An Untaken Road. Steven A. Pomeroy
nudged him toward a broader, interconnected regime of program management. During World War II, Hap Arnold had him liaise between the Army Air Forces and the scientific community. Schriever relished his role. He nurtured this relationship throughout his career to develop methods of applying science to technological development. Long a believer in the value of scientific research, he did not believe the Air Force possessed the expertise to build ICBMs. Summarizing his admiration for the scientific community, he commented that he became a “disciple of the scientists who were working with us in the Pentagon. . . . I felt very strongly that the scientists had a broader view and had more capabilities. We needed engineers . . . but engineers were trained more in a, let’s say a narrow track having to do [more] with materials than with vision.”44 Schriever’s words describe how the Air Force perceived the relationship between science and technology and indicate that he well understood technology’s physical and mental aspects.
Von Neumann’s February 1954 report recommended a crash program to produce and deploy an ICBM force, a program that resulted in a complete restructuring of the moribund Atlas missile program and sounded the death tocsin for the intercontinental cruise missile. The personnel and organizations involved, including the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, revamped the ICBM effort. They accelerated the Atlas missile program, and their use of smaller payloads and smaller rockets affected later missile programs, including the Minuteman. Three years before Sputnik flew and the public worried about an apparent Soviet lead in long-range rocketry, planners and designers prepared to ensure American dominance. The idea that Sputnik ignited the American grab for space is a myth. It was the American desire for nuclear security that ignited the American military move into space, and the civilian programs followed. After all, as a result of the ICBM’s 1954 breakthrough, the first American satellite project was not Vanguard or Explorer. It was WS-117L, a spy satellite, given the “go-ahead” in 1955.45
The Teapot Committee soon had General Schriever running the Air Force’s newly created Western Development Division, an organization dedicated to the ICBM program. The Air Force had managed its cruise missile programs in the same ways as aircraft procurement. It treated them as individual programs instead of a family of systems. On August 2, 1954, Schriever assumed command with unique authority and control over ICBM weapon-system acquisition and procurement. His broad, integrated, systems outlook predicated his management style. He imposed horizontal and vertical integration. His authority ranged over system engineering responsibilities to operations, maintenance, logistics, and civil engineering. Everything related to ICBMs, from launch pads to communications equipment to the rockets, present and future, belonged to Schriever. As Thomas Hughes has suggested in Rescuing Prometheus, Schriever’s bureaucratic innovation was so simple at heart that it was difficult for people to accept. He centralized his control of the money and the people, and he accepted redundancy and the concomitant expenses. His mental architecture for doing business was a disruptive innovation.46
Consistent with Arnold’s and von Karman’s achievements, Schriever led and directed technological change. Historian Jacob Neufeld assesses this task as combining “operational requirements with technologies and strategies to establish objectives for future systems.” Schriever used Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation as his scientific and engineering advisory body to create specifications, oversee development, and coordinate between the Air Force and numerous subcontractors building the ICBM’s various pieces. This provided industrial unity the intercontinental cruise missile program lacked. The Air Force had ultimate authority and oversight, and Schriever gambled that the vision of the scientists, if properly guided, would deliver a viable missile in the shortest amount of time. Like Gen. Leslie Groves (who led the atomic bomb Manhattan Project), he let his scientific and engineering brain trust solve the thorny problems. This technique, what one might call trust, was critical to the concurrent development of multiple ICBM systems. This approach was revolutionary, and Schriever described the fight to install it as “a hell of a struggle [that left] . . . lots of blood on the floor.”47 Schriever’s program management innovation was more mental than physical, but it is at the heart of a story of profound military technological innovations.
Historian David Spires has maintained that the “application of concurrency reflected an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary approach to weapon system acquisition.” Schriever sought to “bring all elements of our program along so that they all would be ready, at each successive stage, to be dovetailed into each other.”48 Innovation scholar Adam Grissom remarks, “Innovation changes the manner in which military formations function in the field. Measures that are administrative or bureaucratic in nature, such as acquisition reform, are not . . . innovation unless a clear link can be drawn to operational praxis.”49 The ICBM proponents achieved this. The midfifties efforts of Doolittle, Gardner, Schriever, and von Neumann, among others, prepared the Air Force bureaucracy for the development, acquisition, and procurement of technologies capable of reshaping strategic contexts. The centralization mirrored the managerial organization of the German V-2 program so admired by Theodore von Karman and Hap Arnold. Throughout the development of ICBM technology, bureaucratic problems arose, particularly in deconflicting lines of authority, accountability, and responsibility between major Air Force organizations. Schriever in practice never actually quite had complete control of everything, but he had enough. As historian Spires relates, “By 1957, two years into the program, Atlas embraced 17 major contractors and 200 subcontractors across thirty-two states employing 70,000 workers,” and Atlas was only one of Schriever’s programs.50 From his perch at Western Development Division, Bernard Schriever shaped the operational praxis of the ICBM within the American strategic nuclear triad.
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