Lassman 2015 Putting The Military Back Into Military Industrial Complex

Putting the Military Back into the
History of the Military-Industrial

Complex
The Management of Technological Innovation
in the U.S. Army, 19451960
By Thomas C. Lassman*
ABSTRACT
In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower, the Army Chief of Staff, established the
Research and Development (R&D) Division on the War Department General Staff to
expedite major technological breakthroughs in weapons technology. This goal, based
on the separation of the management of R&D from procurement, captured the Armys
preference for qualitative rather than quantitative superiority on the battlefield, but it
threatened to upend entrenched methods of incremental product improvement under
way in the Armys supply organizations, collectively called the technical services. The
divisions brief existence (it ceased operations in 1947) contrasted sharply with the
longevity of the Ordnance Departments in-house manufacturing arsenals; for more
than a century they had exploited synergies between R&D and production to turn out
new weapons mass-produced in industry. The history of the R&D Division and the
corresponding management of technological innovation in the technical services
broadens an otherwise narrow historiographical interpretation of postwar knowledge
production in the United States that is still focused heavily on the moral and political
economy of military-funded academic research.
* Division of Space History, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, MRC 311, P.O. Box
37012, Independence Avenue at Sixth Street, SW, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012.
For their valuable comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this essay, I am especially grateful to Martin
J. Collins, Elliott V. Converse III, Michael J. Neufeld, Bernard Lightman, H. Floris Cohen, and the three
anonymous referees who reviewed the manuscript for Isis. A debt of gratitude must also be paid to the late
Herbert Pankratz and the staff of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, and the
archivists and librarians at the Library of Congress and the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington,
D.C. The Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum generously provided funds to
underwrite the research for this essay.
Isis, 2015, 106:94 120
2015 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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THOMAS C. LASSMAN
95
N 10 JUNE 1946 GENERAL DWIGHT EISENHOWER, the Chief of Staff of the

Army, appointed Major General Henry Aurand, a career ordnance officer who had
prepared to retire from active duty, the first director of the new Research and Development
Division on the War Department General Staff.1 Proclaiming the value of science to the
successful prosecution of the war just ended, Eisenhower had established the division
the first of its kind on the General Staffin late April to integrate civilian scientific
expertise into weapons development and military planning on a permanent, departmentwide basis. In his new position, Aurand executed policies that threatened to disrupt
long-established patterns of technological innovation in the Armys procurement and
supply organizations collectively called the technical servicesan outcome not wholly
unanticipated by Edward Bowles, a professor of communications engineering at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had served since 1942 as a special consultant
to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Bowles, who had drafted Eisenhowers R&D
directive, cautioned Aurand shortly after his appointment about the emphasis [in the
Army] on material and facilities for research, as opposed to what I believe would be the
more important problemthat of educating professional men, in the Army and out, in
order that there may be competence to do the research that lies ahead. After all, it is not
facilities, but men, who furnish the inspiration and the creative genius.2 In effect, Bowles
called for a sea change within the Army leadership to put the War Department on a firmer
scientific footing and, in the process, facilitate a shift from the proven practice of
incremental product improvement under way in the technical services toward more
cutting-edge R&D of the type expected to produce radical technological breakthroughs.
General Aurand achieved neither objective. The R&D Division ceased operations at the
end of 1947, the victim of a backlash from the technical services and a diminished role on
the General Staff after the transfer of the Army Air Forces (AAF) research and development program to the newly independent Air Force.
The extent to which the Research and Development Division challenged traditional
methods of technological innovation in the Armys technical services reflected broader
patterns of institutional behavior that restructured on a much larger scale the political
economy of the federal R&D establishment after World War II. The organizational
structure of what came to be known as the military-industrial complex predated the Cold
War. The War and Navy Departments, which merged with the newly created Department
of the Air Force to form the National Military Establishment in 1947 (renamed the
Department of Defense two years later), had always relied on industrial firms to develop
and manufacture in quantity the weapons required to equip the armed forces, especially
during wartime.3 The Cold War strengthened and permanently deepened this long1 Henry S. Aurand to Robert P. Patterson, 1 June 1946, Box 32, Folder: Personal Correspondence: 1946,
MS, (2), Henry S. Aurand Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, Dwight D. Eisenhower
Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter cited as Aurand Papers). Born in Pennsylvania in 1894,
Aurand graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1915 and then served in the Coast Artillery Corps.
In 1920 he moved to the Ordnance Department and remained there in various assignments until 1939, at which
time he transferred to the Supply Division on the War Department General Staff. During World War II Aurand
commanded major logistics operations in the United States, Europe, and China. For a detailed narrative history
of Aurands Army career see John Russell Reese, Supply Man: The Army Life of Lieutenant General Henry
S. Aurand, 19151952 (Ph.D. diss., Kansas State Univ., 1984).
2 Edward L. Bowles to Aurand, 19 June 1946, p. 2, Box 33, Folder: Special Correspondence: Dr. Edward
Bowles, 1946 1947, Aurand Papers.
3 On the establishment of the Department of Defense see Roger R. Trask and Alfred Goldberg, The
Department of Defense, 19471997 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense,
1997), pp. 121; and Steven L. Rearden, The Formative Years, 19471950 (History of the Office of the Secretary

96
HISTORY OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
established institutional relationship, to the extent that, for the first time, the military
departments collectively displaced private patrons as the leading source of funding for
academic research in the physical sciences and engineering disciplines.4 The prewar and
postwar periods differed more in degree than in kind.5 The outbreak of war on the Korean
Peninsula in June 1950 and the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in October 1957
accelerated this transformation and also prompted the government to expand further the
national security apparatus and the role of science within it. By 1960, defense spending
consumed 80 percent of all federal R&D funds.6
of Defense, 1) (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1984). On the
dependence of the War and Navy Departments on private industry see esp. the first four volumes of Paul A. C.
Koistenens The Political Economy of American Warfare (Lawrence: Univ. Press Kansas, 1996 2004), which
cover the colonial period through World War II. See also, e.g., Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board:
BusinessGovernment Relations during World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973); Merritt Roe
Smith, Military Arsenals and Industry before World War I, in War, Business, and American Society: Historical
Perspectives on the Military Industrial Complex, ed. Benjamin Franklin Cooling (Port Washington, N.Y.:
Kennikat, 1977), pp. 24 42; Gary E. Weir, Building American Submarines, 1914 1940 (Washington, D.C.:
Naval Historical Center, 1991); Weir, Forged in War: The Naval-Industrial Complex and American Submarine
Construction, 1940 1961 (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1993); Cooling, Gray Steel and Blue
Water Navy: The Formative Years of Americas Military-Industrial Complex, 18811917 (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe
String, 1979); William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002); Alex Roland, Model Research: The National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, 19151958, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1985);
Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Vol.
1: The New World, 1939 1946 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1962); Irving Brinton Holley,
Jr., Buying Aircraft: Materiel Procurement for the Army Air Forces (United States Army in World War II:
Special Studies) (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1964); and R. Elberton Smith, The
Army and Economic Mobilization (United States Army in World War II: The War Department) (Washington,
D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1959).
4 See Paul A. C. Koistinen, State of War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 19452011 (Lawrence:
Univ. Press Kansas, 2012); Elliott V. Converse III, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960 (History of
Acquisition in the Department of Defense, 1) (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of
Defense, 2012) (hereafter cited as Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960); Glen R. Asner, The
Cold War and American Industrial Research (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon Univ., 2006); Philip Shiman,
Forging the Sword: Defense Production during the Cold War (USACERL Special Report 97/77) (Champaign,
Ill.: U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, July 1997); Thomas J. Misa, Military Needs,
Commercial Realities, and the Development of the Transistor, 1948 1958, in Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, ed. Merritt Roe Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1985), pp. 253287; Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval
Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990); Nick A. Komons, Science and the Air Force: A History
of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Arlington, Va.: Office of Aerospace Research, 1966); Roger L.
Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1993); and Bruce Seely, Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering
Colleges, 1900 1960, Technology and Culture, 1993, 34:344 386, esp. pp. 367379. On the funding of
academic research prior to World War II see Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research
Universities, 1900 1940 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); and Robert E. Kohler, Partners in Science:
Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900 1945 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1991).
5 This distinction is not intended to suggest any sort of institutional determinism. Other alternatives that
foreshadowed wholesale differences in kind within the federal R&D establishment existed but either experienced
modification or remained unfulfilled during and after the transition from World War II to the Cold War, a crucial
point discussed in Nathan Reingold, Choosing the Future: The U.S. Research Community, 1944 1946,
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1995, 25:301328. See also David M. Hart, Forged
Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 19211953 (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), esp. Chs. 57. This essay explicates one such alternative that also happened to
capture patterns of institutional behavior long under way between the military departments and private industry.
6 David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 130, 136. Representative examples of new Cold War institutions of science and
technology include the Presidents Science Advisory Committee, founded after the launch of Sputnik; the Advanced
Research Projects Agency, a contract research organization established by the Department of Defense in 1958 to
fund private-sector R&D for high-priority military programs; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), successor organization to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Also founded in

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
97
Historians of science have largely examined the expansion of the postwar militaryindustrial complex from the perspective of the impact of defense spending on university
research. Studies written within this framework fit into two general categories of analysis.
One claims that academic research funded by the military departments placed undue
emphasis on technological novelty, an outcome that corrupted the recipient institutions
and polluted the scientific process; while the other argues that civilian scientists accepted
military authority and programmatic restrictions on classified data as the necessary costs
of exploiting seemingly limitless defense resources for their own purposes in order to
pursue new lines of research, build expensive laboratories and instruments, and train
graduate students.7 More recently, the historiography has moved beyond plumbing the
depths of the moral and political economy of academic science to include transnational,
comparative, and other perspectives in a global rather than a strictly national, U.S.Soviet
Cold War context.8 There is plenty to learn from such variation and its collective
contribution to a more nuanced and expansive history of science after World War II.9 This
essay also focuses on variation or, rather, the lack of it that still pervades much of the
1958 to build a program of nominally civilian space exploration, NASA maintained deep connections to the
military and intelligence communities. See Zuoyue Wang, In Sputniks Shadow: The Presidents Science
Advisory Committee and Cold War America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008); Richard J.
Barber Associates, Inc., The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958 1974 (Washington, D.C.: Advanced
Research Projects Agency, Dec. 1975); Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History
of the Space Age (New York: Basic, 1985), Chs. 6 10; Peter Hayes, NASA and the Department of Defense:
Enduring Themes in Three Key Areas, in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and
Roger D. Launius (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2006), pp. 199 238;
J. D. Hunley, Preludes to U.S. Space-Launch Vehicle Technology: Goddard Rockets to Minuteman III (Gainesville: Univ. Press Florida, 2008); and Hunley, U.S. Space-Launch Vehicle Technology: Viking to Space Shuttle
(Gainesville: Univ. Press Florida, 2008).
7 David A. Hounshell, Rethinking the Cold War; Rethinking Science and Technology in the Cold War;
Rethinking the Social Study of Science and Technology, Social Studies of Science, 2001, 31:289 297, esp. p.
290. For a sampling of this literature see Paul Forman, Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis
for Physical Research in the United States, 1940 1960, Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci., 1987, 18:149 229; Daniel
J. Kevles, Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 194556, ibid., 1990,
20:239 264; Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge (cit. n. 4); Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and
American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1993); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley:
Univ. California Press, 1997); Peter J. Westwick, The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947
1974 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003); Paul K. Hoch, The Crystallization of a Strategic
Alliance: The American Physics Elite and the Military in the 1940s, in Science, Technology, and the Military,
Vol. 1, ed. Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 87116;
S. S. Schweber, The Mutual Embrace of Science and the Military: ONR and the Growth of Physics in the
United States after World War II, ibid., pp. 3 45; David Kaiser, Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower,
and the Production of American Physicists after World War II, Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci., 2002, 33:131159;
W. Patrick McCray, Project Vista, Caltech, and the Dilemmas of Lee DuBridge, ibid., 2004, 34:339 370;
Thomas C. Lassman, Government Science in Postwar America: Henry A. Wallace, Edward U. Condon, and the
Transformation of the National Bureau of Standards, 19451951, Isis, 2005, 96:2551; Joan Lisa Bromberg,
Device Physics vis-a`-vis Fundamental Physics in Cold War America: The Case of Quantum Optics, ibid.,
2007, 97:237259; and Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science
(Seattle: Univ. Washington Press, 2005). Additional sources are cited in Barton C. Hacker, Military Institutions,
Weapons, and Social Change: Toward a New History of Military Technology, Tech. Cult., 1994, 35:768 834,
on pp. 829 831.
8 See the Focus section entitled New Perspectives on Science and the Cold War, Isis, 2010, 101:362 411,
esp. the introductory essay by Hunter Heyck and David Kaiser (pp. 362366).
9 Business historians have adopted a similarly broad perspective to reframe the historiography of the
military-industrial complex. The more recent scholarship is distinguished by its . . . broader perception of the
complex patterns of cause-and-effect portrayed in the evidence, and its determination to generate a more
systematic (and, at times thereby, more complicated) set of conclusions regarding the history and implications
of the [military-industrial complex]: Michael A. Bernstein and Mark R. Wilson, New Perspectives on the
History of the Military-Industrial Complex, Enterprise and Society, 2011, 12:19, on pp. 5 6.

98
historical literatureto broaden and deepen what has otherwise been a narrow interpretation of postwar scientific and technological change in the United States.
The Army did not just fund extramural research. Like other science-based government
agencies, such as the Department of Agriculture and the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, it also managedthrough the technical servicesa nationwide network of
in-house R&D institutions. The manufacturing arsenals assigned to the Ordnance Department, which consumed the biggest share of Army R&D and procurement funds, did
notas the current historiography suggests largely by omissionpassively observe the
reconstruction and expansion of the federal R&D establishment after World War II, even
as the Department of Defense grew increasingly dependent on extramural research to meet
the technological requirements of new weapon systems.10 Nor is it certain that the arsenals
served as stewards of the scientific and technological backwardness that historians have
sometimes attributed to them.11 To the contrary, they operated for more than a century at
the crucial nexus of weapons R&D and production, a pattern of behavior that General
Aurandarmed with a theory of innovation based on the wholesale separation of those
functions in order to obtain major qualitative leaps in weapons technologytried but
failed to modify. The arsenals remained significant repositories of an accumulated knowledge base in science and engineering that industry routinely tapped to scale up manufacturing capacity for quantity production.12 Additional historical research on state-owned
military R&D institutions of which the Armys ordnance arsenals constitute just one of
many typesand their relations to other sources of knowledge production in the academic
and industrial communities is essential to a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of how scientists and their patrons accommodated the national security objectives
of the Cold War.13
10 Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, p. 144. See also A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the
Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
Belknap, 1957).
11 The historian Daniel Kevles asserted in his seminal study of the American physics community that, on the
whole, armed service laboratories tended to devote themselves to the simple testing of materials and devices, to
the cut-and-try improvement of guns, cannons, engines, and gadgetry: Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The
History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 103.
12 According to the Armys official history of the Ordnance Department during World War II, In [the
arsenals] year after year research and development work went forward along with manufacturing and maintenance of equipment. While their peak productive capacity was never enough to meet the needs of a wartime
army, the arsenals provided the technical assistance that enabled privately owned companies to manufacture
specialized ordnance when expansion was necessary. Here the art of munitions manufacture was preserved.
Not only blueprints of components of weapons, ammunition and vehicles, but carefully planned shop
layouts and details of processing were available for distribution to new contractors. Constance McLaughlin
Green, Harry C. Thomson, and Peter C. Roots, The Ordnance Department: Planning Munitions for War
(United States Army in World War II: The Technical Services) (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of
Military History, 1955), p. 7.
13 The historian Bruce Hevly observed in 1992 that too often historians have relied solely on the scientists
accounts of their relationships with military sponsors, and on the researchers descriptions of the militarys
needs, desires, and shortcomings. . . . [But t]he military . . . had its own interests, motives, and capabilities, often
not revealed in accounts of what academic scientists were told or believed, and much work remains to be done
to clarify the needs and interests of military sponsors of research and development. Summer studies, for example,
are now still understood largely from the scientists point of view, and little is known about that of the military.
The militarys in-house and wholly owned laboratories . . . are also largely unexplored by historians. More than
two decades later, Hevlys assessment of the state of the field is still accurate. See Bruce Hevly, Reflections on
Big Science and Big History, in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Peter Galison and Hevly
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 355363, on pp. 359 360. Martin J. Collins, Cold War
Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 19451950 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 2002), draws on the early history of the RAND Corporation to reach a similar conclusion.

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
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THE POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION OF ARMY R&D
The Ordnance Department (renamed the Ordnance Corps in 1950) and the six other
technical services that fulfilled the Armys logistics requirementsthe Quartermaster
Corps, the Transportation Corps, the Signal Corps, the Medical Department, the Chemical
Warfare Service, and the Corps of Engineersseeded the basic structural elements of the
military-industrial complex. These institutions of science and technology played an
essential role in the Cold War arms buildup that projected U.S. military power abroad and
framed on a global scale the foreign policy objectives of every president from Harry
Truman to Ronald Reagan.14 At the end of World War II, policy makers in the War and
Navy Departments emphasized the role of technological superiority over sheer numbers of
weapons produced, the latter of which had been a major deciding factor in the Allied
victory.15 The Armys response to this strategic shiftfrom quantity to qualityproceeded in fits and starts. It reflected not so much the moral, ethical, and political
compromises faced by scientists conducting weapons research but, instead, the difficulty
the Army experienced in adapting its own long-standing R&D traditions in the technical
services to new strategies of managing technological innovation that acquired broader
institutional legitimacy on the War Department General Staff (the Army Staff after 1947)
during the early years of the Cold War.
The War Department General Staff established the management policies through which
it coordinated the functions of the Armys logistics and combat commands.16 Programmatic responsibility for the development of weapons and related equipment (except for
aircraft) used by combat units in the field resided in the technical services, which fulfilled
the logistical requirements of the Army Service Forces (ASF), the departments wartime
procurement and supply organization.17 A sweeping reorganization of the War Department
in 1946 restructured the management of the technical services and the institutional status
of R&D in the Army. On 11 June the Army Service Forces disbanded, and its management
functions shifted to the new Service, Supply, and Procurement Division on the General
Staff. In advance of this realignment, on 29 April, General Eisenhower ordered the
establishment, effective 1 May, of the Research and Development Division. Organizationally equivalent to the Service, Supply, and Procurement Division and reporting
directly to Eisenhower and Secretary of War Robert Patterson, the new division had been
Collins highlights the dearth of historical writing on the military departments as institutions and as agents and
sites of change after World War II; see the conclusion, esp. pp. 217219.
14 See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security
Policy during the Cold War, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). See also the ongoing series,
History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 6 vols. to date (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office
of the Secretary of Defense, 1984 2011).
15 Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 8 9.
16 On the founding of the General Staff and its evolution to the eve of World War II see James E. Hewes, Jr.,
From Root to McNamara: Army Organization and Administration, 1900 1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army
Center of Military History, 1975), Ch. 1.
17 John D. Millett, The Organization and Role of the Army Service Forces (United States Army in World War
II: The Army Service Forces) (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1954), p. 154. Two
other field commands, established during a major reorganization of the War Department in 1942 to reduce the
administrative burden on the General Staff, functioned alongside the Army Service Forces: the Army Ground
Forces and the Army Air Forces. See Hewes, From Root to McNamara, Ch. 2. Aircraft R&D for the Army Air
Forces resided outside the technical services in the laboratories, testing facilities, and contracting offices
managed by the Air Technical Service Command (renamed the Air Materiel Command in 1946), located at
Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Ibid., p. 121; Herman S. Wolk, The Struggle for Air Force Independence,
19431947 (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997), pp. 141143; and Al Leggin,
Army Air Forces Research and Development, Chemical and Engineering News, 10 Nov. 1946, 24:2914 2915.

100
set up to maximize the input of civilian scientific expertise into military planning and
weapons development through the initiation, allocation, and coordination of R&D in the
technical services and the Army Air Forces.18 The Research and Development Division
immediately absorbed the R&D coordinating functions executed by the New Developments Division, which Pattersons predecessorHenry Stimson, who retired in September 1945 had founded on the War Department Special Staff in October 1943 to
facilitate, in cooperation with the Army Service Forces, the introduction of new weapons
into the combat commands.19 Although a direct descendant of the New Developments
Division and endorsed by Eisenhower, the R&D Division owed its existence as a planning
and policy-making organization on the General Staff to Patterson and also to Edward
Bowles, who had served as a special consultant to Stimson during the war.20
As envisioned by Patterson and Bowles, authorized by Eisenhower, and executed by
General Aurandthe newly appointed Director of Research and Development21the
18 Hewes, From Root to McNamara, pp. 146 158; Lowell R. Ecklund, The Organization for Research and
Development in the Army, 1940 to 1947 (M.S. thesis, Syracuse Univ., 1948), pp. 45, 54; and Henry I. Hodes
to Distribution, 29 Apr. 1946, ibid., document no. 1. The reorganization of the War Department provided greater
autonomy to the Army Air Forces to the extent that the R&D Division exercised only nominal staff supervision
over the AAFs research and development program to prevent project duplication in the technical services.
Aurand had no direct interaction with the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field. Instead, he coordinated R&D
through his AAF counterpart on the Air Staffthe Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development (see
note 22, below). Hewes, From Root to McNamara, pp. 82 83, 158; Notes on Division Staff Meeting, 9 July
1946, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers; Aurand to Commanding General (Army Air
Forces), 10 Sept. 1946, Carl A. Spaatz to Director of Research and Development, 25 Sept. 1946, and Aurand to
Commanding General (Army Air Forces), 26 Sept. 1946, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June
1946 June 1947, (2), Aurand Papers; and Notes on R&D Staff Meeting at Which Reorganization of Division
Was Discussed, 22 Nov. 1946, pp. 23, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers.
19 Charles R. Shrader, History of Operations Research in the United States Army, Vol. 1: 1942 62 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of the Army for Operations Research, 2006), pp. 169 170;
and Hewes, From Root to McNamara, pp. 120 125, 402. Although the field commands (the Army Service
Forces, the Army Ground Forces, and the Army Air Forces) absorbed the bulk of the administrative responsibilities previously executed by the Chief of Staff, the centralization of staff functions in the War Department
continued apace as the war progressed. Rather than expanding the General Staff, which focused on broader issues
of planning, policy, and strategy, a Special Staff had been established in 1942 to perform specific functions, such
as the coordination of R&D, for the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of War. John D. Millett, The War
Department in World War II, American Political Science Review, 1946, 40:863 897, esp. pp. 867 869,
874 881.
20 According to Bowles, Stimson had favored from the outset a permanent organizational presence for
R&Dinitially embodied in the New Developments Division on the War Department General Staff. Memorandum for the Record, 20 Sept. 1945, in Ecklund, Organization for Research and Development in the Army
(cit. n. 18), document no. 14. Patterson, who had served during the war as Under Secretary of War in charge of
materiel procurement and economic mobilization, shared Stimsons views on the subject, which he first
expressed to Eisenhower in mid-March 1946. For some years I have given close attention to the Army programs
on research and development. . . . The importance of the work in the future cannot be doubted, and I believe that
it would be well to consider certain organizational changes: Patterson to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 17 Mar. 1946,
quoted in note 1 for entry 840 in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. Louis P. Galambos, Vol. 7: The
Chief of Staff (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. 1000. Bowles, who had helped set up the New
Developments Division in 1943, articulated the R&D Divisions programmatic objective to mobilize science on
behalf of the War Department in more detail in a separate policy statementScientific and Technological
Resources as Military Assetsthat Eisenhower released over his name on 30 April. Bowles to Eisenhower, 12
Apr. 1946, and Eisenhower to Distribution (draft), n.d., Box 33, Folder: Special Correspondence: Dr. Edward
Bowles, 1946 1947, Aurand Papers; Eisenhower to Distribution, 30 Apr. 1946, entry 883 in Papers of Dwight
David Eisenhower, ed. Galambos, Vol. 7: Chief of Staff, pp. 1046 1049; and Hewes, From Root to McNamara,
p. 124. On Bowless career at MIT and his consulting role in the War Department see Alex Soojung-Kim Pang,
Edward Bowles and Radio Engineering at MIT, 1920 1940, Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci, 1990, 20:313337; and
Collins, Cold War Laboratory (cit. n. 13), Chs. 12.
21 Aurand initially ranked third on Eisenhowers list of preferred candidates to direct the R&D Division. His
first choice, Lieutenant General James Doolittle, had obtained a doctorate in aeronautics from MIT in 1924 and

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
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divisions operating philosophy rested on the assumption that the separation of the
management of R&D from procurement would obviate the need to satisfy short-term
production requirements, thereby improving the odds for significant qualitative gains in
weapons technology.22 Not everyone agreed. General Brehon Somervell, a career logistics
officer who had been in charge of the Army Service Forces during the war, opposed this
strategy. Although he established a separate Research and Development Division on the
ASF headquarters staff to supervise the technical services and also coordinate R&D
between them and the Army Ground Forces (which established military requirements for
weapons and equipment), its functions remained subordinate to those of production and
procurement throughout the war. Somervell recalled late in 1945, just before the management functions of the soon-to-be abolished Army Service Forces shifted to the new
Service, Supply, and Procurement Division on the War Department General Staff, how
difficult it had been to reconcile conflicts between the desirability of introducing improvements and the requirements of mass production. Only if one agency included
responsibility for both research and procurement could the inevitable conflicts . . . be
settled expeditiously so that deadlocks do not delay or prevent the procurement of
adequate weapons in the necessary quantities.23 Further research beyond the findings
presented in this essay will determine the full extent to which new R&D policies executed
by the War Department General Staff, until recently a topic long neglected by historians,
translated directly into programmatic execution in the arsenals and other laboratories
served with distinction as a commander of AAF bomber forces during the war. In May 1946, however, Doolittle
retired from active duty, although he continued to serve as a consultant on R&D policy to the Air Staff. General
Joseph Stilwell, commanding general of the Army Ground Forces and second on the list, had headed the War
Department Equipment Board, which endorsed Eisenhowers 30 April policy guidance on R&D (see note 20,
above) and released a report to that effect on 29 May 1946. Stilwell died later that year, in October. Meanwhile,
Colonel Gervais Trichel, previously Chief of the Rocket Development Division in the Office of the Chief of
Ordnance and now Assistant Director of the New Developments Division, served temporarily as acting director
of the R&D Division until Eisenhower announced Aurands appointment. Trichel remained on Aurands staff as
Deputy Director for Development. Eisenhower to the Secretary of War, 26 Apr. 1946, entry 876, and 27 April
1946, entry 882, in Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. Galambos, Vol. 7: Chief of Staff, pp. 1036,
10451046; Conference on Organization of the Research & Development Division, 14 June 1946, p. 1, Box
34, Folder: Staff Meeting, (2), Aurand Papers; Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 217,
220 323; Hewes, From Root to McNamara, pp. 242243; and Ecklund, Organization for Research and
Development in the Army, pp. 46 52.
22 Bowles had fashioned a similar research and development strategy for the Army Air Forces. In December
1945, on the recommendation of Bowles and the aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, chairman of the AAF
Scientific Advisory Group, Army Air Forces commanding general Henry Arnold established the Office of the
Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development. Although the new position ranked above the other
major functional elementssuch as personnel, intelligence, operations, and materiel on the Air Staff, Bowles
deliberately emphasized to Arnold the necessity of separating the management of R&D from procurement.
There is real danger, he wrote Arnold in November, that [the offices] success might be jeopardized by its
coming under the insidious spell of the materiel type of thinking, which is far too materialistic to control an office
of this character. This will have to be watched. Bowles to Henry H. Arnold, 26 Nov. 1945, p. 2, Box 33, Folder:
Special Correspondence: Dr. Edward Bowles, 1946 1947, Aurand Papers. Bowless expectations did not pan
out. Major General Curtis LeMay, who filled the new post, had the authority only to coordinate R&D, rather than
directly manage its execution in the operating commands responsible for materiel acquisition. In October 1947,
shortly after the Air Force separated from the Army, the Office of the Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research
and Development ceased operations, and its functions reverted to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Materiel.
Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 212217.
23 Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 149 150; and Hewes, From Root to McNamara (cit.
n. 16), pp. 120 122, 152, 161. The new R&D Division on the General Staff absorbed the ASF Research and
Development Division when the Army Service Forces disbanded in June 1946. L. Van Loan Naisawald, The
History of the Army R&D Organization and Program, Part I: Organization (Washington, D.C.: Office of the
Chief of Military History, n.d.), pp. 14 15, copy in the Historical Resources Branch, U.S. Army Center of
Military History, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C.

102
operated by the technical services, in much the same way that the current Cold War
historiography has already recorded the impact of national security policies and military
funding priorities on the content and professional standards of academic research.24 In the
interim, however, a preliminary analytical framework can be extracted from a close
reading of the historiography of American industrial research. Direct reference to the
literature on corporate R&D is instructive in this case given the historical dependence of
the Army, and also the Navy and the Air Force, on science-based industry to develop and
manufacture in quantity weapon systems of all types.
Since the late nineteenth century, science-based manufacturing firms had operated
elaborate R&D laboratories staffed by professionally trained scientists to develop new
products. Institutionalized invention became a major source of corporate growth in the
chemical, communications, and electrical industries during this period in no small part
because of the synergies that existed between R&D and manufacturing. This relationship
began to change after World War I, as firms in these industries exploited for commercial
purposes discoveries in new and, in some cases, seemingly esoteric scientific disciplines
that had little in common with established patterns of product-driven R&D. Moreover,
firms typically segregated such researchwhat contemporary practitioners in the industrial and academic communities called basic or fundamental researchfrom other inhouse R&D functions that focused on short-term product improvements. The notion that
fundamental research, separated from the immediate demands of product development and
manufacturing, would be the wellspring of new technologies gained traction throughout
the corporate R&D community, but the historical record of firms that adopted and
successfully institutionalized this strategy is mixed.25 The E. I. DuPont de Nemours and
Companys strategic move into synthetic organic chemistry in the 1920s, for example,
complemented the firms existing knowledge base in high explosives technology and
produced two blockbuster innovationsnylon fiber and neoprene synthetic rubberwhile
the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Companys costly investment in nuclear
physics researchan academic field of investigation largely unknown to the companys
R&D personnelin the 1930s generated good science but no commercially successful
technologies. What both of these episodes and many others at firms elsewhere demonstrate
is that R&D often produced commercially valuable results sporadically and in ways
seldom anticipated by research managers, even in cases where companies institutionalized
specific policies, such as the separation of fundamental research from development and
production (both physically and managerially), to make the innovation process more
efficient and predictable. DuPont invested heavily in fundamental research after World
War II in a deliberate attempt to replicate its previous success in synthetic fibers R&D, but
the resulting disconnect between the science produced and the technological requirements
of product diversification and market growth compromised the companys long-term
24 See the sources cited in note 7, above; see also Robert W. Seidel, Accelerators and National Security: The
Evolution of Science Policy for High-Energy Physics, 19471967, History and Technology, 1994, 11:361391.
Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, provides the most complete historical analysis to date of
top-level R&D management and policy (within the broader context of weapon systems acquisition) in all three
military departments during the early postWorld War II period.
25 Ronald R. Kline, Construing Technology as Applied Science: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and
Engineers in the United States, 1880 1945, Isis, 1995, 86:194 221, esp. pp. 216 217. For an introduction to
the historical literature on industrial research in the United States 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), pp.
13 85.

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
103
competitive performance. Contrary to the optimistic expectations of DuPonts R&D

management, this postwar outcome more closely resembled the abortive effort to commercialize nuclear physics research at Westinghouse Electric in the 1930s.26
The national security objectives of the Cold War, which placed a premium on military
preparedness and technological superiority to wage war, forced the Army to confront the
same tension between effective R&D management and the unpredictability of knowledge
production that had long structured the innovation process in science-based industry. One
recent study has shown how commercial manufacturing firms serving military markets
enthusiastically expanded their internal R&D capabilities to take advantage of financial
incentives tied directly to Defense Department policies that proclaimed the value of
fundamental research as the primary driver of technological innovation.27 The policy
implications for the Defense Departments intramural R&D programs are equally significant, highlighted in the Armys case by the extent to which directives handed down by
the Research and Development Division threatened to undermine the long-standing
synergies between R&D and production that had guided weapon systems innovation in the
technical services.
At the outset, the R&D Division lacked the authority to manage the budgets and
contracts that structured research and development programs in the technical services.
Those functions resided in the Service, Supply, and Procurement Division. The coordination of R&Da major function of General Aurands division consisted of broad
oversight and overall direction based on site visits to in-house installations and the review
and approval of budget and program plans submitted periodically to his staff of military
officers and civilian scientists and engineers by the chiefs of the technical services.28 On
paper, this division of labor provided institutional legitimacy to the new R&D Division.
In practice, however, it provoked institutional discord. On 12 June 1946, the day before
Eisenhower announced his appointment, Aurand met personally with Secretary of War
Robert Patterson, who now highlighted the R&D Divisions top priorities as a functioning
organization. [Patterson] talked to me about the necessity for controlling the utilization
of . . . money by the Technical Services, Aurand wrote in a memorandum for the record,
indicating the type of development contracts which should be given outside and the
things which [the technical services] should do themselves, and making sure that research
and development stood on its own and separate from other types of procurement contracts.29 Less than a month later, in early July, retired Major General Clarence Williams,
26 See David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D,
19021980 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988); 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 Soc., 2005, 6:601 645; and Lassman, Industrial Research Transformed: Edward Condon at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 19351942, Tech. Cult.,
2003, 44:306 339. For additional case studies see Scott G. Knowles and Stuart W. Leslie, Industrial
Versailles: Eero Saarinens Corporate Campuses for GM, IBM, and AT&T, Isis, 2001, 92:133; Margaret
B. W. Graham, RCA and the VideoDisc: The Business of Research (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986);
and John W. Servos, Changing Partners: The Mellon Institute, Private Industry, and the Federal Patron, Tech.
Cult., 1994, 35:221257.
27 See Glen R. Asner, The Linear Model, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Golden Age of Industrial
Research, in The ScienceIndustry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications, ed. Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and
Sven Widmalm (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications/Watson, 2004), pp. 330.
28 Notes on Division Staff Meeting, 16 July 1946, p. 2, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand
Papers; and Aurand to the Deputy Chief of Staff, 8 July 1946, p. 1, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol.
I, June 1946 June 1947, (2), Aurand Papers.
29 Aurand to James L. Walsh, 3 July 1946, p. 1, Box 32, Folder: Personal Correspondence: 1946, TZ, (2),

104
who had served as the Chief of Ordnance from 1918 to 1930, explained to Aurand the
major obstacle that would likely pose the greatest threat to Pattersons stated goals. Your
big problem, Williams wrote, will be to secure the cordial and sympathetic cooperation
of the [technical] services. As you know they are jealous [and] suspicious of any
infringement on what they regard as their own preserves.30 Given Williamss observation
and the disquiet expressed by some senior officers in the technical services about the scope
of oversight exercised by the General Staff and the extent to which it might be over done
and thus severely handicap the operations of the research and development agencies,
Aurand could not have been surprised when his announcement in September of new R&D
procedures based on Pattersons earlier policy guidance drew criticism from the service
chiefs.31
The Congress appropriated funds for research and development directly to the technical
services.32 In keeping with the requirement that the management of R&D be separate from
procurement and centralized within his own division, Aurand proposed that such funds
bypass the technical services and instead be transferred directly as a lump sum to the Chief
of Staff, to whom he reported, starting in fiscal year 1947. He justified this realignment on
the assumption that it would optimize the efficient coordination and allocation of finite
resources for R&D, while still granting the technical services full autonomy to manage
approved programs internally or through extramural contracts. Although they had already
received Aurands personal assurance that the execution of R&D contracts would remain
under their firm control according to policies handed down by the Director of Service,
Supply, and Procurement, the chiefs of the technical services rejected outright any
proposal to grant funding authority to the Chief of Staff.33 Lieutenant General Raymond
Wheeler, the Chief of Engineers, suspected a deliberate attempt by Aurand to obtain
operational control of R&D. It is no more necessary, he told Aurand, for the Chief of
Staff or the Director of Research [and] Development . . . to have research and development funds appropriated directly to him in order to properly control their utilization than
for all supply funds or all construction funds to be appropriated to the Chief of Staff or the
Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement. Direct appropriations to the Corps of
Engineers, Wheeler pointed out, already afforded the same efficiencies and institutional
flexibility for the prosecution of research and development that Aurand reserved for the
R&D Division. He specifically highlighted prior instances in which the research and
development budget simply absorbed surplus funds originally allocated for procurement.34
Major General Harry Ingles, the Chief Signal Officer, called attention to the difficulties
that the technical services would likely encounter if forced to plan their R&D programs
without sufficient advance notice of funding availability, otherwise guaranteed through
Aurand Papers; and Aurand, Memorandum for Record, 12 June 1946, Box 34, Folder: Research & Development Board Memorandums, 1946 47, Aurand Papers.
30 Aurand to Clarence C. Williams, 26 June 1946, p. 1; and Williams to Aurand, 2 July 1946, p. 2: Box 32,
Folder: Personal Correspondence: 1946, TZ, (3), Aurand Papers.
31 Minutes of the First Meeting of the War Department Research Council, 19 Apr. 1946, p. 1, Box 11,
Folder: War Dept. Files, Reports, Defense of the R&D [Research and Development] Budget, 1946, Georges
F. Doriot Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Doriot
Papers); and Arthur A. Fickel to Georges F. Doriot, 9 July 1946, Box 9, Folder: War Dept. Files, Correspondence, Research and Dev. Division, War Dept. General Staff, Doriot Papers.
32 Hewes, From Root to McNamara (cit. n. 16), p. 97.
33 Notes on Division Staff Meeting, 16 July 1946, p. 2; Notes on Division Staff Meeting, 20 Aug. 1946;
and Notes on Staff Meeting, 8 Oct. 1946, p. 1: Box 4, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers.
34 Raymond A. Wheeler to Aurand, 4 Oct. 1946; and Aurand to Wheeler, 7 Oct. 1946: Box 32, Folder:
Personal Correspondence: 1946, TZ, (3), Aurand Papers.

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
105
direct appropriations from the Congress: There will need to be definite allocation[s] and
assurance[s] from your [Aurands] office that funds required for research and development
are definitely to be furnished. Major General Everett Hughes, the Chief of Ordnance and
a staunch critic of what he considered to be the R&D Divisions creeping authority,
registered a similar complaint about Aurands tactics. The Chiefs of Services never know
where they stand or what to expect, he charged. Already jaded by the loss or anticipated
transfer of functions previously under their control to other divisions on the General Staff,
Hughes suspected a concerted attempt to abolish the Technical Services. Hughes and
Ingles pressed Aurand to execute the R&D Divisions founding directive. It appears to
me, Ingles wrote, that our best bet is . . . the more efficient utilization of the facilities
of the Technical Services rather than a high centralization of planning and operation in
your Division.35
While his plan to restructure established patterns of funding for research and development foundered, Aurand, on Secretary Pattersons instructions, had already acted on
Ingless suggestion to improve R&D efficiencies in the technical services. In line with the
War Departments requirement for qualitative gains in weapons technology and also
because of impending budget cuts and personnel reductions prompted by the postwar
demobilization, Aurand based the R&D Divisions policy guidance on a narrow definition
of research and development. From the outset, the R&D Division encouraged the expenditure of research funds on projects expected to yield major technological breakthroughswhat Aurand called the military application of pure researchrather than
incremental improvements or modifications to existing equipment. General Ingles rejected
outright this theory of technological innovation. As far as communications equipment is
concerned, he cautioned Aurand, this would be a disastrous policy. . . . In the field of
wire communication equipmentand it must be remembered that wire channels carry
about 80 [percent] of all our communications trafficprogress in both industry and the
Armed Forces is made almost entirely by improvements. The complete replacement of a
piece of wire with a new and radically different item is very rare. Elaborating further,
Ingles emphasized that it would be most unwise to cease spending a considerable portion
of our [Signal Corps] development funds on . . . improvements to existing equipments.
In response, Aurand simply confirmed the War Departments policy to eliminate the
gadgeteering which is so expensive and produces so little.36 He also issued guidance
concerning the organization of R&D in the technical services. In-house installations would
35 Harry C. Ingles to Aurand, 21 Sept. 1946, pp. 12, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June
1946 June 1947, (2), Aurand Papers (first and concluding quotations); and Everett S. Hughes to Aurand, 31
Oct. 1946, pp. 35, Box 11, Folder: War Dept. Files, Reports, Defense of the R&D [Research and
Development] Budget, 1946, Doriot Papers. Aurand dismissed outright any intention to obtain operational
control of R&D in the technical services. There seems to be a widespread fear, he wrote Ingles, that [the]
Research and Development Division . . . will become an organization similar to the Office of Naval Research
which will actually contract for and operate projects. Only insofar as the technical agencies fail to furnish the
necessary information and assistance for this General Staff Division will such centralization become
necessary. . . . It is the considered opinion of this Division that no centralization of operation of research and
development within the War Department is either necessary or desirable. Centralization of management of the
War Department Research and Development Program is mandatory. Aurand to Ingles, 3 Oct. 1946, p. 5, Box
34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June 1946 June 1947, (2), Aurand Papers.
36 Notes on Division Meeting, 25 June 1946, p. 1, and Notes on Division Staff Meeting, 16 July 1946, p.
2, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers; Ingles to Aurand, 21 Sept. 1946, pp. 12, and Aurand
to Ingles, 3 Oct. 1946, p. 3, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June 1946 June 1947, (2), Aurand
Papers; and Aurand to Distribution, 26 Mar. 1947, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June
1946 June 1947, (1), Aurand Papers.

106
focus on the military application of known scientific facts for product development and
testing. Knowledge gleaned from longer-range and more speculative researchpure
research, in Aurands terms, and the source of major technological breakthroughs
would be obtained through extramural contracts.37
Hamstrung by running conflicts with the technical services, the Research and Development Division continued to function, albeit without much influence, for little more than
a full calendar year. Having failed to obtain direct control of R&D funds through the Chief
of Staff, Aurand had to accept the more limited role of coordination and supervision
already authorized by Eisenhowers founding directive.38 Sometimes Aurand took more
direct action, a strategy that further strained relations with the technical service chiefs.
Upset that Aurand had personally intervened in R&D planning discussions between the
Quartermaster Corps and local industrialists in Chicago, Major General Thomas Larkin,
the Quartermaster General, dispatched a stinging criticism of the R&D Division. Research and Development at the War Department [General Staff] level should not be an
operating function, Larkin wrote Aurand in December 1946. [The] Chiefs of [the
technical] Services should handle their own affairs. Aurand tried to mollify Larkin by
clarifying functional roles, the same strategy he had used to reassure Wheeler and Ingles
about funding priorities. There is no intention on the part of this office to operate, as you
have often been assured, he replied. There is every intention to be of assistance.39
Meanwhile, consolidation of the Research and Development Divisions organizational and
administrative functions within the Armys existing R&D management structure had
proceeded slowly. The establishment of this organization as an integral part of the Army
research structure, and the integration of that structure, have taken practically all of our
time, wrote Cloyd Marvin, president of George Washington University and Aurands
deputy director for research, in April 1947. Even now, we are beset with . . . administrative problems. . . . This makes it difficult for us to put the desired amount of time on our
creative objectives.40 Complicating matters further, the unification of the War and Navy
37 Aurand to Ingles, 3 Oct. 1946, p. 6, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June 1946 June 1947,
(2), Aurand Papers.
38 We are going to control funds through the quarterly reports [submitted by the technical services] and . . .
budget analysis, Aurand announced to the division staff in November 1946, shortly after Wheeler, Ingles, and
Hughes had rejected his plan to transfer funding authority from the technical services to the Office of the Chief
of Staff. Elaborating further, Aurand acknowledged by example the limits of his own and the R&D Divisions
influence. I know . . . that one [technical] service has obligated but 10 [percent] of its [fiscal year 19]47 [R&D]
money. How are we going . . . [to] ask [the Congress] for half as much again for the next [fiscal year] when . . .
they have obligated only 10 [percent] of their money? So I have to sit down with their R&D fellow and say What
are you going to do about it? When queried directly by a member of his staff about the extent to which he
expected the R&D Division to control funds, Aurand confirmed a general over-all control of the preparation of
the [R&D] program, which entailed nothing more than staff assistance to establish department-wide priorities
for research and development. Notes on R&D Staff Meeting at Which Reorganization of Division Was
Discussed, 22 Nov. 1946, pp. 2122, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers.
39 Thomas B. Larkin to Aurand, 13 Dec. 1946; and Aurand to Larkin, 18 Dec. 1946, p. 1: Box 34, Folder:
Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June 1946 June 1947, (2), Aurand Papers.
40 Cloyd H. Marvin to John W. Snyder, Apr. 1947, p. 1, Box 9, Folder: War Dept. Files, Correspondence,
Research and Dev. Division, War Dept. General Staff, Doriot Papers. Marvin had joined the staff of the R&D
Division in September 1946. Aurand divided his own management responsibilities along functional lines
between Marvin and Colonel Gervais Trichel, the Deputy Director for Development (see note 21, above). Marvin
advanced the divisions research objectives as liaison to the civilian scientific community, while Trichel handled
all matters pertaining to military hardware and relations with the technical services and the combat commands.
War Department Research and Development Division, Science, 18 Oct. 1946, 104:369; and Conference on
Organization of the Research & Development Division, 14 June 1946, pp. 12, Box 34, Folder: Staff
Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers.

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
107
Departments into the National Military Establishment later that year, and the corresponding transfer of the Army Air Forces research and development program to the newly
established independent Air Force, reduced the R&D Divisions scope of oversight, an
outcome that prompted Marvin to resign and left Aurand with few incentives to recruit a
replacement. Marvin confirmed his former bosss frustration in early September, two
weeks prior to unification. Aurand . . . has taken a rather pessimistic view, he wrote,
and seems to feel that the War Department cannot do the type of research and development that ought to be done.41
Three months later, in December 1947, the R&D Division ceased operations as an
independent staff organization. The Service, Supply, and Procurement Division (renamed
the Logistics Division in 1950) absorbed its functions intact; the R&D Division became
the R&D Group of the Service, Supply, and Procurement Division. Sidelined by the
technical services and stripped of its coordinating responsibilities on behalf of the Air
Force, the Research and Development Division had stood out as an easy target for
elimination, given the broader reorganization already under way to reduce the number of
staff agencies reporting directly to the Chief of Staff. General Aurand, meanwhile,
welcomed the merger, citing conflicts between his division and the Service, Supply, and
Procurement Division and an inability to obtain cooperation from the technical services.
Although now a subordinate function of logistics, R&D still remained focused on qualitative gains in weapons technology.42 In January 1948, on Eisenhowers recommendation,
Aurand replaced Lieutenant General Leroy Lutes as Director of Service, Supply, and
Procurement, pledging to give the Technical Services the ball and let them carry it,
giving only the necessary guidance to keep them all abreast and pulling together as a
team.43 Some observers opposed the merger of R&D and procurement, prompting
Aurand, early in 1949, to acknowledge their perception that research and development is
41 R&D Division Staff Meeting, 18 July 1947, p. 3, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (1), Aurand Papers;
Marvin to the Secretary of War, 25 July 1947, and Aurand to the Secretary of War, 31 July 1947, Box 34, Folder:
Staff MemorandumsVol. II, June 1947December 1947, Aurand Papers; and Hewes, From Root to McNamara
(cit. n. 16), pp. 243244. Aurand assigned Marvins duties to the Deputy Director for Development and established
a new combined positionthe Deputy Director of Research and Development headed by a military officer
already serving on the R&D Division staff. Research & Development Division Staff Meeting, 29 Aug. 1947,
p. 3, Box 34, Folder; Staff Meetings, (1), Aurand Papers; Marvin to Doriot, 4 Sept. 1947, Box 8, Folder: War
Dept. Files, Correspondence, Joint Research and Development Board, 1947, Doriot Papers; and Wolk,
Struggle for Air Force Independence (cit. n. 17), p. 196.
42 R&D Division Staff Meeting, 1 Aug. 1947, p. 1, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers;
Hewes, From Root to McNamara, pp. 174 175; Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp.
151152; and Naisawald, History of the Army R&D Organization and Program (cit. n. 23), pp. 2324. In 1955,
Secretary of the Army Wilbur Brucker approved the establishment of the position of Chief of Research and
Development on the Army Staff. Eight years after the dissolution of the R&D Division, research and development had once again obtained independent status. Control of funds and R&D programs, however, still remained
in the technical services under the management of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, the position previously
held by the Director of Service, Supply, and Procurement. Not until 1960 did the Deputy Chief of Staff for
Logistics cede some management functionsthe control of funding and personnelto the Chief of Research
and Development, an outcome that Aurand had not been able to achieve as director of the R&D Division. See
Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 154 162, 603 611.
43 R&D Division Staff Meeting, 18 Dec. 1947, p. 5, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (1), Aurand Papers;
Minutes of Staff Conference, Service, Supply, and Procurement Division, War Department General Staff, 22
Dec. 1947, Box 39, Folder: Logistics Division Staff Meetings, 1948 1949, (3), Aurand Papers; Statement to
Be Read at Logistics Division Staff Conference, 22 July 1948, p. 1, Box 37, Folder: Special Correspondence:
Lt. Gen. R. A. Wheeler, 1948, Aurand Papers; and Eisenhower to Aurand, 20 Dec. 1947, entry 1955, in The
Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. Louis P. Galambos, Vol. 9: The Chief of Staff (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 21532154. Lutes stepped down to become deputy director of the executive
committee of the Munitions Board. See Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 46 63.

108
being de-emphasized. He disagreed, highlighting instead the extent to which the combination of both functions in a single staff organization improved the status of R&D and
opened up new opportunities for growth, an outcome that also validated the argument
previously raised by General Wheeler, who had defended the use of surplus procurement
funds to support R&D programs in the Corps of Engineers. Under this arrangement,
Aurand wrote, we have been able to secure the largest appropriations for research and
development since the war. . . . The tying together of research and development with
procurement under one military head has had excellent effects on both programs. . . . We
have led research and development with procurement money to the extent that we are
requesting funds for procurement for items not yet standardized.44
The brief existence of the Research and Development Division and the subsequent
resubordination of R&D to procurement should not be interpreted as an implicit acknowledgment of scientific and technological backwardness in the technical services. The
technical services did have to overcome certain prejudices that persisted within the
civilian scientific communityfor example, the tendency among academic scientists to
privilege fundamental research over more applied fields of studyand even among the
Armys own leadership.45 Commenting on the Armys chronic difficulty in recruiting and
retaining qualified scientists to work in its in-house laboratories, Secretary of War Robert
Patterson put much of the blame for this outcome on requirements emphasizing the same
type of R&D that General Ingles had defended as the most significant contributor to
technological innovation in the Signal Corps. The undoubted lack of confidence, on the
part of scientists, concerning the War Departments ability to carry out high grade
scientific research, Patterson wrote Senator John Gurney (R., N.D.), the new chairman of
the Senate Armed Serves Committee, in the spring of 1947, is grounded largely in [the]
pre-war history of the Army, wherein Army research and development was almost
exclusively in the field of engineering design based on improvements to existing equipment.46 While new organizational innovationssuch as the R&D Division on the War
Department General Staff had been created to tune the Armys materiel requirements to
the opportunities afforded by the latest advances in science and engineering, the technical
services had already begun to position themselves on their own as proactive stakeholders
44 Aurand to Marvin, 3 Jan. 1949, p. 2, Box 37, Folder: General Correspondence: 1948 1949, LM, (2),
Aurand Papers. All weapons and equipment still in the R&D phase had to be tested and evaluated prior to
approval for quantity production. The Ordnance Technical Committee, made up of representatives from the
Ordnance Department, the other technical services and the combat commands, the Air Force, and the Navy,
authorized final acceptancealso called standardization of approved items. See G. M. Barnes, Research and
Development Service, Journal of Applied Physics, 1945, 16:745747, esp. pp. 746 747; and Scott B. Ritchie,
ResearchIts Coordination and Application in the Development of Ordnance Materiel, ibid., pp. 747751,
esp. pp. 748 749.
45 Late in 1946, a member of the R&D Divisions scientific liaison group highlighted the importance of the
distinction between fundamental and applied research, drawing on a recent discussion of faculty research
priorities with the new Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University. The men who are coming back
to the universities are very anxious to get back to their basic researches. . . . When the Army and Navy have
problems that are along the lines in which these men have a natural interest, and where the problem is basic and
fundamental, they will be very glad to undertake it, with certain limitations. In the first place, they do not wish
to have more than a limited amount of their research funds come from the Army and Navy. They dont want to
engage in anything that is highly secret, and in general the work must be of such a type that it is suitable for
graduate students theses which can be published. In other words, they are very glad to help out wherever any
government laboratory or agency needs help on basic and fundamental problems. Notes on Staff Meeting, 6
Dec. 1946, pp. 12, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers.
46 Secretary of War to John C. Gurney, 12 May 1947, p. 6, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June
1946 June 1947, (1), Aurand Papers.

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
109
rather than passive participants in this process. Lack of space precludes a full accounting
of specific outcomes in each of the seven technical services. However, a brief analysis of
the management, organization, and content of R&D in the Ordnance Department during
the early postwar period is a useful starting point for more in-depth historical research,
given thatinternally and through extramural contractsthe department consumed twothirds of the Armys entire R&D budget by the early 1950s.47
THE DYNAMICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN THE ORDNANCE DEPARTMENT
Established by the Congress in 1812, the Ordnance Department had always managed the
R&D and production of weapons and related equipment through a permanent, nationally
dispersed network of arsenals, proving grounds, and depots often referred to collectively
as the arsenal system. The historiography of the arsenal system combines narrative
histories produced by the Armytypically descriptive monographs that chronicle weapons programs and organizational changes at specific installationsand academic studies
that tend to be more broadly conceptualizedassessing, for example, the impact of the
arsenals on American manufacturing technology and labor practices in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.48 The history of the arsenal system as a source of state-supported
knowledge production and technological innovation during the Cold War is still largely
unknown. Except for a few scattered studies, no critical historical analysis of the post
World War II arsenal system has yet been written.49 One potentially fruitful point of entry
is the original group of six permanent peacetime arsenals founded before 1900. Their long
historiessome spanning more than a centuryprovide a unique opportunity to examine
over time the extent to which internal, localized traditions of technical practice and
47 Research and Development Memorandum 3-53, 13 May 1953, p. 1, Box 1, Folder: Army Ordnance
Advisory Committee, 195253, Clifford C. Furnas Papers, National Archives and Records Administration,
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter cited as Furnas Papers).
48 For a sampling of the Army historical literature see A History of Rock Island and Rock Island Arsenal from
Earliest Times to 1954, 3 vols. (Rock Island, Ill.: Rock Island Arsenal, 1965); A History of Watervliet Arsenal,
1813 to Modernization 1982 (Watervliet, N.Y.: Watervliet Arsenal, 1982); Judy D. Dobbs, A History of the
Watertown Arsenal, 1816 1967 (Watertown, Mass.: U.S. Army Materials and Mechanics Research Center, Apr.
1977); Neil M. Johnson and Leonard C. Weston, Development and Production of Rocket Launchers at Rock
Island Arsenal, 19451959 (Rock Island, Ill.: U.S. Army Weapons Command, 1962); John W. Bullard, History
of the Redstone Missile System (Huntsville, Ala.: U.S. Army Missile Command, 15 Oct. 1965); and James M.
Grimwood and Frances Strowd, History of the Jupiter Missile System (Huntsville, Ala.: U.S. Army Ordnance
Missile Command, 27 July 1962). The most complete compilation of this literature, which includes detailed
annotations and also listings of in-house R&D installations in the Medical Department, the Quartermaster Corps,
the Transportation Corps, the Signal Corps, the Chemical Warfare Service, and the Corps of Engineers, is Edgar
F. Raines, Jr., U.S. Army Historical Publications Related to the U.S. Army in the Cold War Era: A Preliminary
Bibliography, 22 July 1994 (unpublished manuscript), Histories Division, U.S. Army Center of Military
History, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C. Academic studies include Hugh G. J. Aitken, Taylorism at
Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908 1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1960); James J. Farley, Making Arms in the Machine Age: Philadelphias Frankford Arsenal, 1816 1870
(University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1994); Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New
Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977); Smith, Army Ordnance and
the American System of Manufacturing, 18151861, in Military Enterprise and Technological Change, ed.
Smith (cit. n. 4), pp. 39 86; and David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production,
1800 1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1984).
49 See Raber Associates, Conservative Innovators and Military Small Arms: An Industrial History of the
Springfield Armory, 1794 1968 (South Glastonbury, Conn.: Raber Associates, 1989); and John Milner Associates, Historical and Archeological Survey of Frankford Arsenal, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (West Chester,
Pa.: John Milner Associates, May 1979).

110
organizational behavior either accommodated or resisted external sources of pressure

brought about by wholesale changesfor example, the transition from World War II to
the Cold Warin the structure and function of the federal R&D establishment.
The government established the Springfield Armory, the first federal arms factory, in
western Massachusetts in 1794 and Watervliet Arsenal in upstate New York in 1813.
Watertown Arsenal outside Boston and Frankford Arsenal in northeast Philadelphia
commenced operations in 1816. Founded in 1862, Rock Island Arsenal sat just inside the
Illinois border on the Mississippi River next to the city of Davenport, Iowa. The establishment of Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, approximately thirty-five miles west of New
York City, followed in 1880.50 Springfield produced rifles and small arms, and Watervliet manufactured large-caliber guns and artillery. Watertown specialized in the
production of gun carriages and forgings. Frankford turned out small arms ammunition, artillery projectiles, fuses, gun cartridge cases, optical and fire control equipment, gauges, and pyrotechnics. Rock Island fabricated artillery recoil mechanisms,
gun carriages, and combat vehicles, while Picatinny Arsenal produced explosives,
propellants, bombs, and other munitions. R&D laboratories, which typically included
engineering and pilot production facilities, operated alongside full-scale manufacturing lines at each arsenal, and preliminary evidence suggests a close working relationship between the two functions, especially during wartime.51
Over many decades, Watertown and Frankford arsenals accumulated extensive expertise in ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy that supported their respective product lines.
The scientific staff of [the] laboratory, wrote Watertowns commanding officer early in
1940, is constantly engaged in a search for cleaner metals, steels that will resist gun-firing
erosion to the maximum degree, and tools that are capable of machining the tough steels
produced.52 Wartime production requirements for artillery prompted the arsenal laboratory to rediscover the centrifugal casting of gun barrels, a process previously abandoned
in favor of using forged steel. Perfection of the casting technique culminated in improved
metallurgical and physical properties, reduced weight, and savings in the time, labor, and
materials required for gun production. The laboratory also turned out a new method of
welding tank armor, obviating the need for rivets that could be shattered by shell fire.
Similarly, at Frankford, a wartime shortage of copper focused the attention of metallurgists in the arsenal laboratories and engineers in the manufacturing divisions on the
development of a steel substitute for the brass used in ammunition cartridge cases.
Acknowledging that very sound scientific work is being carried out . . . [with] the use of
modern physical equipment, one civilian scientist on General Aurands staff in the
Research and Development Division who visited the laboratories at the Frankford Arsenal
and the Aberdeen Proving Groundthe Armys primary installation for ballistics R&D
reported in the spring of 1947 that comparatively little long-range work is being done.53
The interdependence of R&D and production also extended to the relationship between
research and development. In many instances, in spite of the desires of the scientist
50
A seventh arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, opened in 1796 and operated continuously until the Civil War.
Green et al., Ordnance Department (cit. n. 12), pp. 6 7, 36, 216 220.
52 Rolland W. Case, Manufacturing Preparedness at Watertown Arsenal, Machinery, Mar. 1940, 46:99 101,
on p. 100.
53 Notes on Staff Meeting, 7 Mar. 1947, pp. 12, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers;
William H. Gude, Foundry Research at Watertown Arsenal, Foundry, Dec. 1945, 73:104 106, 186 188, esp.
pp. 105106, 186; and Daniel J. Murphy, Metallurgical Activities at Frankford Arsenal, Metal Progress, Aug.
1952, 62:6772, esp. pp. 67, 7172.
51

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
111
performing the research, Aurand wrote in September, it has been necessary to employ
him later, not only in applied research and development, but in actually training combat
units in the use of his discovery. In other words, the War Department policy has been that
research and development are indivisible. It is believed that this policy is sound and has
been borne out by past experience.54
Historical writing on technological innovation in the Cold War arsenal system has
failed to capture the institutional subtleties that structured these relationships. The case of
small arms manufacture at the Springfield Armory is instructive. In his study of the
Armys troubled effort to develop a suitable replacementthe M-14 for the M-1
infantry rifle, the historian Edward Clinton Ezell highlighted as a significant source of
programmatic difficulty the Ordnance Departments failure to separate Springfields R&D
and production functions. Ordnance leaders did not learn, he wrote in the introduction,
that it was fatal to place a research department under a production-oriented organization.55 To the contrary, they had put considerable thought into this problem and acted on
it. In 1940, for example, the Chief of Ordnance, Major General Charles Wesson, had
rejected calls from his subordinates to separate the management of R&D from production
and procurement, citing instead his preference for the status quoplanning for the
manufacture of existing rather than new weapons given the urgency of national rearmament. Two years later, in 1942, Wessons replacement, Major General Levin Campbell,
reversed course and established in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance a separate
Technical Division (renamed the Research and Development Service in 1944) wholly
independent of the departments production and procurement function, known as the
Industrial Service. This freedom from control of those responsible for mass production
is a great spur to development, wrote one of Campbells subordinates in the Research and
Development Service in June 1945.56
Ezells study provides little direct evidence to show that the combination of R&D and
production crippled the rifle program at the Springfield Armory.57 Nor does it acknowledge the impact of R&D policy changes captured in the opposing management strategies adopted by Generals Wesson and Campbellin the Office of the Chief of Ordnance.
In an earlier essay on postwar small arms procurement, Ezell arrived at the same
conclusion about the relationship between R&D and production within the Ordnance
Department as a whole, and he offered as evidence lessons learned in industry:
The independent research and development facility emerged in the latter decades of the
nineteenth century. In its earliest phase, industrial research was merely an adjunct to manufacturing. . . . Some useful discoveries were made in the mid-1800s, but there were no
54 Aurand to the Director of Plans and Operations, 3 Sept. 1947, p. 2, Box 34, Folder: Staff Memorandums
Vol. II, June 1947December 1947, Aurand Papers.
55 Edward Clinton Ezell, The Great Rifle Controversy: Search for the Ultimate Infantry Weapon from World
War II through Vietnam and Beyond (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1984), p. xvi.
56 Green et al., Ordnance Department (cit. n. 12), pp. 83 85, 88, 9596, 114 117, 221223; and David W.
Hoppock, How Army Ordnance Develops Weapons for Its Customers, Product Engineering, June 1945,
16:361366, on pp. 361362.
57 Instead, it cites as evidence (and paraphrases in the introduction) a statement written forty years earlier by
James Phinney Baxter III in Scientists against Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), p. 12: The [military] services
had not learned yet, as American industry had, that it is fatal to place a research organization under the
production department. Baxter, in turn, based this statement on congressional testimony given by Vannevar
Bush, wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), criticizing the combination of R&D and production during a hearing of the House Select Committee on Post-War Military Policy on
26 Jan. 1945.

112
freewheeling, unfettered investigations. Research was definitely production-oriented. By the

early decades of the twentieth century, American industry was beginning to see the value of
dissociating their research programs from the functions of the factory.
These statements are misleading, even though other scholars have drawn on Ezells
arguments to explain the protracted decline of the arsenal system after World War II and
the corresponding growth of private-sector contracting for weapons R&D and production.58 While it is true that pioneering firms, such as the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company (AT&T) and the General Electric Company (GE)the latter of
which Ezell mentioned by namefunctionally separated research from production to spur
technological innovation, freewheeling, unfettered investigations rarely occurred, and in
those cases where they didat Westinghouse Electric in the 1930s and at DuPont after
World War II, for exampleR&D outcomes often did not meet commercial expectations.59
The indivisibility of research and development and the co-location of R&D and
production at the Springfield Armory derived institutional legitimacy from decades of
practical experience.60 These established patterns of behavior, however, did not preclude
changes in the management of technological innovation within the arsenal system. Historically, military personnel drawn from the Ordnance Departments officer corps managed the arsenals and their major functions, such as R&D and production. Unlike the
civilians who staffed the laboratories and manufacturing lines as permanent employees,
uniformed officers rotated through their management posts on fixed timetables equivalent
to tours of duty in the field.61 This management structure, some critics charged, compromised the stability of R&D programs. Some of the arsenals tried to maintain continuity
through the direct recruitment of civilians to fill top-level management positions.62 Preliminary evidence suggests that such efforts did not necessarily privilege science over
engineering. To the contrary, a preference for engineers may have been a priority.
58 Edward Ezell, Patterns of Small-Arms Procurement since 1945: Organization for Development, in War,
Business, and American Society, ed. Cooling (cit. n. 3), pp. 146 157, on p. 150. Aaron L. Friedberg, In the
Shadow of the Garrison State: Americas Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 277280, draws, in part, on Ezell, Great Rifle Controversy (cit. n. 55), to show
how problems encountered during the development of the M-14 rifle reinforced political opposition to the arsenal
system and, more generally, to government ownership of the means of production, culminating in Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamaras decision to close the Springfield Armory in 1967.
59 See Leonard S. Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell,
1876 1926 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985); and George Wise, Willis R. Whitney, General Electric,
and the Origins of U.S. Industrial Research (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985). Industrial laboratories did
occasionally produce significant scientific breakthroughs. GEs Irving Langmuir and Clinton Davisson at
AT&Ts Bell Telephone Laboratories both won Nobel Prizes for chemistry and physics in 1932 and 1937,
respectively, but their contributions to science originated as the by-products rather than the intended consequences of corporate research programs that focused on the solution of practical problems in electric lighting and
long-distance telephony. See Reich, Irving Langmuir and the Pursuit of Science and Technology in the
Corporate Environment, Tech. Cult., 1983, 24:199 221; and Arturo Russo, Fundamental Research at Bell
Laboratories: The Discovery of Electron Diffraction, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1981,
12:117160. For a general discussion on the disconnect between R&D and commercial applications in sciencebased industries after World War II see Hounshell, Evolution of Industrial Research in the United States (cit.
n. 25), pp. 4151; see also the sources cited in notes 26 and 27, above.
60 See Raber Associates, Conservative Innovators and Military Small Arms (cit. n. 49), pp. 46 51, 90 95,
446 447.
61 Green et al., Ordnance Department (cit. n. 12), pp. 3536.
62 Other technical services, such as the Signal Corps, favored the same strategy. See George Raynor Thompson
and Dixie R. Harris, The Signal Corps: The Outcome (United States Army in World War II: The Technical
Services) (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1966), p. 626.

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
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Displeased with the procession of officers in and out of this Arsenal, the commanding
officer of the Frankford Arsenal, Brigadier General Edward MacMorland, broke protocol
and promoted a civilian engineer who had risen through the civil service to manage the
laboratory division.63 This is keeping with my desire to have civilians handle as many of
the important activities [at the arsenal] as possible, he wrote Brigadier General Henry
Sayler, Chief of the Ordnance Departments Research and Development Service, in
September 1946. In no other way can we obtain the necessary continuity for the
important projects which are being assigned to us.64 The Secretary of War highlighted
one important exception. In addition to working on the feasibility of establishing civilian
direction of our research establishments, Patterson wrote in the spring of 1947, we are
now considering a plan whereby some thirty selected officers will be chosen each year to
continue their post-graduate education through the doctorate level, and be earmarked for
research and development work as their primary career activity. . . . Such a plan, if
adopted, will be a radical departure from traditional Army methods of operation, but
should be of inestimable value to the Army in this new scientific age.65 The priority that
Patterson assigned to this planI know of no step that will do more to link together the
Army and the scientistsindicates the extent to which the professional standards of
scientific expertise, already ensconced in industry and elevated to national prominence
during the war, had shaped the Armys attitudesfrom the General Staff down to the
arsenalstoward the management of technological innovation.66
63 MacMorland handpicked Cecil Fawcett, who had received a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical
engineering from the State University of Iowa in 1931. Fawcett remained at the university, building laboratory
instruments in the physics department, until 1934, then worked as a toolmaker and production engineer at the
nearby Rock Island Arsenal. In 1937 Fawcett left Rock Island to join the technical staff at the Frankford Arsenal,
where he directed experimental R&D in the artillery ammunition division. He transferred to the laboratory
division two years later and became associate director in 1943. See Whos Who in Engineering: A Biographical
Dictionary of the Engineering Profession, 8th ed., ed. Winfield Scott Downs and Edward N. Lodge (New York:
Lewis, 1959), s.v. Fawcett, Cecil C.
64 Edward E. MacMorland to Henry B. Sayler, 4 Sept. 1946, Box 4, Folder: File No. 1, July, August,
September 1946, Henry B. Sayler Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter cited as Sayler Papers). Aurand assigned the same
significance to the civilian personnel he recruited to staff the R&D Division. We hope to keep this organization
small but to do so we have to have very qualified personnel, he wrote just a few months earlier. Much of this
personnel should be civilian. In this day and age of scarcity of civilian scientists, when particularly those who
were in uniform or working with people in uniform have gone back to their civil pursuits, the job of manning
the division is difficult. Aurand to William C. Munnecke, 10 July 1946, Box 32, Folder: Personal Correspondence: 1946, MS, (1), Aurand Papers.
65 Secretary of War to Gurney, 12 May 1947, pp. 3 4, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June
1946 June 1947, (1), Aurand Papers. The plan originated in a proposal drafted early in 1946 by Marsh White,
professor of physics at the Pennsylvania State College and, since 1944, special consultant to the War Department
General Staff. Eisenhower to the Secretary of War, 1 Apr. 1946, entry 812, in Papers of Dwight David
Eisenhower, ed. Galambos, Vol. 7: Chief of Staff (cit. n. 20), p. 971.
66 Patterson to Eisenhower, 25 Mar. 1946, quoted in note 1 for entry 812, in Galambos, ed., Papers of Dwight
David Eisenhower, ed. Galambos, Vol. 7: Chief of Staff, p. 971. Expectations for the organization of science as
a civilian and military resource at the national level found their most articulate expression in OSRD director
Vannevar Bushs landmark report, ScienceThe Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Postwar
Program for Scientific Research (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). Bush wrote the
report on request from President Franklin Roosevelt. See Daniel J. Kevles, The National Science Foundation
and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy: A Political Interpretation of ScienceThe Endless Frontier, Isis,
1977, 68:526; and Jessica Wang, Liberals, the Progressive Left, and the Political Economy of Postwar
American Science: The National Science Foundation Debate Revisited, Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci., 1995,
26:139 166. In line with Pattersons stated objectives, the Congress passed legislation in June 1948 that granted
expanded authority to the Secretary of the Army to select officers for postgraduate education. Eisenhower to
Idwal H. Edwards, 17 Apr. 1946, entry 855, in Galambos, ed., Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed.
Galambos, Vol. 7: Chief of Staff, pp. 1016 1017.

114
In practice, the War Departments enthusiasm for science foundered on personnel and
budget cuts. It is undoubtedly true, Patterson acknowledged, that some high grade
scientists have resigned during recent months, and previously, because of unsatisfactory
working conditions. Congressionally mandated personnel reductions imposed on the War
Department slashed staffing levels for intramural R&D by 15 percent in fiscal year 1947,
prompting the Ordnance Department to terminate research and development programs not
deemed absolutely essential to the Armys materiel requirements.67 To tear down an
organization in a balanced manner and still retain the strength so necessary to carry on . . .
is indeed a task, General Campbell, who had just retired, wrote Everett Hughes, his
successor as the Chief of Ordnance, in May 1946. Since the Reduction in Force occurred
in September 1946, General MacMorland reported to Hughes early in 1947, there has
been [at Frankford Arsenal] a continuous scrutiny of projects to eliminate those which are
not considered worth while. At the Springfield, Watertown, and Watervliet arsenals,
standard maintenance and spare parts activities received top priority over research and
development, an outcome that prompted Aurand, at the time still director of the R&D
Division, to complain to General Sayler that secondary priority is being given to R&D
work, which is not in accordance with the Chief of Staffs [Eisenhowers] instructions.68
The Chief of the Engineering and Development Department at the Detroit Arsenal,
established in 1940 to produce tanks and just designated the Armys seventh permanent
peacetime R&D and manufacturing facility, cautioned Sayler that a reduction of funds
will mean not only a lengthening out of an already extremely conservative program, but
will also necessitate the omissions which caused most of our troubles in procurement,
supply, training, and maintenance during the war.69
Even new, high-priority research-intensive weapons programs in the rocket and guided
missile fields faced growth restrictions during this period.70 Late in 1946, Colonel Benjamin Mesick, the officer in charge of ordnance contracts at the California Institute of
Technologys Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), petitioned Sayler to establish a separate
rocket arsenal on surplus Army property fifty miles east of Los Angeles for applied
development work, such as fabrication of rocket motors, hydraulic testing of propellant
circuits and other specialized problems of rocket production. Practical considerations
tempered Saylers initial enthusiasm. I think the idea is excellent, he wrote Mesick,
[but] such an Arsenal can not be established with the limited appropriations we have and
which are in prospect; it is all we can [d]o to hold our own as far as existing facilities are
concerned.71 Mesick persisted, but the fast-approaching deadlinelate January 1947
67 Secretary of War to Gurney, 12 May 1947, p. 6, Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June
1946 June 1947, (1), Aurand Papers; and Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 138 139.
68 Levin H. Campbell to Hughes, 29 May 1946, Box 5, Folder: Mar.Dec. 1946, Everett S. Hughes Papers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; MacMorland to Hughes, 7 Mar. 1947, pp. 12,
Box 5, Folder: File No. 16, April, May, June 1947, Sayler Papers; and Notes on Staff Meeting, 18 Apr. 1947,
pp. 23, Box 34, Folder: Staff Meetings, (2), Aurand Papers.
69 Joseph M. Colby to Sayler, 10 Sept. 1946, p. 1, Box 4, Folder: File No. 1, July, August, September 1946,
Sayler Papers. The Chrysler Motor Company built and operated the Detroit Arsenal under contract during the
war. Operation of the arsenal reverted to the Ordnance Department in 1945. Shiman, Forging the Sword (cit. n.
4), p. 138.
70 Aurand to the Chief of Ordnance, 11 July 1946; and William F. Tompkins to the Commanding General
(Army Service Forces), 9 May 1945, pp. 10 11: Box 34, Folder: Staff MemorandumsVol. I, June 1946 June
1947, (2), Aurand Papers.
71 Benjamin S. Mesick to Sayler, 17 Dec. 1946; and Sayler to Mesick, 6 Jan. 1947: Box 5, Folder: File No.
15, January, February, March 1947, Sayler Papers. Established in 1943, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory operated
under contract to the Army until 1958. That year, management of the contract transferred from the Army to the

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
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for final disposal of the property forced him to propose without success an alternative
locationBenicia Arsenal, an ordnance storage and repair facility closer to JPL. One
final attempt to force Saylers handthis time based on a proposal, also put forward by
Mesick, to refurbish the Ogden Arsenal in Utah at minimal costyielded a similar
response. We havent money at this time to have a rocket center any place, Sayler told
Ogdens commanding officer in April 1947.72 Not until the end of the decade did the Army
muster sufficient resources to activate and staff a separate peacetime rocket and guided
missile installation at the Redstone Arsenalthe site of idled wartime munitions factories
operated by the Chemical Warfare Service and the Ordnance Departmentin Huntsville,
Alabama.73
Short-term budget and personnel constraints notwithstanding, the active recruitment of
civilians to manage arsenal operations previously controlled by the officer corps highlights
the extent to which the Ordnance Department tolerated institutional change. By contrast,
the establishment of a rocket and guided missile facility modeled on the traditional arsenal
system suggests a preference for institutional continuity. The Ordnance Departments
embrace of basic research is equally instructive. In this case, too, it demonstrates the
resilience of established patterns of organizational behavior that persisted until the late
1950s. Early in 1946, Saylers predecessor as Chief of the Research and Development
Service, Major General Gladeon Barnes, announced that the Ordnance Department expected to spend one-third of its R&D funds internally and distribute the remaining
two-thirds to civilian contractors having strong scientific and engineering research
organizations and facilities suitable for the development of new weapons.74 Extramural
contracting included basic researchmost likely what Aurand called pure research and
the R&D Division classified as knowledge relevant to weapons development but obtained
from investigations not supported by the Armys in-house installations.
Programmatic control of basic research resided within the arsenal system. Individual
arsenals managed projects in fields that broadly matched their existing R&D capabilities.
In June 1951, overall supervision and coordination of basic research throughout the
department shifted from the arsenals to the new Office of Ordnance Research (OOR),
located on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Staffed largely by
civilian scientists but also still tuned to the technical requirements of the arsenals, OOR
solicited, reviewed, and approved proposals from contractors in the academic and industrial communities and evaluated and distributed the research results to ordnance laboratories.75 Although it avoided a similar fate, the Office of Ordnance Research most closely
resembled in its authority and functions the short-lived R&D Division on the War
new National Aeronautics and Space Administration. See Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space
Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1982).
72 Green et al., Ordnance Department (cit. n. 12), pp. 3738; Mesick to Holger Toftoy, 22 Jan. 1947, Willis
R. Slaughter to Sayler, 5 Mar. 1947, and Sayler to Slaughter, 31 Mar. 1947, Box 5, Folder: File No. 15, January,
February, March 1947, Sayler Papers; and Slaughter to Sayler, 4 Apr. 1947, and Sayler to Slaughter, 10 Apr.
1947, Box 5, Folder: File No. 16, April, May, June 1947, Sayler Papers. Built after World War I, Ogden
Arsenal served as an ammunition storage facility. Green et al., Ordnance Department, pp. 38, 59 60.
73 See Helen Brents Joiner, The Redstone Arsenal Complex in the Pre-Missile Era: A History of Huntsville
Arsenal, Gulf Chemical Warfare Depot, and Redstone Arsenal, 19411949 (Redstone Arsenal, Ala.: U.S. Army
Missile Command, 22 June 1966); and Joiner and Elizabeth C. Jolliff, The Redstone Arsenal Complex and Its
Second Decade, 1950 1960 (Redstone Arsenal, Ala.: U.S. Army Missile Command, 28 May 1969).
74 G. M. Barnes, Research Needs for Weapons, Mechanical Engineering, Mar. 1946, 68:196 198, 211, on
p. 197.
75 Research and Development Memorandum 3-53, 13 May 1953, p. 13, Box 1, Folder: Army Ordnance
Advisory Committee, 195253, Furnas Papers; and Ordnance Research Program, Army, Navy, Air Force
Journal, 16 June 1951, 88:1165.

116
Department General Staff: it supervised and coordinated ordnance basic research. The
Office of Naval Research (ONR), by contrast, executed the same coordinating function for
Navy R&D as a whole but also filled a crucial operational role that both the Office of
Ordnance Research and Aurands R&D Division lacked. Established by the Congress in
1946 to support extramural basic research and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of
the Navy rather than to any one of the departments bureaus responsible for R&D,
production, and procurement of weapons and equipment, ONR evaluated project proposals, negotiated contracts, and issued funds directly to approved institutions.76
Programmatic authority of the type executed by ONR at the outset accrued to the Office
of Ordnance Research only gradually. The arsenals relied on a nationwide network of
fourteen ordnance districts to negotiate and administer contracts for basic research.
Established by the Ordnance Department during World War I to mobilize industry for war
production, the districts acquired permanent status in 1922 as part of a broader initiative
undertaken by the Office of the Chief of Ordnance to decentralize the procurement
process. Through their detailed knowledge of local R&D and manufacturing operations,
the district offices acted essentially as regional purchasing agents, guaranteeing the
Ordnance Department ready access to sufficient sources of supply in the event of a
wartime emergency. The arsenals selected contractors to fulfill requirements for basic
research from qualified candidates located in their respective districts. Under our present
policy of decentralization, General Sayler instructed the chief of the Chicago ordnance
district in the spring of 1947, we are assigning the technical supervision of practically all
of our various projects to the . . . Arsenals, and they are the agencies, who with the aid of
the Districts, should decide all the relative merits of prospective contractors and handle
such work as may appropriately be given to [them].77
As director of R&D, Aurand disliked this division of labor. The people who have to
76 Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, pp. 332333. On the establishment and early growth of
the Office of Naval Research see Sapolsky, Science and the Navy (cit. n. 4), Chs. 23; and Kevles, Physicists
(cit. n. 11), p. 355. Like the Army, the Navy owned and operated a large and technologically diversified shore
establishment composed of in-house R&D, manufacturing, maintenance, and support facilities split among seven
independent bureaus at the end of World War II: Ordnance, Ships, Aeronautics, Supplies and Accounts, Naval
Personnel, Medicine and Surgery, and Yards and Docks. For an overview of R&D in the bureaus during the war
see the articles under the general title Mobilization of Scientific ResourcesIV, the U.S. Navy, J. Applied
Phys., Mar. 1944, 15:203290. On the Navys postwar R&D management and organization see David K.
Allison, U.S. Navy Research and Development since World War II, in Military Enterprise and Technological
Change, ed. Smith (cit. n. 4), pp. 289 328; Booz, Allen, and Hamilton, Inc., Review of Navy R&D Management,
1946 1973, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, 1 June 1976); and Rodney P. Carlisle,
Management of the U.S. Navy Research and Development Centers during the Cold War Era: A Survey Guide
to Reports (Washington, D.C.: Navy Laboratory/Center Coordinating Group and the Naval Historical Center,
1996). Case studies of major R&D installations in the bureaus include, but are not limited to, Joseph P.
Smaldone, History of the White Oak Laboratory, 19451975 (White Oak, Md.: Naval Surface Weapons Center,
1975); Albert B. Christman, Sailors, Soldiers, and Rockets: Origins of the Navy Rocket Program and of the
Naval Ordnance Test Station, Inyokern (History of the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California, 1)
(Washington, D.C.: Naval History Division, 1971); J. D. Gerrard-Gough and Christman, The Grand Experiment
at Inyokern (History of the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California, 2) (Washington, D.C.: Naval
Historical Division, 1978); Kenneth G. McCollum, ed., Dahlgren (Dahlgren, Va.: Naval Surface Weapons
Center, 1977); Carlisle, Where the Fleet Begins: A History of the David Taylor Research Center, 1898 1998
(Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1998); Carlisle, Powder and Propellants: Energetic Materials at
Indian Head, Maryland, 1890 1990 (Indian Head, Md.: U.S. Naval Ordnance Station, 1990); and William F.
Trimble, Wings for the Navy: A History of the Naval Aircraft Factory, 19171956 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval
Institute Press, 1990).
77 Donald M. Compton to Sayler, 8 Apr. 1947; and Sayler to Compton, 10 Apr. 1947: Box 5, Folder: File No.
16, April, May, June 1947, Sayler Papers; and Green et al., Ordnance Department (cit. n. 12), pp. 26 27,
36 37, 55, 118.

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
117
stay in contact in . . . research and development, he wrote in September, are the

scientists in the War Department laboratories and the scientists of our contractors. This
relationship is best obtained if the War Department laboratory makes the contract with the
civilian laboratory. After all, the main contact always exists at the place where the money
is exchanged. Otherwise, he cautioned, R&D is completely subject to the whims of the
procurement ideas of the district contracting officer.78 It is not known to what extent
procurement objectives shaped the content, scope, and outcomes of basic research in the
Ordnance Department. Much more historical research is needed. Either way, Aurands
objections had no discernible impact; the ordnance districts retained their contracting
functions on behalf of the arsenals and also the new Office of Ordnance Research.
Substantive changes to this contracting regime did not transpire until 1958, eleven years
after the Research and Development Division ceased operations. That year, the Congress
enacted legislation that extended grant-making authority to OOR and other federal
research agencies.79 The open-ended nature of basic research did not fit easily into
established contracting procedures originally designed for the procurement of specific
goods and services. Essentially a lump-sum payment, the research grant provided maximum flexibility to the recipient to conduct research. The Army, however, did not formally
implement the provisions of the legislation until 1960, an outcome that one historian has
attributed to the unwillingness of the ordnance districts to relinquish control of contract
management to the Office of Ordnance Research.80
Preliminary evidence suggests that OORs labored transition from a coordinating to a
funding agency may have been unique, given the Armys limited tolerance for a more
extensive restructuring of R&D policies and procedures vis-a`-vis the technical services.
Also in 1958, the Army Research Office commenced operations as the central planning
and coordinating agency on the Army Staff for all department-wide R&D. Unlike the
Office of Ordnance Research, but following closely in the footsteps of the long-defunct
Research and Development Division, the Army Research Office had no programmatic
authority. The technical services retained control over the execution of the Armys
intramural and extramural R&D programs.81 The Army Research Offices limited authority did not preclude support for basic research in the arsenals. To the contrary, through
OOR they received for internal consumption some funds for basic research, but the
arsenals did not immediately segregate this work from product development.82 In March
1960 the Frankford Arsenal established a new Institute of Research, the first of its kind in
the Ordnance Department, insulated from the short-term demands of development and
manufacturing and funded on a multiyear rather than an annual basis to improve program
continuity.83 Only additional historical research, however, will determine the extent to
78 Aurand to Walsh, 22 Sept. 1947, p. 2, Box 33, Folder: Special Correspondence, James L. Walsh, 1947,
Aurand Papers.
79 Prior to 1958, only the Department of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare possessed the authority to award research grants.
80 Peregrine White, A History of the Office of Ordnance Research, Army Research Office, 19511981
(Durham, N.C.: U.S. Army Research Office, 1982), pp. 2526; and White, Ordnance Basic Research, 1956 60
(Durham, N.C.: U.S. Army Office of Ordnance Research, 1 Oct. 1960), pp. V14 V18.
81 John S. Norris, Army Research Office Established at Belvoir, Washington Post, 15 Mar. 1958, p. A5; and
Army Research Office, Science, 19 Sept. 1958, 128:645 646.
82 Between 1951 and 1955, the Office of the Chief of Ordnance disbursed funds directly to the arsenals for
basic research. Starting in fiscal year 1956, however, the Office of Ordnance Research executed that function.
See White, Ordnance Basic Research, 1956 60 (cit. n. 80), p. V9.
83 Ibid., pp. VII4 VII5, VII9, VII40.

118
whichif at allthis new type of R&D institution improved the productive capacity of
technological innovation in the arsenal system.
The preceding analyses of the Research and Development Division and the organization
and management of knowledge production in the ordnance arsenals and the Armys
contract research agencies barely scratch the surface of what still remains a neglected
topic in the postwar history of science in the United States. Like the universities and
science-based industries on which they increasingly relied for technical expertise during
the Cold War, all three military departments, not just the Army, faced the seemingly
difficult challenge of adapting entrenched patterns of organizational behavior to new R&D
management strategies that deliberately emphasized long-term qualitative gains in weapons technology.84 The documentary record is indeed voluminous, although many materials, especially for the later years of the Cold War, remain classified, an outcome that has
long restricted the depth and scope of historical writing on military R&D.85 Despite the
classification restrictions, however, historians are nevertheless well positioned to access a
wide range of relevant manuscript materials in the records of the Army, the Navy, and the
Air Force at the College Park, Maryland, and regional branches, including the presidential
libraries, of the National Archives and Records Administration. Manuscript collections
and other unpublished records preserved in the history programs attached to the military
departments are equally crucial to any study of in-house research and development during
the Cold War. Essential repositories include the libraries and archives at the U.S. Army
Center of Military History at Fort Lesley J. McNair, the Naval History and Heritage
Command at the Washington Navy Yard, and the Air Force Historical Studies Office at
Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, all of which are located in Washington, D.C.; the U.S.
Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; and the Air Force Historical
Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Linked to these headquarters
organizations are local and regional history offices whose content specialties capture the
operational histories of nearby military installations.86
TOWARD A BROADER HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE
COLD WAR
Historical writing on science during the Cold War has produced a plethora of studies
structured by questions about the social costs and moral consequences of military-funded
academic research in the United States. Such questions, while important, hardly capture
the scale, scope, and organization of American science after World War II, especially
given the institutional pluralism of the federal R&D establishment. This essay has drawn
attention to the resulting gap in the historiography, focusing specifically on the absence of
a critical analysis of the in-house R&D institutions that managed technological innovation
in the Department of Defense. Filling this gap is not in itself a sufficient justification for
further historical research, but the preceding narrative highlights several salient themes in
84 See Converse, Rearming for the Cold War, 19451960, Chs. 57, 9, and 10, on weapons acquisition in the
Navy and the Air Force.
85 See Robert W. Seidel, Clio and the Complex: Recent Historiography of Science and National Security,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1990, 134:420 441.
86 See James E. David, Conducting PostWorld War II National Security Research in Executive Branch
Records: A Comprehensive Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001). For current contact and agency
information see Directory of Federal Historical Offices and Activities, on the website of the Society for History
in the Federal Government (www.shfg.org).

THOMAS C. LASSMAN
119
the early postwar history of research and development in the Army that suggest possible
revisions to the literature.
Established in 1946, the Research and Development Division institutionalized the
War Departments response to a fundamental tension that structured the postwar
management of technological innovation in the Army. The demand for qualitative
advances in weapons technology, a strategic postwar objective, put pressure on the
Army to adapt long-standing R&D traditions in the technical services to new management practices that favored the introduction of major technological breakthroughs
rather than incremental improvements to existing equipment. Steeped in wartime
rhetoric proclaiming the value of science as a vital source of new technologies, the
R&D Division nevertheless failed, on strong opposition from the technical services,
to achieve its stated objective of separating the management of research and development from procurement, an outcome that highlights the Armys limited tolerance at
the time for a broad reorganization of the institutional processes that had long guided
weapons innovation. The evidence presented in this essay suggests, however, that
such rigidity on the part of the technical services had less to do with institutional
conservatism and a lack of foresight, arguments put forth in the prevailing historiography, than with the persistence of a long-established in-house work cultureperhaps
most clearly articulated in the Ordnance Departments manufacturing arsenalsthat
exploited synergies between R&D and production. General Ingles, the Chief Signal
Officer, admitted as much when he dismissed General Aurands statements to the
contrary and defended the value of incremental product improvement over radical
innovation. Even the Office of Ordnance Research, a major source of basic research
for the Army in the 1950s, owed its institutional legitimacy to the arsenal system and
the nationwide procurement apparatus that resided in the ordnance districts.
The evolving relationship between R&D management and organizational patterns of
technical practice in the Armys arsenal system adds a new and largely unknown category
of analysis to the university-based framework that historians have long used to structure
their understanding of science during the Cold War. The extent to which this or other
categoriesfor example, analyses of in-house R&D in the Navy and the Air Forcewill
reframe the historiography remains to be seen, although the handful of studies highlighting
the central role of process innovations and manufacturing in industrial research and
development indicate that much more work remains to be done.87 Until the military
institutions of science and technology in the United Statestypically acknowledged in the
abstract but far less often studied in detail emerge from the shadows cast by their
better-known academic counterparts and move into the forefront of current scholarship,
87 On Navy and Air Force R&D installations see the sources cited in note 76, above. See also Karen J. Weitze,
Keeping the Edge: Air Force Materiel Command Cold War Context, Vol. 2 (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,
Ohio: Headquarters, Air Force Materiel Command, Aug. 2003); and Jacob Neufeld, Kenneth Schaffel, and Anne
E. Shermer, Guide to Air Force Historical Literature, 19431983 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force
History, 1985). Studies that emphasize the role of process innovations and manufacturing in industrial R&D
include Philip Scranton, Technology-Led Innovation: The Non-Linearity of U.S. Jet Propulsion Development,
Hist. Tech., 2006, 22:337367; Christophe Lecuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High
Tech, 1930 1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006); Ross Knox Bassett, To the Digital Age: Research Labs,
Start-Up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002); Stuart W.
Leslie, Blue Collar Science: Bringing the Transistor to Life in the Lehigh Valley, Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci.,
2001, 32:71113; Margaret B. W. Graham and Bettye H. Pruitt, R&D for Industry: A Century of Technical
Innovation at Alcoa (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); and Graham and Alec T. Shuldiner, Corning
and the Craft of Innovation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

120
historians will likely remain blind to the full extent of the thematic variations that remain
so crucial to the future growth of the field. Such variation is a deliberate expression of the
institutional diversity that structured relations between science and the state and also
rendered on a global scale the social, political, and economic consequences of nearly fifty
years of permanent preparedness for war.


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Putting the Military Back into the

History of the Military-Industrial

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N 10 JUNE 1946 GENERAL DWIGHT EISENHOWER, the Chief of Staff of the

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competitive performance. Contrary to the optimistic expectations of DuPonts R&D

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HISTORY OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

organizational behavior either accommodated or resisted external sources of pressure

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HISTORY OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

freewheeling, unfettered investigations. Research was definitely production-oriented. By the

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HISTORY OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

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stay in contact in . . . research and development, he wrote in September, are the

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