm—the Office of Air Research—to support
basic research in academic and industrial laboratories, the report called for a new
29 OAR did not have a separate budget line. AMC controlled its funding. Komons, Science and the
Air Force, 16; Stephen B. Johnson, The United States Air Force and the Culture of Innovation, 1945–1965
(Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museum Program, 2002): 34–35; Robert Sigethy, “The Air
Force Organization for Basic Research, 1945–1970: A Study in Change” (Ph.D. diss., American University,
1980): 25; Sturm, “The USAF Scientific Advisory Board,” 31; “Research Command Starts to Function,”
Aviation Week 55 (2 July 1951): 14; D. L. Putt, “Air Force Research and Development,” Aeronautical
Engineering Review 9 (March 1950): 41.