One benefit that World War II gave us as a nation was an unprecedented number of scientific and technical developments. Among them were nuclear weapons, radar, jet engines, data-processing technologies, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, and improved navigation and communication capabilities. All of these improved the effectiveness of the military services, especially the Air Force, but it should be noted that all of them also provided “spinoffs” for peaceful purposes. In one way or another, they also led to what we call the Space Age and eventually allowed us to put satellites in orbit, men on the moon, and probes deep into outer space.
None of these technical breakthroughs just happened. They were inspired by the demands of war and planned by men and women who not only foresaw future needs but filled them.
One of the leaders who had uncommon foresight was Hap Arnold. As chief of the Army Air Forces during World War II, he felt that he had another task besides winning the air war:
That [job] was to project myself into the future; to get the best brains available, have them use as a background the latest scientific developments in the air arms of the Germans and the Japanese, the R.A.F., and determine what steps the United States should take to have the best Air Force in the world twenty years hence.1
Hap Arnold asked his friend Robert A. Millikan at CalTech to recommend the best man to head a committee of practical scientists and engineers experienced in sonics, electronics, radar, aerodynamics, and other phases of science that might influence the development of aircraft in the future. Millikan decided on Theodore von Karman, a member of Millikan’s staff at CalTech. Millikan didn’t want to let von Karman go, but Hap’s requirements were overriding, so von Karman was given a leave of absence and went to Washington. It was the right choice.
Shortly after von Karman arrived, men who understood the advanced theories behind the new developments began to appear. Hap told them he wanted them to think ahead 20 years, forget the past, and regard the equipment then available only as the basis for their boldest predictions. Hap wanted them to think about supersonic and pilotless airplanes; improvements in bombs; defenses against modern and future aircraft; communication systems; television; weather; medical research; atomic energy; and any other factors that might affect the development and employment of air power in the years to come. He wrote:
I assured Dr. von Karman I wasn’t interested in when he submitted his report. He was to go ahead, wherever he wanted and whenever he wanted; to pay no attention to tomorrow’s airplane, or the day-after-tomorrow’s airplane, but to look into the future twenty years and determine what we would have to have then, and make a report that would be a guide to the commanders of the Air Force who would follow me. I gave him and his associates free rein—to go to England, Germany, Japan, Italy—even to Russia if they could get in.2
The appointment of von Karman was one of the many extraordinarily wise personnel decisions that Hap Arnold made during the war. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1881, von Karman was educated in Germany and became an internationally renowned research aerodynamicist. He came to the California Institute of Technology as a guest lecturer in 1926 and was persuaded to remain as director of the university’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory in 1929. During the 1930s, von Karman exerted a considerable influence over aeronautical research and development in this country. In the late 1930s, at Hap’s invitation, he sat on a special committee for Air Corps research of the National Academy of Sciences. Among the problems that Hap wanted advice on was rocket-assisted takeoffs for aircraft and other “Buck Rogersish” ideas. Thus began the formal part of the relationship between this brilliant man of science and the dedicated military man who was soon to lead his fledgling service into a major war. It was during this period that I first met von Karman.
On December 1, 1944, Hap formed the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) as “an office attached to the commanding general, AAF.” Von Karman was its director; Hugh L. Dryden was the scientific deputy.
Although science and technology were mobilized during World War II, the war was fought with and decided by conventional weapons. In 1940, Hap had wisely decreed that priority would be given to “the continuing production of current types of airplanes.” Although some new aircraft were designed, tested, and produced during the war, care was exercised to avoid interference with our mass-production programs.
We fought the war without advancing the frontiers of aeronautics very far, but basic new breakthroughs were at hand. Jet aircraft, guided missiles, and rockets did not influence the war to a major extent, but they showed great promise.
In 1944, the atomic bomb was about to become a reality. Clearly, in any future conflict, we would not have time for mobilizing and training forces, and building weapons. We would have to fight with what was on hand. Therefore, our force in being had to be both modern and adequate.
General Arnold recognized these facts and was determined not to let the Air Force lapse into obsolescence after the war by ignoring new scientific knowledge. He knew that vast amounts of scientific data existed and were in danger of being lost unless assembled, interpreted, and stored for easy access. These data were to be found scattered throughout the United States and Great Britain and in the soon-to-be-defeated Germany. He also knew that great improvements would have to be introduced into the Air Force and that we could not continue to depend upon the British for new inventions like radar and the jet engine. Thus, it was imperative to our continued air-power development that all available information be consolidated and a long-range plan developed.
Just before V-E Day in 1945, von Karman and six colleagues made a very timely trip to Europe and were able to save a great amount of valuable German data that might otherwise have been lost to us. In August 1945, they produced a paper entitled “Where We Stand,” which highlighted areas that they felt were fundamental for future Air Force planning. Among the factors they considered nearly a half century ago were that there would be aircraft that would fly at speeds beyond the velocity of sound; that missiles would be developed that could transmit destruction to targets at distances of several thousand miles, as well as smaller missiles for defense against enemy aircraft; and that there would be improved communications for the control of aircraft in the air and with fighter controllers on the ground. The group predicted that only aircraft or missiles moving at extreme speeds would be able to penetrate enemy territory protected by such defenses, and that the location and observation of targets, the takeoff, navigation, and landing of aircraft, and communications would be independent of visibility and weather. They foresaw that fully equipped airborne task forces would be able to strike at far distant points and be supplied by air.
Von Karman’s group also concluded that the considerable achievements of the German scientists had come about not because the Germans were better or brainier people, but largely as the result of encouragement and adequate support from the German government. This is a valid conclusion, which we would do well to remember.
Once the Air Force’s position in regard to the future was thus defined, the Scientific Advisory Group started to make a long-range blueprint for the future. When the war was concluded in August 1945, the future of Air Force research and development faced another challenge. The bulk of military research during the war had been controlled by the Office of Scientific Research and Development, reporting to the White House. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the director of the agency, proposed that military research henceforth be entirely under civilian control. Von Karman reacted with anger to this proposal. Only some diehard academicians with no military experience agreed with Bush.
In December 1945, the Scientific Advisory Group produced a study entitled “Toward New Horizons.” It was an excellent in-depth look into the future, and officially declared that a vigorous research program was vital to the military and that no one person or agency should act as the Army Air Forces’ only source of scientific information. A very significant statement from that report applies fully today: “Problems never have final or universal solutions, and only a constant and inquisitive attitude toward science and a ceaseless and swift adoption of new developments can maintain the security of this nation through world air supremacy.”
In the introduction to this study, von Karman dismissed the argument, current at that time, that atomic weapons would negate the need for large military forces in the future. This was an idea that has lingered for years and has certainly hurt us. The individual reports included in the study not only produced large numbers of technical proposals and predictions, but also pointed the way for the Army Air Forces to organize for the conduct of research and for producing scientifically trained officers.
The report was about a half inch thick and was backed up with a two-foot stack of supporting materials. It made some interesting predictions:
• Over the next decade (1945–1955), air power would become increasingly important. Atomic weapons would increase destructive capabilities over a thousandfold.
• Improvements in aerodynamics and propulsion would lead to supersonic flight. (In 1947, Captain Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager broke the “sound barrier” in the X-1 rocket plane.)
• There would be improvements in guidance, navigation, and radar that would lead to all-weather flying and the ability to recognize a target and hit it accurately.
• We would have long-range pilotless aircraft. (In 1953, eight years after the report was published, a pilotless winged bomber called the Snark flew for the first time.)
• We would have intermediate-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles. (Twelve years later, in 1957, we had the Atlas and the Thor.)
• We would have earth satellites. (The Soviets had them in 1957; we had them in 1958.)
As happens so frequently in advisory work of this kind, no great or immediate reaction to the report was apparent. Military appropriations were very meager in 1946 and action was difficult to obtain. In addition, when these reports came out, Hap Arnold had retired and his absence may have affected subsequent events, illustrating the saying that, “Advice is only helpful when someone wants to take it.” A corollary is, “A person is much more likely to accept, and act on, advice if he asks for it.” However, many of the specific proposals became a point of reference for all the Air Force research efforts that followed.
It was not until 1948, after the Air Force became a separate service, that a more workable situation evolved. The name of the Scientific Advisory Group was changed to the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), and it was placed directly under the Air Force chief of staff. As administrative procedures improved to permit the SAB to become more useful, the quality and extent of its recommendations increased.
One of the first major tasks was to expand the influence of the research and development staff at the Pentagon. At this time, a committee chaired by Lewis N. Ridenour, dean of the Graduate College of the University of Illinois, was formed to help the Air Force organize its research and development (R&D) efforts. I was asked to serve, along with George P. Baker, of the Harvard Business School; James B. Fisk, of Bell Telephone; Carl Overhage, of Eastman Kodak; Ralph Sawyer, of the University of Michigan; Raymond Woodrow, of Princeton University; and Frank Wattendorf, the Air Force Air Materiel Command’s principal aeronautical engineer. Meanwhile, I had been a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics since 1948 and was its chairman from 1956 until 1958, when it was renamed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This association enabled me to keep abreast of vital activities in those scientific domains, a very useful exposure to what was going on in the pure aerospace sciences.
Our SAB report called for the establishment of the Air Research and Development Command in the Air Force with strong ties to the Air Materiel Command. It also advised, in forceful words, that adequate resources would have to be devoted to building the future Air Force. We recommended that a small but significant percentage of the Air Force’s R&D budget be allocated for R&D contracts with educational institutions. We also recommended that future R&D be on a “system” basis and that task forces of specialists be assigned to particular weapon systems or components.
Introducing systems engineering was one of the SAB’s more far-reaching and successful recommendations. It was the necessary interim step toward the establishment of the present Air Force Systems Command.
Systems engineering was an important managerial concept for the military. In the early days of aviation, the practice was to design an airplane structure and attach it to an available engine. When we got the airplane, we said, “Here is an airplane; we will now see what it can do.” We would test it and agree that it was a magnificent plane with great maneuverability, speed, and climbing capability. Then we would say, “Now we will put on the necessary military equipment.” We would then begin to install the guns, bombs, cameras, and navigation and communication gear. All too often, by the time we got through satisfying all the military requirements, the airplane had turned into a clunker that could not perform as originally intended.
This process was the absolute opposite of systems engineering, which enabled us to start many things at the same time and have them all come to the stage where they could be introduced into the complete vehicle ready to go at just the right time. Of course, this concept was a tremendous gamble and it took people with courage to pull it off.
Much credit must go to Trevor Gardner, John von Neumann, and General Bernard A. “Benny” Schriever for furthering and implementing the systems engineering concept and making it work. They took a number of new weapons, aircraft, and missiles and developed each of them in parallel, not in sequence, as had been customary in the past. This greatly shortened the time required and was probably the one thing that brought our missile program into actual operational use as rapidly as possible.
Another organization that owes a similar debt to the SAB is the Air Force medical R&D complex, which was recommended by an SAB committee chaired by Dr. Randolph Lovelace. Still another was the establishment of the Lincoln Laboratory, from which our modern air defense system developed.
After the United States got involved in Korea, the SAB was asked to review the Air Force guided missile program. With Louis N. Ridenour as our chairman, this committee emphasized that the use of guided missiles was the natural next step in air warfare and the Air Force should quickly add them to the inventory.
Selling our recommendations was not easy. General Hoyt Vandenberg, my former 12th Air Force chief of staff in North Africa, now had four stars and was Air Force chief of staff. Our recommendations, made by a group of civilian scientists and industrialists, called for fundamental structural changes in Air Force organization. Some members of Van’s staff vigorously resisted such changes; therefore, Van was not fully convinced.
Since we were such good friends and I totally agreed with our recommendations, I was asked to brief Van informally. Instead of talking with him in his Pentagon office, I invited him for a few days of duck hunting, a favorite sport of both of ours. While we sat in the duck blinds, I carefully reviewed the rationale for our recommendations and told him we were convinced that the Air Force was woefully deficient in its ability to develop a future Air Force that could win wars if we were ever challenged again. I managed to convince him that the changes were necessary. By the time he went back to the Pentagon, he was “sold.”
As a result of Van’s subsequent decisions, there was an increase in R&D funds when the Korean War started in June 1950. However, the increase in emphasis on R&D created a great demand for scientific personnel. The SAB was asked to help find ways to attract the right kind of people; Ridenour accepted the chairmanship of a working group to recommend ways to make the Air Force scientific program more attractive and viable.
A recommendation of major significance was that the Air Force should create more weapon systems laboratories to integrate new developments in aircraft and missile components. This recommendation generated Project Vista, a CalTech study of tactical atomic warfare and the atomic defense of Western Europe. An offshoot was a study by the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory on ways to modify tactical aircraft so that tests of various concepts could be conducted. Other recommendations led to a study at Harvard University of Air Force transport and logistics problems, and armament activities. The eventual result was the establishment of the Air Force Armament Development and Test Center at Eglin Air Force Base, in Florida.
A significant and useful SAB study was a forecast of weapon weights and yields by class and the prediction of thermonuclear possibilities. This panel, chaired by John von Neumann, had a key influence in getting the initial intercontinental ballistic missile program under way. This panel also provided further guidance during the early years in the development of the nuclear weapons stockpile, for manned aircraft as well as ballistic missiles, and for tactical as well as strategic uses.
In all, 342 reports were produced by eight technical panels after “Toward New Horizons” was first published in 1945. Von Karman was replaced as chairman by Mervin J. Kelly in January 1955; I replaced Kelly the following November and served until December 1958.
The need for maintaining an emphasis on Air Force R&D was spurred by unsettling intelligence reports beginning in 1952 of Soviet weapons development. On August 12, 1953, a shocked world learned that the Soviets had detonated a hydrogen bomb, a weapon with far higher yield for its mass than the atomic bomb. At this time, Soviet scientists were also wrestling with the problem of projecting thermonuclear weapons over vast distances, reducing warhead friction upon reentry, and providing more accurate guidance mechanisms.
Postwar interviews with over 200 German scientists captured by the Soviets during World War II and repatriated to the West revealed the possibility that by 1956 the USSR might have 2,000-pound nuclear warheads in their arsenal that could be launched from two-stage rockets and could reach the northwestern United States. The German scientists estimated that by 1958, the Soviets would be able to launch 8,000-pound weapons that could reach any American target.
During my tenure as chairman of the SAB, I felt it was imperative that another “new” look at Air Force R&D be undertaken. The German scientists were very accurate in their predictions. The Soviets launched an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) in April 1956 and an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in August 1957. As a climax, the Soviets sent Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into earth orbit on October 4, 1957.
Until that time, the American public and government officials had discounted the progress and capabilities of the Soviets. We had for a long time thought rather disparagingly of the Soviets as, perhaps, agrarians with their shirttails out and whiskers. But we came to realize that they had a very fine technological capability. The launching of Sputnik really brought this forcibly to our attention and indicated the necessity for us to go all out if we were going to catch up and then surpass them.
Once again, the country had been lured into complacency, and our political, military, and scientific leaders were castigated for their apparent inability to foresee these outstanding scientific achievements.
The Air Force had given priority to the ICBM, and its leaders did not want satellites or any other projects to divert resources from ballistic missiles. However, the American public demanded to know how the Soviets, considered backward by most, could make such awe-inspiring technological break-throughs.
A group of distinguished scientists, some of them members of the SAB, assembled at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1957. They eventually produced the “Woods Hole Summer Studies.” These studies represented an update of “Toward New Horizons” and recognized the international impact of the Soviet accomplishments in space and of their ICBMs, as well as their nuclear capability.
Unfortunately, the Woods Hole report did not have much impact. The leaders of the Air Force’s R&D community, pressed by Congress for action to close the space gap revealed by Sputnik, had to concede that satellite technology should be given some priority. There was concern in the Air Force that the Strategic Air Command’s primary role might be infringed upon.
Seven technologies had to come together to bring about space systems, satellites, and ballistic missiles: servomechanisms, radar, the digital computer, space communications, transistors, the fusion bomb, and rocket propulsion. These seven technologies evolved and accelerated during the 1950s and were bound together by systems engineering. By carefully integrating these technologies, the complexities of manufacturing satellites, missiles, and space vehicles could be brought under control.
The integration of these technologies offered great managerial challenges to our free society engaged in a cold war against an antagonist of surprising scientific capability. As chairman of the SAB, I set forth three chores for us to accomplish: try to solve some of the day-to-day R&D problems of the Air Force; try to answer complex scientific questions of the secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force chief of staff; and generate new ideas. The last is always the most difficult and the most prone to be sacrificed because of involvement in day-to-day operations. However, I believe it is the most important. My views have not changed with the passing years.
I retired as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board in 1958. Lieutenant General Donald Putt, who had retired in 1957 from the Air Force and was then president of United Technologies Corporation, succeeded me. I subsequently served as a member of the SAB’s Ad Hoc Consultant Group for several years.
The SAB made later contributions, one of the most important being participation in the Air Force’s Project Forecast during the early 1960s. This project enlisted almost 500 people, balanced between R&D experts who understood the requirements of war, and some of the nation’s top civilian scientists, from universities, industry, “think tanks,” and government. The man who masterminded the project was Major General (later General) Benny Schriever, brilliant commander of the Air Force’s Air Research and Development Command, later the Air Force Systems Command.
The result of this project was a 25-volume compilation of studies, each of which dealt with some aspect of aeronautical or military science. It was a masterful effort that took a long look at the Air Force in the light of a presumed status quo in strategic nuclear relations between the superpowers. The study recommended the continued development of small conventional weapons as well as small nuclear weapons for tactical use on the battlefield. It represented a blueprint for the next decade of the Air Force and has since been followed with other studies designed to keep us ahead technologically. Its value and success can be measured by the fact that we have not been engaged in a nuclear war.
I had become interested in rocket development in the 1930s when I met Robert H. Goddard, who laid the foundation for most subsequent U.S. developments in long-range rockets, missiles, Earth satellites, and spaceflight. While with Shell, I worked with him on the development of a type of fuel that would have a sufficiently high vapor pressure so that the vapor would be completely consumed without a pump, thus simplifying some of his early experiments.
My interest in rocketry was revived while commanding the 8th Air Force. The Germans were using the V-1 rocket against British targets, but we were able to cope with it because its performance was not much greater than that of our better airplanes. We could hear a V-1 coming; a pilot could either shoot it down or fly alongside and tip it with a wingtip, causing the gyro to spill and send the V-1 down before arriving in England.
It was different with the V-2, which was the first practical supersonic rocket. It came and exploded before you saw or heard it. It was a much more effective weapon because of its psychological effect. I thus became aware of the effectiveness of rockets and missiles as weapons. However, there were many who did not then give much credence to the tremendous potential of rocketry; some of us in the airplane business looked with a slightly raised eyebrow at those rocket people, who seemed to be unduly enthusiastic about its possibilities.
After World War II, I gave a talk about Goddard’s life and work and the future of rocket power at the preview opening of the Goddard Rocket Exhibit, sponsored by the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation. As a result, I came in close contact for the first time with the people of the American Rocket Society. While there were undoubtedly geniuses among them, most of us probably looked upon them as somewhat starry-eyed.
This meeting led to my taking over the chairmanship of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics from Hunsaker in 1956. He had been chairman for quite a few years and he, even more than I, considered the rocket people way ahead of their time. I did not see the realization of the potential of rockets as imminent at the time, but coming. He asked me to succeed him as chairman because he thought I was more sympathetic to the rocket. He told me, “I know in my heart that the rocket is coming, but I am just not in the mood to give up everything we are doing with the airplane, which badly needs further development, in the interest of going off into the wild blue yonder.” He recommended to the members that I be appointed to succeed him. My field of scientific interests thereafter expanded to include all manner of space activities.
Through my various advisory roles to the Air Force and to other agencies of the government while working for Shell, I came to know the organization and functioning of the Air Force’s ballistic missile program. I was privileged to see many of the official status reports of the program and acquired some knowledge of the role played by the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation and later by the Space Technology Laboratories (STL) as the scientific-technical member of the ballistic missile program management team for the Air Force. I studied STL’s relationship with Ramo-Wooldridge, its financial structure, its management, and its plans for the future, and I decided that it was a unique organization that was accomplishing a very useful function. It was for these reasons that I accepted the chairmanship of the STL board on January 1, 1959, when I retired from Shell. Before that happened, however, Joe and I would have to cope with the most severe and lasting shock we have ever faced together.
1. Arnold, Henry H., Global Mission. New York: Harper & Row, 1949, p. 532.
2. Ibid., pp. 532–533.