Article ID: CBB001550736

Putting the Military Back into the History of the Military-Industrial Complex: The Management of Technological Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1945--1960 (2015)

unapi

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 Army's 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 Army's supply organizations, collectively called the technical services. The division's brief existence (it ceased operations in 1947) contrasted sharply with the longevity of the Ordnance Department's 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.

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Authors & Contributors
Schaefer, Agnes Schaefer
Immerwahr, Daniel
Baxter, Colin F.
Samuel (Samuel Evan) Milner
Alic, John A.
Milner, Samuel
Concepts
Big science
Research and development (R&D)
Science and war; science and the military
World War II
Industrial productivity
Business history
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, late
20th century, early
19th century
Places
United States
Germany
Soviet Union
France
China
Great Britain
Institutions
International Geophysical Year (IGY)
Western Electric
United States Navy
United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften
Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft
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