NATIONAL A.IR AND SPACE !1CSEUM RAND CORPORATION

JOINT ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE HISTORY OF THE RAND CORPORATION

EDITORIAL USE FORM PREFACE This manuscript is based upon a tape-recorded interview conducted by ~1artin collins on _....;:....;1a.;;:.y_l~8.:..,_1_9_9_0_~~____ The ~ape and the manuscript are the property of the undersigned: however, the originals and copies are indefinitely deposited, respec~ivelYI at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Ins~itu~ion and at the RAND corpora~ion. I have read the transcript 'and have made only minor corrections and emendations. The reader is therefore asked to bear in mind that this manuscript is a record of a spoken conversation ra~her than a literary product. Though the Smithsonian Institution and the RAND corporation may use these materials for their own purposes as they deem appropriate, I wish to place the condition as selected below upon the use of this interview material by others and I understand that the smithsonian Ins~itution and the RAND Corporation will make reasonable efforts to enforce the condition to the extent possible.

CONDI!'::!:ONS (Check one) PUBLIC. THE MATERIAL MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE TO AND MAY BE USED BY ~.NY PERSON FOR .Z>..NY !..AWFUL PURPOSE. I OPEN. This manuscript may be read and the tape heard by persons approved by the smithsonian Ins~itution or by ~he RAND Corporation. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the smithsonian or RAND. MY PERMISSION REQU!RED TO QUOTE, CITE OR REPRODUCE. This manuscript and the ~ape are open to examination as above. The user ~ust agree not to quo~e from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the Smithsonian or RAND in which permission I must join. Upon my death this interview becomes open. EDITORIAL ~SE FORM (CONT.~

MY PERMISSION REQUIRED FOR ACCESS. I mus~ give writen permission before t~e manuscrip~ or tape can be utilized o~her t~an by smithsonian or RAND s~aff :or official Smit~sonian or RAND purposes. Also my permission is required to quote, oite or reproduce by any means. Upon dea~h the 'nterview becomes open.

nen) Bernard Schriever ed) ql (Da schriever, Bernard. Dates: May 18 and September 5, 1990. Interviewer: Martin Collins. Auspices: RAND. Length: 3 hrs.; 38 pp. Use restriction: Open. Schriever initially describes his pre-war military service and studies in engineering, General Arnold's interest in maintaining a close relationship between the military and scientific community, his assignment to the Scientific Liaison Office from late 1945 to 1949, the establishment of various post-war scientific advisory boards, and the relationship of these boards and RAND to the Scientific Liaison Office. He then discusses the creation of the Office of the Assistant for Development Planning in 1950 under DCS/Development, its mission to evaluate new weapons systems technologies for the period five to ten years in the future, the use of Development Planning Objectives (DPOs) in fulfilling this mission, some of the DPOs formulated while he headed the Office of the Assistant for Development Planning from 1950 to 1954, the controversies they produced, and the input of RAND and others into DPOs.

May 18, 1990 TAPE 1, SIDE 1 1-3 Schriever's assignment to Pentagon after Second World War; reminiscence of General Hap Arnold and his views on the impact of technological development on the military; Schriever's background in engineering; Arnold's establishment of Air Force Scientific Liaison Office; Arnold's appointment of Theodore von Karman as his scientific advisor before Second World War 3-5 Arnold's establishment of Project RANDi definition of RAND mission and relationship with the Air Force 5-7 Relationship between RAND and Scientific Liaison Office; reminiscences of Gene Root, Larry Henderson 5-6 Establishment of assistant for development and planning 5-7 RAND studies on strategic bombing, nuclear weapons delivery from aircraft 8-9 Establishment of Scientific Advisory Board, Joint Research and Development Board, and their relationship with Scientific Liaison Office; development of Arnold Engineering Development Center; development of Edwards Air Force Flight Test Center

TAPE 1, SIDE 2 9-11 Continued discussion of Scientific Liaison Office contacts with scientific community, Scientific Advisory Board, RAND, and Joint Research and Development Board; reminiscence of von Karman; vision of Hap Arnold 11-12 Difference between RAND and Scientific Advisory Board relationships with Air Force; creation or Division Advisory Groups (DAG) 12-14 Arnold's vision of what the Air Force needs were in scientific and technological capability in postwar SCHRIEVER-1

Interviewee: General Bernard Schriever Interviewer: Mr. Martin Collins Place: At General Schriever's home, Washington, D.C. Date: May 18, 1990

TAPE 1, SIDE 1 Hr. collins: Let me state for the record the objective of the interview. I'm interested in a better understanding of the relationship between RAND and the Air Force since RAND's inception in 1946, and more generally, how external expertise and advice has figured into Air Force decision making in some of the policy areas that RAND was involved with. It seems like a good beginning point is to go back to one of your first responsibilities immediately after World War II, as a chief of the Scientific Liaison Branch, and the deputy chief of staff, materiel area. I guess my initial question would be, "What were the responsibilities and objectives of that liaison branch, and how did it relate to the RAND enterprise, or did you come in contact with RAND at that point? General Schriever: Well, I think I might as well make a general statement as to what went on at that time, rather than to answer questions at this moment. You can then ask me questions. Because maybe I'll answer quite a few of the questions in just a discussion of what happened at that time. I returned from the Pacific war, after being over there about three and a half years in the southwest Pacific, in october of 1945. And had about two months' leave and more or less an opportunity--I was a colonel at the time--to determine my own assignment. I had been at wright Field prior to the war, and also at Stanford University, taking a graduate course there when the war started in December of '41. I also knew General ["Hap"] Arnold well, because he'd been my first commander at March Field when I finished flying school as a cadet in 1933. I was assigned to March Field, and he was the commander there, a lieutenant colonel at the time. Then in '34 he was also in charge of the western region, when the Air Corps was flying the airmail for several months, and he was stationed at Salt Lake City and I was stationed at Salt Lake City. SCBRIEVER-2 Getting back to my return, I was assigned to the Pentagon. That happened to be the place I wanted to go, and I was fortunate enough to get that assignment. General Arnold called me into his office and in essence expressed his view that the technology breakthroughs that had occurred in World War II, namely the nuclear weapon, rockets, radar, jet engines, would essentially revolutionize at least the equipments that the Air Force would need, that would require change of doctrine, strategy, and so forth. Hap Arnold was probably, at least in my opinion, the Air Force officer who had the greatest vision of any that I have known, including up to this time. And he made a number of speeches and wrote several memorandums or papers during that period right after the war, and took actions which I will try to enumerate, that certainly proves my point with respect to how visionary he was. He said to me, in terms of these technological and scientific breakthroughs, that the next war would be very different from the last one because of these technology breakthroughs, and that we needed to look far in advance, and not just a few years but like fifty years, which he talked about to (Theodore] von Karman, which I'll come to in a moment. He said, "The scientists who have made all these things possible in the laboratories that were created during World War II are all returning to their universities, for the most part, and other assignments that they had prior to the war." But they mostly had come from academia. He said it was absolutely essential for the Air Force, which he considered to be the leading service as far as technology was concerned, to maintain a very close interaction with the scientific community. He felt that it was essential that the Air Force work in a very harmonious, cooperative way with the scientific community, with the aircraft industry--we didn't call it aerospace at that time-­ and the Air Force. And he did several things during that time, but at that point he said, "Look, we need to set up an air staff office which has as its major function achieving the objective, as a staff officer." In support of the policy that he was enunciating, of having this very close relationship with the scientific community. And he said he wanted me to take over that office. He knew that I had, prior to the war, been at Wright Field, first as a test pilot and then as a student at what was called at that time the Air Corps Engineering School. It was a forerunner of what is now the Air Force Institute of Technology. I attended the Air Corps Engineering School for nine or ten months, starting in september of 1940, and we had our graduation from there in June-­ I think it was of 1941--and I received assignment to go to SCBRIEVER-3 further graduate work. Incidentally, the Air Corps Engineering School was at the graduate level. I went to Stanford University along with Lieutenant Wassel, who was also a graduate of the Air Corps Engineering School, my same class. We were there when Pearl Harbor occurred, but we didn't get our orders until March of 1942. My orders were to go to the southwest Pacific, which I did and stayed there until the end of the war. So he knew my background in the engineering area at Wright Field, and he said he'd like for me to take over this new staff assignment, which turned out to be called the Scientific Liaison Office. There was no such office at the time, and I was put under the deputy for engineering, I think it was called at the time. It was under materiel, but General Al Crawford was the deputy for engineering, and my office was under that particular part of the Pentagon hierarchy, although I had direct access to the chief's office through the office that was set up under General [curtis] LeMay, which I think you're familiar with, so I won't go into the detail on that. So I dealt with both General Crawford and LeMay's office, and in that manner I did have access to the top level of the air staff. That was the genesis of the creation of the Scientific Liaison Office for that rather general objective of establishing and maintaining that interaction with the scientific community. General Arnold had--before that time, as a matter of fact before the war ended--brought Theodore von Karman in as his scientific advisor, and had given him the job, that was prior to the war, of really taking a far out look into what the new technologies meant for the Air Force and what could we expect, and that's when the fifty year thing came in. He said, "Take a look as far out as fifty years in the future." And the result of that was the Toward New Horizons, which I think you probably are familiar with. I was not involved in that particular study at that time, because I didn't come back from the Pacific until afterwards. So von Karman was already on board, and I'm sure that von Karman, who was very close to General Arnold, influenced General Arnold substantially. And they submitted a preliminary report. I can check the dates, but I think it was actually given to General Arnold right after the war, between the time the war ended in August and January 1 of 1946. That can be checked, too. I just don't remember the exact dates. That was the initial report, and I've forgotten what that title was, but then that was continued and then later was the several documents which were then Toward New Horizons. At the same time, late '45--and I'll have to check that out, too--he established what was called Project RAND. That was before the RAND Corporation was established. All of that is in SCHRIBVER-4 that history that the RAND corporation put out, so you can get the dates on that. And he asked them to make a study and that was undertaken under the auspices of the Douglas Aircraft corporation, and I think Frank Collbohm was the project head of that particular study. I've forgotten exactly. Let's see, I can't recall exactly the charter that they were given, but again, I can fill that in. collins: It was a very general charter. Schriever: It was a general charter, but as part of that charter was what could be done with respect to a satellite. In other words, they had that as part of their charter, because I know that their initial report actually came out, at least the preliminary report came out--and I had all that, I had to check all those dates--in early 1946, in which•.•. Oh, hell, leave the name blank. collins: We can fill that in. Schriever: Yes, leave that name blank, because he was later the first chief scientist of the Air Force. collins: David Griggs? schriever: No, no, before Griggs. He died of a heart attack very early on. But he--I commented about this in my speech--had indicated all of the roles that satellites could play: reconnaissance, weather, communications, and so forth. That was in a 1946 report, and that was Project RAND now, it was not the RAND corporation. Project RAND. They also said that it was technically feasible to develop satellites with these sorts of capabilities that were very important from a support standpoint to the military forces. And incidentally, in the preliminary von Karman report, also indicated the feasibility of a satellite. They didn't go into any detail with respect to the missions that were to be carried out. But the Project RAND initial report did. And that really interested Arnold, and he followed that up then. I can't remember the exact sequence, but he then indicated, and LeMay's office was involved, and I was involved in the Scientific Liaison Office in the creation of the RAND Corporation, which was to carry out, only for the Air Force, dedicated to the Air Force, technical and analytical studies which would lead to optimum weapons systems and optimum operational applications of those weapons systems, looking into the future, including threats and so forth. In other words, RAND was to have continuing relationships with the Air Force, working with the Air Force technical side of the house, that is Wright Field at the time, and whatever we had at the time as test operations at Eglin. We were doing some SCHRIEVER-S flight testing at Edwards at that time but Edwards had not yet been established as the official flight test center for the Air Force. That came a little bit later. But the RAND Corporation was to work with both the technical side of the Air Force and also the operational side. Furthermore, they were to be given a maximum degree of freedom in terms of doing their studies. In other words, they were not to be intimidated or coerced. In essence they were to have a maximum of academic freedom to carry out their studies. They were not studies that were dictated by the Air Force. In other words, in working with the Air Force, their studies evolved on the basis of what they thought was most important in terms of providing the kind of inputs to the Air Force that would be of most benefit, both from the standpoint of new systems, the applications of those systems from an operational standpoint. Initially, Project RAND, it was called--research and development is where RAND came from, that was underlying the name--but Project RAND then became the RAND Corporation, which I believe was established in late 1946.

Collins: Actually that was 1948 when it became a corporation.

Schriever: It became a corporation that late? I thought it was earlier that that. At any rate, it can be easily checked. But if it was that late, then it was Project RAND that simply continued and then they just finally incorporated and became the RAND corporation under Collbohm.

I can recall g~ing out to the Douglas corporation in santa Monica. It was located in the Douglas Corporation in Santa Monica, and I was out there a number of times during the time period. See I was in that scientific liaison job from December of 1945 until August of 1949, when I went to the National War College. And it was during that time that all of this was going on, as far as the RAND Corporation was concerned. And in those years, the policies and procedures and the pattern of operation, between the Air Force and the RAND Corporation, was really established. Everybody was sort of feeling their way. At that time, the Scientific Liaison Office did not have the administrative oversight of the RAND Corporation. I had that later, when I came out of the National War College, and we set up what was called, first, the assistant for evaluation, which later was changed to assistant for development planning, initially under Ivan Getting. I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but I'll go back. It was under Ivan Getting, and Gordon P. Saville was at that point the deputy for research and development. That title can be straightened out, too, because the title changed. But he became a full-fledged deputy, separate from materiel, when they created the Air Research and SCHRIEVER-6 Development Command in 1950. So during the period while I was in the National War College, that finally came about. But that is another story, how all that happened, because we were involved in that, too, in the Scientific Liaison Office, in creating a separate office or separate command to separate out what you might call research, development, test, evaluation, and procurement from the logistics or support kind of activity. And so Gordon P. Saville was the deputy for R&D. Ivan Getting was the assistant for evaluation, and I came in as his deputy. And he left about a year or maybe a little less than a year after that. That was '50, '51. I took over then as the assistant for development planning, and I won't cover that any further, but at that point in time, that office actually had the administrative oversight of the RAND Corporation at the air staff level, and I worked very closely with RAND at that time. I'll just go ahead, but then go back. As a matter of fact, I had in the Pentagon a RAND group under Gene Root. Gene Root had an office right next to mine, and we normally rotated the RAND people into the Pentagon, but we had a number of offices where the RAND people were right in the Pentagon for the period that I was running the operation. And they continued there for a while after that, and out of that came the ANSER Corporation, so if you want to later on cover that, why, we can cover that. But I had a very, very close relationship with the whole RAND exercise, from 1946 through 1954, so it's almost eight years. Now let me go back. RAND established a Washington presence, and they set up their first offices under Larry Henderson in the Cafritz Building in Washington. So that made it easy for the Air Force to maintain a close interface with the RAND Corporation-­ right here in Washington, I'm talking about--because RAND was working for the Pentagon Air Force. They were making studies that related to all of the Air Force, but they were working directly at a level that was aimed at providing the kind of information to the decision makers in the Pentagon at the chiefs' level and the deputies' level. It was also valuable for the major operating commands, but primarily Arnold's view, and how we looked at it from the Pentagon, was that these were major inputs to allow us to make decisions on the weapons system characteristics, to meet certain kinds of threats that were projected in the future, for example. The RAND corporation was making studies on, for example, strategic bombing, both from the standpoint of ground survivability and also from the standpoint of attacking. Mostly, of course, the Soviet union was involved; they were the enemy. And RAND corporation came up first among all analytical groups to recommend the low-altitude attack for strategic bombing, and also looked at the various needs for the performance, particularly with respect to subsonic to supersonic speeds for the aircraft. SCHRIEVER-7 And there were a number of major arguments going on as to the need for supersonic flight at high altitude versus supersonic flight--big arguments on supersonic flight on the deck, which of course was very, very difficult to achieve and has never been practical with today's technology. Another group of studies that they were involved in was, of course the application of nuclear weapons from tactical aircraft. How could they deliver at low altitude? And determining the kind of envelopes that the aircraft would fly and so forth. So they were very much involved in the operational. You know, during World War II we had operational analysts, and I can remember that we had some over in the Pacific who actually flew missions with us to do analysis as to the most effective way of carrying out certain types of missions. And the RAND corporation further improved those kinds of analyses. So they were involved very much on the operational side--tactics, types of maneuvers, and so forth, as well as looking at, in the broadest sense, and identifying those technologies that held the most promise for future weapons systems. So they were looking at both near-term and far out types of decision making that had to be done within the Air Force. So it was, you might say, a period in which the Air Force and the RAND corporation--I'm talking now of the period from '46 on, and I'm going to call it the RAND Corporation, although it might have been under the name RAND Project. It was a very easy dialogue that we had going with the RAND corporation, and I want to repeat again, we were not directing them to do particular studies. We were allowing them to develop their own charters for studies that they were to undertake. They did that on the basis of having dialogue with people in the Pentagon, with people at Wright Field, with SAC, with TAC, and all of the commands. I can sum it up bottom line, that that was a period in which I think that the RAND corporation made very major inputs to the decision making of the Air Force, in terms of both what weapons systems they should pursue for the future, and what tactics they should apply in carrying out different types of warfare that might occur, and that was both from an application of strategic forces as well as tactical forces. They made studies that related to NATO operations, made studies with respect to tactical operations. I can remember Paxson, Ed Paxson had tactical operations. And we made studies of wars in the Middle East, for example, and the Far East, and these were all of great value, as far as the planners were concerned, at both the air staff level and the planners at major command levels. There were always skeptics and critics of RAND, even at that time, although up through, I would say, the 1950's and into the 1960's--at least into the late fifties--RAND was essentially dedicated to the Air Force. SCHRIEVER-S I'm jumping ahead now. They were beginning to do some work at the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] level as early as the late fifties, but then that escalated to beat hell during the Kennedy Administration, and then they went afield and did studies for New York City, and they got into all kinds of other things, and that finally led to what is now Project Air Force. The original concept of RAND was certainly diluted substantially. I can't speak for the Air Force today, the relationship of Project Air Force with the Air Force, but the golden days as far as I'm concerned were from the very beginning of Project RAND and into the RAND Corporation. I think they had great impact through the 1950's in terms of major Air Force decisions having to do with weapon systems and the utilization of those weapon systems. I don't think they have that much influence today. Collins: Okay. I guess I'd like to go back. schriever: Yes, you might ask some questions specifically. Collins: Explore a little bit more your role in the Scientific Liaison Office. schriever: All right. Let me go back. Collins: Did you have a general charter to try to involve academia, people in universities with Air Force efforts? Was that part of your charge there? Did you have some kind of outreach effort to these groups, I guess is what I'm asking. Schriever: Yes. Von Karman was made chief scientist or advisor, and they set up--the Scientific Advisory Board came after they had their scientific--it was called the-­ collins: We can sort out that. Schriever: Von Karman continued on right from the time that he was brought in. The SAB, Scientific Advisory Board, came along, and I was the staff office that supported the Scientific Advisory Board activities, was the Scientific Liaison Office. And it was through that particular arrangement that was made that I had the opportunity to interact with the scientific community. I didn't have a specific charge to seek out individuals, you know, but it was through the organizational structure that was created, of the RAND Corporation, the Scientific Advisory Board. And then they set up the Joint Research and Development Board which Vannevar Bush--I think he was the one. He headed up the first one, I believe, when they set it up in a formal way. [telephone interruption] collins: Resuming after a brief pause. We were talking about your ties to the scientific community. SCHRIEVER-9 schriever: Yes. I'm a little bit hazy on just when that--Karl Compton was also involved. Vannevar Bush. They set up that Joint Research and Development Board, and I believe that happened toward the end of my tour in the Scientific Liaison Office, but I'd have to check back. I'm trying to remember.

Collins: The JRDB was set up in 1946, and then after unification it became RDB. SChriever: All right. It became RDB. So it was set up in '46, and I was also the briefing officer to our representatives on the JRDB. So it was the Joint Research and Development Board, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and the RAND Corporation that I dealt with, my office dealt with, interfaced with, as far as the air staff was concerned. That's how I became involved with the scientific community to the extent that I did. Now in addition to that, we also had the responsibility for all the new activities and facilities that the Air Force was contemplating, in terms of meeting their requirements from an R&D and test standpoint were also under my Scientific Liaison Office from an air staff standpoint responsibility. Much of that was farmed out in terms of detail. Let me give you an example here. The Arnold Engineering Development Center. There was a working group set up at Wright Field in terms of doing the planning and the studies that were necessary to do the detailed planning for the Arnold Engineering Development Center. But the need for it came out of von Karman and the SAB. Okay? So we hired a company to do a site survey, Swerdup and Parsell. They did a site survey, and I was the air staff representative that worked with them on doing that survey and working with the people at Wright Field. So the Scientific Liaison Office was involved because the SAB was heavily involved in overviewing, making recommendations, advising, and so forth and so on, in connection with the Arnold Engineering Development Center. So that sort of activity was going on. Also the Edwards Air Force Flight Test Center. That was also created during that period of time, '46 to '50. The first rocket test facility out in the same location as the Edwards Air Force Base, our rocket test facilities. That was another new facility that we were also involved in. So it was a combination of things that created the interaction with the many scientific types.

TAPE 1, SIDE 2 schriever: From a bottom line standpoint, I would say that being involved in the formation of the Scientific Advisory Board, becoming well acquainted with von Karman and members of the SCHRIEVER-l0 Advisory Board, having an air staff responsibility with respect to the activities of the Scientific Advisory Board, that was one of the most important interfaces that was created by the Scientific Liaison Office. And that we had a lot to do from an administrative standpoint in creating the policy and operating procedures. The RAND Corporation, Project RAND and then RAND Corporation, was the other interface that led to creating relationships with many of the people in the RAND itself. A good many of them originally came out of industry, but there also were people from academia. I had, even before the war, made contacts with the industry, since I was a test pilot, and then at Wright Field, I had contacts with industry, although not any to speak of with respect to academia. Then the Joint Research and Development Board, where the Scientific Liaison Office had the responsibility of interacting with the Joint Scientific Advisory Board, providing all of the briefing material and briefing the Air Force representatives. I believe that General McNarney was one of the representatives. I think the other one was--I'm not sure if it was General Craigie-­ but McNarney was one. I used to go out to Wright Field. He was at Patterson. I used to brief him. So it was SAB, RAND, the Joint Research and Development Board, plus being involved in an administrative and planning way in the establishment of new facilities, which really got under way through mostly the impetus of the Scientific Advisory Board von Karman created. And that was the Army Engineering Development Center, Flight Test Center. I might say also the establishment of the missile test range at Cape Canaveral. We took over Patrick Air Force Base in 1949, or just before 1949. All of that work was being done, not just by the Scientific Liaison Office, but we were always involved in everyone of these creations of these new facilities that I'm talking about, the rocket test facility as well. The scientific community was working very, very closely with the Air Force on all of these matters, and that was primarily because of the great credibility that von Karman gave to the fact that he was very, very close and he enjoyed his work with the Air Force, and von Karman--I guess he could be considered the number one aeronautical science engineer in the world. He also was a very colorful individual. I maintained a very, very close relationship with von Karman until the day he died. And when I came back from the National War College and took over the Development Planning Office, that whole process of dealing with the scientific community continued. I was still dealing with the Scientific Advisory Board, but that's another subject. It was the scientists [Edward] Teller and [John] von SCHRIBVBR-ll Neumann who, after the thermonuclear weapon first dropped at Eniwetok--it was a 50,000 pound device--they were the ones who said that we could do it with a dry device. That led to the breakthrough that provided the impetus for the long-range ballistic missile, and of course that set the stage for the whole space program. But these associations were not just associations that were short-term. They were very long-term. And it was Hap Arnold himself who, I would say, was the architect, or let's say had the vision to understand that we had to have that very close relationship. None of the other services had it by any means. I mean they followed to some extent, but it was the Air Force that took the lead by a very, very large margin in creating these relationships with the scientific community, which incidentally are still very much alive. Of course, the OSD has its Defense Science Board. The von Neumann Committee, which was the committee that provided the oversight and advice on the ICBM programs, became an advisory committee to the Secretary of Defense, when we had not only the ICBM but we had the IRBM, and also the Polaris SLBM. So there's an evolution that took place over quite a long period of time, which, as far as I'm concerned, was really initiated and the genesis of it came from Arnold's thinking and the entities that he established, and the relationship that evolved with the scientific community, which, as I say, continues on to today.

Collins: How would you describe the difference between what the Scientific Advisory Board did for the Air Force and what RAND did for the Air Force? Why those two different kinds of inputs? They seem to be overlapping, to some degree. schriever: No. The Scientific Advisory Board would use some of RAND's analytical studies, but they never themselves went into that kind of detail. Their interests were, I would say, at a level higher with respect to technologies, and even further out in the future than RAND. RAND really did a hell of a lot of very detailed analytical work and they were on a full-time basis. The Scientific Advisory Board was not on a full-time basis. They would use RAND inputs, so RAND was really an arm of the Scientific Advisory Board to give more credibility to some of the recommendations that the SAB made. The SAB was used in other ways, too. I know I used them that way when I was commander of the Air Force ARDC and then the systems command but even before that. Well, let me tell you what it is now, and before that it was not organized. But right now, each major division of the Air Force Systems Command has what they call a Division Advisory Group, a DAG. Those DAGs have SAB members. Those are the only SCHRIEVER-12 members of the DAG. Now the DAG can also have associate members that are not members of the SAB. Those Division Advisory Groups, they are at the call of the division commander, like the Aeronautics Systems Division or the Space Systems Division, and they're used all the time to look at particular major areas that relate, in many cases, to technical problems. They will call in experts to support them, for doing the detailed work. They did that sort of thing on an informal basis, starting way back. For example, when we only had Wright Field, and we had the laboratories out there, they would be working with the laboratories out there, but they would never be doing the kind of analytical work that RAND was doing or ANSER was doing. For example, RAND has always done work at a level. They look at technology, but then they take an analytical approach to that technology, marry it with the operational factors and so on. Scientific Advisory Board never went into that degree of detail. But RAND and the SAB have always worked very closely together. I imagine in the scientific community you run into differences of opinion in the scientific field. I think a scientist has to take exception in order to feel that he'S really worth his salt. But I would say that, on balance, that RAND and the Scientific Advisory Board have complemented each other. They certainly did during the period that I'm talking about. collins: I guess I'm interested in looking a little more closely at Arnold's vision of what the Air Force required in terms of increased scientific and technical capability, or access to that kind of capability, in the postwar period. Was that view widely shared within the Air Force, to your recollection? That you needed these kinds of inputs from people outside the Air Force to help you. Schriever: I guess I can't answer that in a completely objective way. I can answer it in a subjective way. I don't think that view was shared by very many. If you talk about Air Force military--I'm talking about the military Air Force. See we had won the war by having a great production base. When Roosevelt said, "I want 100,000 airplanes a year," everybody said that was impossible, but we did it, and we had good equipment. But we were fortunate there because the airmail was such a debacle in 1934, that all kinds of things happened. I won't go into any details, but all kinds of things happened, so that when I was a test pilot at Wright Field in 1939, we already had experimental aircraft that were the actual experimental and prototype aircraft of every airplane that flew in World War II, with the exception of the B-29. And that would not have happened if we had not had what I would call a crisis. At least it was a political crisis, as well as a crisis in the fact that we simply didn't have any equipment that could have possibly flown in World War II, if we had not had that problem. And we immediately went SCBRIEVER-13 about developing with industry--industry developed, not the Air Force--but the industry developed the airplanes, under the direction of the Air Corps, that led to our having an adequate capability, from a qualitative standpoint, by the time the war came around. We hadn't really gotten our production industry going, but we sure as hell put it in gear pretty damned fast, particularly after Pearl Harbor.

Collins: Just to get you to digress a moment, okay.

Schriever: But AMC [Air Materiel Command] you see, was production and support, supply-oriented organization. I know all the guys: K.B. Wolfe, Bill Irvine, etc. Their sights were never, as far as I could see, beyond the next two, three, four, or five years. There were only a few people that really had shared Arnold's vision, I mean believed in it. Craigie, Don Putt--there were certainly a number of younger officers, the Young Turks that were in the Pentagon, which included myself in the period '46 to 1950 which led to, with the support of the scientific community, incidentally, the creation of the Air Research and Development Command. That all came about again by this group, led more or less by the Scientific Liaison Office, and getting the support of the Jimmy Doolittles, Ivan Getting, Ridenour--Louis Ridenour was the guy I was trying to think of that was on project RAND, and he was also on the SAB. He was the one that, in that Project RAND, came up with the applications of the satellites for military support operations. Louis Ridenour. I can't name them all now, but it's easy to get the names of the top scientific community that was involved. And I should have said that sooner. They were not only involved in identifying the technologies and making recommendations with respect to applying those technologies to new systems, to provide greater capability, but they also, during that period, looked at the whole organizational structure, the management structure that the Air Force had in being, to optimize the application of that technology to new systems. There are a number of documents on that, during that period. Really the industry was fighting real hard against--well, they fought against creating the Arnold Engineering Development Center. They wanted to have their own test facilities. They were against creating the Air Research and Development Command, because they were comfortable in dealing with the Air Materiel Command. And so there was a bitter battle in the Air Force, and that never could have been won if it hadn't been for the strong scientific support. Arnold was gone, you know. Arnold had retired. And Arnold died in 1950. But he created the strong SCBRIEVER-14 scientific support to the advocates who saw the importance of technology. They saw that we were moving into a technological revolution. It was overtaking what you might call the industrial revolution which brought about production capability, but not high technology. It was a new high technology that came into being as a result of World War II, that brought about the need to have technology become a major factor in almost all the major decisions that were made with respect to new systems and the application of those systems. And that simply was not the forte of the Air Materiel Command. The old engineering division, which was under the Air Materiel Command, was at Wright Field, but they lacked the authority really to do the things that were necessary. They were always under the Air Materiel Command, which was logistics and support-oriented, and the air staff was dominated by the operators and by the requirements people. Now if you talk about requirements in the operational sense, because it was called operational requirements, they were looking ahead only as far as the operators in the field were looking ahead. Now there wasn't any reason to be critical or to believe that these operators were really thinking--they had their own problems in operating the equipment they had, and they were thinking in terms of, well, what can I do to improve what I have. They weren't thinking about something new, five or six years from now. And I'll give you how that frame of mind comes about. When I was in the Pacific during the war, I had a feel for technology and the importance of it. But fighting a war over there--after flying in B-17s, I was made chief of maintenance of the Fifth Air Force, and then later I had what was called the advanced echelon of the Far East Air Service Command. People would come over from the U.S., from Wright Field, and they'd have all kinds of fine solutions to problems, but they were a couple of years away. I wasn't interested in it at all, because what we needed to do was do something much quicker than that. Well, that was wartime, but you still have that same kind of culture and thinking in the operational commands. They're thinking about improvements that are relatively short-term. And when you think, today, the length of time it takes to field a new system. We did it in the missile business in five years. That would be unheard-of today. It takes anywhere from ten to twelve from the time you take a new technology through the development, test, evaluation, procurement, and so forth, to get it out into the operational inventory. And operators are not going to be thinking that far in advance. And that whole purpose of creating the Air Research and Development Command was that we'd have an organization that really put technology as the key element in their decision making process. And it's worked pretty well. Not as well as I had SCHRIEVER-iS hoped, because they did away with the Development Planning Office. They went back to just requirements. And today, the POM--it's really a five-year plan and program for the three services. It's dominated by dollars and politics. Technology plays a very poor third or fourth in any consideration. Because five years is simply not long enough, and they're not doing the long-range strategic planning, which is where technology really fits, because new technology takes time to introduce. I'm just g1v1ng that as the kind of thinking that was going on, that we needed the organizational arrangements that would provide technology with a seat at the decision-making table. That's the best way I can put it. And there, the scientific community working with the Air Force, primarily the SAB and through the RAND Corporation, to provide real, detailed analytical support, won the day, and we did create the Air Research and Development Command. We did put in the Arnold Engineering Development Center. And we did expand the underlying base of technology in the Air Force to where today, no question, it certainly is the best by far of any of the services. I forgot to add that, but that was another very important process that was going on during the period 1946 to 1950.

Collins: I was interested in your observation that it was the scientific contacts through the SAB that were fairly instrumental in helping this organizational change came about. schriever: Oh, hell, it would not have come about. I can guarantee it would not have come about, had they not been as integrated into our way of doing business as they were.

Collins: I guess I'm wondering how it was that their input was decisive. schriever: Because they were--SAB, the Scientific Advisory Board, is an arm of the chief of staff of the Air Force. In other words, they report to the chief of staff of the Air Force, and they make their recommendations, and those recommendations carry a hell of a lot of weight. It varies somewhat with who is chairman of the SAB and who is chief of staff--I mean their personalities. But nevertheless, when you had the personality of an Arnold and a [Carl] Spaatz and then a Vandenberg. Vandenberg and Spaatz were really--they understood Arnold, particularly Spaatz. He wasn't the man of vision that Arnold was, but he accepted Arnold's vision, and he supported what Arnold--he became the chief of staff after Arnold retired, then he was followed by Vandenberg. Both of those and von Karman, continued during that period, you see. So that there was a continuity of thought on SCBRIEVER-16 the part of those three chiefs in a row, and von Karman being there, plus a very, very strong cast of characters in the scientific--scientists that were part of the SAB. So that was the strength of the emphasis on science and technology in the Air Force. And that's why it had, you might say, a ten-year honeymoon in the Air Force, and by that time policies were established, organizational arrangements were established, procedures were established that made it impossible to ever revert back. It was irreversible. Even though we've had problems, and we've had relative ups and downs, they haven't been this way or that way. It's been minor perturbations, and not major perturbations, and technology still plays an extremely important role in Air Force decision making. Not as much as I'd like but extremely important, and because of all the things that happened. I think it's the period from '45 to '50 set the stage, and then the period from '50 to '60 really cemented it, because we didn't get the Air Force Systems Command created. We had ARDC but they didn't have the procurement responsibility, so the dollars were still divided between two commands, and it wasn't until 1961 that we had the creation of the Air Force Systems Command. In other words, during the full-scale development period into initial production, that was made a part of what was ARDC, now called AFSC. That occurred in 1961. That whole process took about fifteen years. But the springboard was the relationship that was created with the scientific community.

Collins: Okay. Did RAND play any role in examining these larger questions of Air Force organization and structure for supporting R&D? Schriever: They did not. They did not play an important role in the organization. I'd have to say from an organizational point of view they played a minor role, a supporting role, but not a major role at all.

Collins: NOW, as you had earlier pointed out, the Air Force during World War II had its own kind of operations analysis capability. And obviously one of the main aspects of the military was to worry about its own planning issues, the things that RAND became involved in. It seems interesting to me that the RAND area of responsibility seemed more fundamental to what the Air Force had done before than the Scientific Advisory Board. In other words, the Air Force was already doing that kind of work. Schriever: Their major thrust was to provide, in addition to looking at the capabilities of technology and making recommendations in that regard, they always did an operational analysis kind of thing, too. The operational analysts that we SCHRIEVER-17 had out in the field during the war were mostly drawn from industry and academia. They were analytical types, and they just, you know, had a desire to want to take data and analyze it and point out where we were doing things that we could--these things were providing certain results, and if you do it in some other way, you'd get better results, and that's all it was really all about. But it was collecting actual empirical data and analyzing it to come up with recommendations. And RAND was doing that, too. But of course, during peacetime you don't have actual wartime data to go by, but we did have the data coming out of Korea and then later out of Vietnam. But analysis during peacetime, particularly with new systems, you have to crank in a hell of a lot of assumptions. And that's why you have to be a little bit skeptical, and look underneath what some of the assumptions are, to be sure that you have a credible conclusion. I used to have a hell of a time with some of the analysts at SAC, they had under Zimmerman out there. They would put in assumptions that would in essence satisfy--the answers would come out so that they would satisfy what the SAC management really wanted to hear. If you've got a good analysis staff, it's easy to put in an assumption that will end up providing you with the answer you want. But you can't do that if you have actual data that has been obtained under actual combat conditions. Now we have done an awful lot of work toward getting data that are as close to real combat conditions, by putting in facilities at Eglin Air Force Base, for example, at Nellis, where, with the electronics and data handling that we have today, we can actually carry out missions that would be a very close simulation to an actual military mission, and get actual data. So we do get a lot of data of that kind. RAND was a mix of operational and technical factors. Collins: I guess what I was trying to get at--this overlapped with traditional military responsibilities. You did have military planners who worried about similar issues, if not in the same fashion or at the same level of detail. Schriever: Well, that's true, but if you take a look at the make-up of the Air Force Systems Command--then we're going to have to stop in a minute--you have a large percentage of--and when I say a large percentage--I can say that the officer personnel of the Systems Command, you'll find that at least fifty percent of the officer personnel have advanced degrees. I can't be sure of this number, but I would say fifty percent of the officers in Systems Command have been involved in technical activities seventy-five percent of their career. So they think in technical and scientific terms. They have made their own contacts with academia as well as the industry. So they are SCHRIEVER-18 thinking not in terms only of today's operations. They're thinking in terms of what the hell technology can do to do things a hell of a lot better than what maybe today's equipment can do. So the place where you really have to do the longer term planning, in terms of the application of technology, has to come pretty much from the systems command, because that's where you have the people that are working in the scientific and technical areas on a day-to-day basis, and they're the ones who have the actual personal contacts with academia, the universities. Many of them, you know, have taken their master's and PhD degrees at universities, and they have established a relationship with the community, so to speak, over the years. You take the people in the guidance area, for example. Most of them come out of Stark Draper's laboratory at MIT, and hell, they have a contact with the scientific and technical people in academia and in industry in the guidance area. Hell, they're always thinking about--Stark Draper used to say, "Christ, I can get accuracies down to 100 feet with an all-inertial system." He was saying that fifteen years ago. Bob Duffy, who ran Stark Draper's laboratory after Stark retired, Bob was a product of that particular laboratory. He went through MIT and got his Ph.D. there. When I ran Project Forecast, he headed up the guidance panel. He made certain forecasts at that time in 1963 as to what was possible in the way of accuracies. I can't quote them because I guess they're still classified. Hell, he was laughed at. We not only achieved those accuracies, but we did it a hell of a lot better than that. So the point 11m trying to make is, you have these guys all throughout the whole systems command. You wouldn't have those guys if you were having just the goddamned Air Materiel Command. The Supply and Logistics Command. The business of science and technology, and the application of that, takes a different culture. It's a different culture than the operators. It's a different culture than the logistics supporters. It's a culture that is looking to the future. That is managing that technology in a way that it can be applied in the most rapid way. In other words, from laboratory to operational capability, is one way of expressing it. Because they have the complete responsibility, and no place does it exist than in the systems command in the Air Force. collins: Let me just add, I think this is a good initial discussion. There are a number of questions I'd still like to pursue with you, so if we could get together another time. Schriever: We can get together again, and why don't you just have the list of questions, and I can try to be shorter. Interviewee: General Bernard Schriever

Interviewer: Mr. Martin Collins

Date: September 5, 1990

Place: General Schriever's home, Washington, D.C.

TAPE 1, SIDE 1

Mr. Collins: Last time we talked, we outlined this early history of RAND, as you understood it, and your activities in the Office of Scientific Liaison for the first four years that that office was in operation after the war. Where I'd like to start today is to look at your activities in the Office of Development Planning, when at that point you had more direct cognizance over the RAND activity as it reported to that office. So I think just as a starting point, I'd be interested in having you describe the broad functions of that office and how the RAND activity fit into it.

General Schriever: You mean the Development Planning Office? collins: Yes. schriever: Well, just as a very short background, during the period that I was at the Scientific Liaison Office, and all the activity emphasizing the importance of technology, which Hap Arnold was a leader on and von Karman, the Scientific Advisory Board, and so forth, it was obvious to me and obvious to a number of other younger officers, as well as General Don Putt, who was back and forth between Wright Field and the Pentagon, that we were not really in our long-range planning activity putting enough emphasis on technology. In other words, we were looking more at the near-term requirements from an operational standpoint and the length of time it took to get a weapons system into the inventory. In those days it was five or six years compared to ten or twelve today. Technology had to be considered as a very important element.

One example and then I'll go on and talk in more general terms. The nuclear weapon: we had a fission weapon which was relatively large and had very great weight relatively speaking, which made it a very difficult weapon to match with a long-range ballistic missile. Yet we could not get from the Los Alamos people any kind of projection on what might be possible, in terms of smaller and high-yield weapons, beyond what they had in production. So that the delivery system, that is the airplane, SCHRZEVER-20 which is tied directly to what it has to carry, and even to a greater extent the ballistic missile--we couldn't match the weapon to the weapon carrier. We simply had to get a longer projection of technology. We had to be able to plan in advance at least five to ten years. So the scientific community, particularly the Scientific Advisory Board, certainly bought this as a philosophy for planning on the part of the military. Specifically, I'm talking about the Air Force now. When I came back from the National War College, I didn't expect to go back in the Pentagon. lid been there for four years before. But this whole idea of longer range planning beyond operational requirements had taken hold on a number of people, particularly the scientific community going to the chief of staff, of the Air Force and other high officials in the Air Force, blue-suiters. We did create what we called the assistant for evaluation. That was what it was originally called when I arrived back in the Pentagon in 1950. Dr. Ivan Getting had been put in charge of that under General Gordon P. Saville, who was deputy for R&D, and I was made his deputy. Now the main purpose of that particular office was to try to factor in, as an extremely important element in the determination of initiating new weapon system developments, the technologies that would be available downstream. Downstream, I mean five to ten years in the future, although that meant that the technology was already being worked with in laboratories, and we had adequate scientific support and experimental support that the technology was there and would be available downstream, so it was appropriate that we could put it into our planning process. So that really was the main purpose, was to try to give a balance to the nearer term operational requirements that were coming out of the operational commands and the longer term technology in initiating new major weapon system development programs. So that is the bottom line of what the Development Planning Office was all about. We interacted with the operational planning office in the Pentagon. We interacted with the operational requirerroerts people. We interacted with the operation commands like SAC and like TAC and Air Defense Command, as well as the support organizations such as, at that time, the Air Materiel Command. Our philosophy of operation--Ilm talking now about assistant for evaluation, which a little less than a year later became the assistant for development planning, and Ivan Getting left, and I took over the office. We actually, in my opinion, started what I would call "ad hockery." In other words, we worked on an ad hoc basis. I had a relatively small staff of highly qualified people. Most of the people I had in my office, both civilian and officers, had PhD degrees. They were lieutenant colonels, I had two or three colonels and a number of very bright majors, and about an equal SCHRIEVER-21 number of civil service personnel. All of them highly qualified people from the standpoint of their academic background and almost all of them had had some experience in government and in industry. That was the nucleus, and we more or less had as our main function a definition of the problem which would lead to the requirement for a new system involving new technology. We certainly didn't have the capability of doing all that with a small staff, and we didn't want a big staff because we didn't want an ivory tower. So the ad hoc thing. I had the support of the chief of staff at that time was General Nate Twining. I had known him for a long time before, and he supported the whole concept of development planning because it went against in many cases some of the things that the operational commanders wanted in the field.

But again, going back to how we functioned. I was able, through the chief's office, to request the temporary assignment to my office, either in place or make them available to me on location at SAC or TAC or Air Defense Command, but they would be working for me. That's on the military side. The same thing applied to individuals from different staff offices in the Pentagon. They were then actually assigned to me on a temporary basis, sometimes for a week and sometimes for three or four or six months. We got people out of the Air University at Maxwell.

That's when I decided that it would be highly desirable to get RAND more closely involved in the actual studies that we were doing in the Pentagon, and I got together with Frank Collbohm, who was the president of the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica. I said, IIFrank, look, I know you want your complete independence, and I buy all that from the standpoint of the way RAND was set up, the concept of RAND. You're to do studies that you feel are in the best interests of national security and specifically the Air Force role in that, but we also need a small contingent of RAND to be supporting our development planning activity, which is leading to the establishment of major weapon system programs that are five to ten years in the future from the standpoint of being in the operational inventory. So what lid like to do is create a small group of RAND personnel in the Pentagon, and I only want one guy who would be permanently assigned there, and he'd be in charge of the RAND operation. He'd be sitting in the next office to me. And that happened to be Gene Root, who came in first. Gene Root later ran the Lockheed operation in Sunnyvale. He was out there so you know who he is. "He can coordinate with Santa Monica and then we could rotate people through based on their capabilities and the need, and they'll be there for whatever period of time seems to be appropriate for their specific task.1I So we averaged roughly anywhere from eight to fifteen RAND people in the Pentagon at all times. SCHRIEVER-22 In addition to that, I convinced the powers that be in the Pentagon that I needed a budget to do studies. In other words, I could go out and do studies at Cornell Lab or any other place that I wanted to do a specific study of a research type, analysis type. And I got a ten million dollar budget for that which I controlled personally, and I could sole-source. I didn't have to go through this competitive crap; I could just go to wherever the competence existed, and that was a big help. So that's essentially the kind of resources that we had: a small staff, permanent, both military and civilian; a group from RAND that rotated, based on the needs, intellectually, of the people that would be assigned there on a temporary basis: people coming in from the Air Staff and working specifically on what we called development planning objectives. We had a strategic development planning objective, an air defense planning objective. We had a reconnaissance and intelligence planning objectives, a logistics planning objective, and so on. In other words, we took the functional missions of the Air Force and had a development planning; objective in each of these major functional areas. Again, I think I don't have to repeat myself. I think you've got where the people came from, where the resources came from. The beauty of that was that I really had the ability to ask by name for people that I knew had the capabilities for doing and had the background experience. We developed these planning objectives in the form of documentation which we, of course, within our own circle, massaged and exercised and tested out on the scientific community, for example, the SAB [Scientific Advisory Board]. We worked closely with the SAB on these things, and we got SAB help­ -individuals from SAB not SAB as a whole. Finally, these development planning objectives were processed through the Air Council. That was the last step and the final document then was approved by the Air Council and signed by the chief of staff of the Air Force and became the guidelines for future Air Force weapons systems. In other words, we didn't do detailed specifications, but we identified enabling technology that would permit the development of certain capabilities. Then we'd work with the operational commands and with requirements shop in the Pentagon to actually put out what we call--I forgotten exactly what we called it then--but it was an operational requirements document, which would then move into the machinery for creating a development program to achieve a certain weapons system capability downstream. We didn't have any responsibility once we got through the development planning objectives, working with requirements and the operating commands to get an operation requirements document. That was not our responsibility, to get the operation SCHRIEVER-23 requirements document, but we participated in the preparation of it. So that's essentially the process that we went through.

Collins: Okay. That's very illuminating. Just as an example, let's take one of those functional areas that you mentioned where you developed a development planning objective, say a strategic planning objective. How would the articulation of that thing come about? Would that sort of start off as something that you worked on through your group of staff you had in your office or would you immediately involve people in the operational commands to begin to think out what would be required five to ten years in this area? Schriever: Well, we did certain things internally in the office in the way of identifying promising technologies. That we did pretty much on our own, working with the SAB and working with taking the monies that I had for these special studies and taking RAND inputs, and so forth, and identifying then the most promising technologies which would lead to enhanced capability downstream. Maybe a·completely new weapon system. We identified a number of new apprpaches to gathering reconnaissance and intelligence. That planning objective never was officially published because it was too highly classified. But in the strategic role, for example, we identified the technologies that would allow us to fly at--we in essence said that strategic bombing of the future would have to be done at low altitude. That was a big argument in the Air Force about low versus high, and we also identified the technologies which would permit us to optimize low-altitude flight, which has structural requirements as well! as propulsion requirements in order to fulfill the low altitude. Out of all of that came the high bypass ratio engine, for example, which is much more efficient at low altitudes. There was a big argument as to whether we should try to fly supersonic at low altitude or high subsonic speeds. We had studies made by RAND and by some of the other groups that the survivability at low. altitude--an airplane flying at speeds of supersonic speeds of 1.2 versus flying at .9 were almost negligible in terms of differences in survivability. Yet in order to get to Mach 1.2 on the deck you practically burn up all your fuel, by the time you got to 1.2, so you have nothing left. So it was a completely useless type of operation, but there were lots of arguments in the Air Force about that supersonic flight on deck. The B-2 doesn't have supersonic capability on the deck, nor does the B-1 have a supersonic capability on the deck, so it took us a long time to gain that. But at any rate that was one thing. SCHRIBVBR-24 Another thing, on the tactical side, there were big arguments about scarcity of nuclear weapons. That after all, tactical aircraft couldn't deliver nuclear weapons at low altitude. Well, we had studies made of different maneuvers which would allow release of nuclear weapons at low altitude coming in and releasing the weapon while they were making a fast climb, and the techniques used were developed by a research outfit up in Boston, and we proved them out down at Eglin Air Force Base. So we changed the whole idea of how we might deliver nuclear weapons not from bombers with bombsights and so forth but with tactical aircraft flying at low altitude and making the delivery at low altitude. What they did was, they didn't drop the weapon at that low altitude, but they came over the target and made a programmed turn and then at a certain point in their climb, fast climb out, the weapon was released and the accuracies achieved. Remember now, this was back in the fifties. The accuracies that were achieved were very, very high indeed. So it was these kinds of things. And then, of course, in the thermonuclear weapon, when that came into being, that opened the door for the ICBM. Now there is an ideal example of taking a technology that we had not even worked at in the laboratory. But theoretically [John] von Neumann and [Edward] Teller and several other of the top nuclear physicists in this country said--shortly after the Mike shot in the Pacific, which was in November of '52, I think. By the spring meeting of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, where I made a presentation on low-altitude strategic bombing, both Edward Teller and von Neumann made presentations--I think I've said this to you before--that the thermonuclear weapon did not have to be a large, heavy water weapon. It could be a dry weapon, and they indicated that studies that they had made, a thermonuclear weapon having a yield of a megaton, weighing no more than 1500 pounds, could be built and could be ready for operational use by 1960. This was 1953. We followed that up then with two studies, one through the Scientific Advisory Board with von Neumann as chairman, with Teller, [Herb] York, Bradbury--all the top nuclear scientists were on it. I initiated that study through the Development Planning Office. In June or July of '53 they submitted their report and said yes, it was feasible to have just that kind of weapon that I just described by 1960. On the basis of that, we had another study group that married the theoretical 1500 pound warhead to an ICBM, and was it feasible to do that by 1960. And von Neumann was the chairman of that, and that was a teapot. It's been since declassified, that report. Collins: I've seen that. Schriever: You've seen that, all right. Okay, now that started the whole damn ICBM program. So these are the kinds of things that we were involved in the Development Planning Office. That's SCHRIEVER-2S a very unusual case, that's the one in the extreme, but other cases we would actually prove out, through experimental work and laboratory data, that we could do certain things technically and that we needed to move forward. We had big arguments on the whole goddamn in-flight refueling, the supersonic nuclear bomber, which I had a big fight with [Curtis] LeMay on when he was a four-star general and I was only a colonel. It's not feasible to do. So we stopped certain things, as well as started certain things. collins: I think an interesting example to follow a little bit further is the one that you mentioned about the contentious issue of the mode of attack on the Soviet Union: whether you go in high, you go in low; whether you go in SUbsonic, or supersonic. Articulating an appropriate development planning objective then seems to involve several different things. One is reaching agreement on the best mode for conducting a war, and the other is deciding on which technology is the most appropriate when you've made that choice. What it sounds like you're saying is that there were different groups in the Air Force that held strong views, differing views on these subjects. I guess my question is, how do those different points of view get resolved and then result in a development planning objective for a particular technology?

Schriever: Well, they never became completely resolved. LeMay for example--and don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be critical of LeMay, because he held his views. LeMay's views at that time was that, for example, following the B-52, which was a high-altitude bomber, he wanted a B-70, which was a supersonic Mach 3 bomber. He contended that electronic countermeasures would be adequate to allow penetration at acceptable losses with a high-altitude bomber like the B-70. And others contended, and we in the Development Planning Office contended, that that was not the case, that you would not be able to survive, even at altitudes of 80,000 feet going at Mach 3, in the time period ahead. That electronic countermeasures would not permit you to really penetrate with acceptable losses. The fact of the. matter is, any attack that SAC now and over the past twenty years or longer--twenty-five years almost--any attack over the Soviet Union was planned to be at low altitude, including the B-52's, which had to be upgraded structurally to allow them to fly at low altitude. You can't just say, low altitude, high altitude. You've got to design the airplane to fly at those particular altitudes where the loading on the aircraft may be so damn high that it won't survive any kind of turbulent weather. I didn't mention this, but I should have. I should have mentioned it a while ago. We also analyzed the threat. In other SCHRIEVER-26 words, we didn't just talk about technology that we had at hand, but what was our threat. What kind of threat were we operating against. And that was just as important as anything else in our planning process. We had access to all of the intelligence information in the Development Planning Office. This was another battle I won. Those goddamn intelligence creeps. You know they try to hold everything in, and I got clearances for all of my people on a need-to-know basis. So we actually had the opportunity to make a very knowledgeable analysis, and we worked with the intelligence community on the threat. So that when we talked about different methods of attack, we also talked about the threat and, of course, RAND was a big help there because they were always working in the threat arena. That designed airplanes whether you were flying at high altitude, or whether you were flying at low altitude, particularly in terms of delivery systems. Fighters were different because they normally have to fight at any altitude, so they have to be built in such a way that they can withstand supersonic speed even at lower altitudes. So they, from a structural standpoint, are built differently than a bomber. But the threat consideration--and, as I said, we had access to all of the intelligence information. That was another thing. Not only did we have RAND people in the Washington office, but we could task them to do certain analysis for us on the threat considerations. For example, that flying at .9 Mach, versus 1.1 or 1.2, and using different anti-aircraft defenses that the Soviets had, and projecting capabilities based on technology forward, the determination was made that we could fly at low altitude, and it didn't make a hell of a lot of difference whether you were at .9 or 1.1 or 1.2. And it was a hell of a ride. The faster you go at low altitude, the rougher the ride. Now with the present flight control capabilities that are automatic in nature and so forth, you can get a hell of a lot smoother ride at lower altitude. But you can't do it if you were trying to anticipate bumps. Those were all considerations that we put into our planning effort. Collins: That helps articulate the nature of your work and the depth of the differences, but how would these things get resolved and result in a payoff? schriever: They would be resolved at the chief's level. I mean if there was a difference, and there were differences, and usually they were resolved in this way. There would be a final meeting: it would be an Air council meeting, where the chief himself would sit in. Usually, the vice chief of staff was the chairman of the Air council meetings, and the Air Council is composed of all of the deputies on the Air Staff. Whenever the Secretary wanted to sit in--he wasn't a member of the Air Council, but the Air Council made their recommendations to the chief, chief made them to the Secretary. If there was a SCHRIEVER-27 difference, and we had a number of those, where the commander from whether it be TAC or Air Defense Command or SAC--most of these happened with LeMay. LeMay would come in with a couple of his staff people, and the Air Council would meet, and generally when we had one of these things to resolve, the chief himself would sit there. And in those cases, generally, I would make a presentation on the development planning objective or the reasons why certain things should be done in such and such a way. We had, for example, the question of in-flight refueling versus building an airplane that would fly all the way there and all the way back without in­ flight refueling. There was a period of time when SAC generally said well, hell, in-flight refueling is just a crutch. We want something that can fly there and all the way back. We just said, "Look there's no goddamn way you could do it, particularly if you want any supersonic flight." You can't fly 6,000 miles and come back 6,000 miles without in-flight refueling, !unless you built one airplane that weighs about three million pounds. I'm being facetious at this point, but that's the case, and we'd be backed up on these things. And generally a case like that wouldn't require finally going to the Air Council and making a presentation. I think we'd make a presentation, and we'd send supporting information out. We weren't arbitrary. We couldn't be arbitrary. Shit, I was only a colonel, and so here I'm dealing with four-star generals and three-star generals. We'd go out to SAC and make presentations and usually we could resolve these things in some fashion. [telephone interruption] Questions that the operational commander would have. Collins: You mean here before you would take this to the Air Council? schriever: Yes. But if it couldn't be resolved, then the Air Council--we always took the development planning objective to the Air Council for final approval, and then to the chief of staff, and he'd sign off on it. If there were any objections at that point in time, we'd generally ask representation from the objectors to be there, or we would say there is this difference on point of view. So we didn't try to sneak anything through; everything was out on the table. I don't know what more I can say. Collins: But the idea was that in terms of putting together a development planning objective, you would work very closely with SCHRIBVER-28 the operational command that was involved and try to come up with something.

Schriever: Oh, yes. That's right, and there were always a number of iterations, you know.

Collins: One of the interesting parts of this, I think, taking for example your office's analysis, say, of the vulnerability of supersonic Mach 3 high-flying bombers versus low-altitude bombers. Nobody had built these things yeti nobody had tested them in an operational situation, so there was a certain amount of extrapolation and uncertainty in these analyses. How was that kind of issue dealt with by people who had to make decisions?

Schriever: Usually, you see, we were getting more and more into what I would call the sophistication of doing analysis work. Wherever we were able to get some actual experimental data to feed into a problem area, weld do that, but very often they'd have to make assumptions, and we didn't do too much of that analytical work ourselves in the office. I didn't have the people there. That's where RAND came into the picture. That's where we had a couple of early think tanks. There was one--I've forgotten the name of the company up in Boston that did excellent work for us. Cornell Labs at Cornell. And we had several other places that we used for doing analytical work for us, but RAND was the key one. But then we'd ask major companies to do work for us, too, and generally they did it for free. In other words, I'd just ask them how about doing this study for us, and it would be analytical in nature. All the companies at that point in time were beginning to do more and more of that analytical work, and they had to feed assumptions into it. But they were assumptions that were pretty well based on the technologies that were available, or they projected would be available at that time, so they were not just stuff out of the blue. They were well done, and if they were questioned, they were questioned. By having the RAND corporation available, having the scientific community available through the auspices of the Scientific Advisory Board, having such giants of the scientific world who were really very, very cooperative like von Karman, von Neumann. Oh, hell, I can't think of some of the names right now, people up there at MIT who worked on the reconnaissance thing, [Carl F. J.] Overhage. Jim Fisk, Merv Kelly, Don Quarles. I can start going down all these lists of names that were available. I could go to any of them--Bill Baker, Bell Telephone Labs, the top planners and scientists and engineers of any company, Boeing, Douglas, Convair. Didn't make any difference. I could talk to any of them. I could get inputs from anywhere. They would not be specifically project-oriented so I knew I would be getting as much objectivity as was possible to get. It didn't have anything SCHRIEVER-29 to do with the program that they were working on; it was looking ahead. So we had a tremendous network of scientific talent and engineering talent, analytical talent that I could bring to bear on these problems.

One of the big lacks today is that we don't have that kind of planning activity going on. I told that to Atwood, I told it to Don Rice, I've told it to every goddamn guy. The operational requirements people, they couldn't stomach this kind of thing for too long. It was a usurpation of their turf. Right today the military is wrapped around what they call the POM. The POM is a five-year document which indicates how you're going to spend your money over the next five years. It's the most slippery document in the world. It's like quicksilver, changes all the time and there isn't any long-range planning going on in the Department of Defense today. There is some that's policy-oriented, but from the standpoint of really doing a planning job that we did back in the early 50's--and that lasted for about ten years. I left that office in '54, and my successor, General Cooper, did a good job for about the next four years, and after that they discontinued the office.

TAPE 1, SIDE 2

Collins: I'm wondering, as part of this network of input that you had, whether you used a concept in a different way that you employed in the ballistic missile program, and that is the notion applied in a policy sense to concurrency. Would you have two groups at the same time working on the same or very similar problems to see whether the kinds of inputs that you would get would be the same or get different perspectives on the same problem?

Schriever: No. Not in the technology area. We would talk about competing technologies to some extent, but if you talk about red­ blue kind of thing, we would exercise the red-blue kind of an approach to threats. In other words, war-gaming kind of stuff. But from a technology standpoint, no. Except when there were different technologies that would do similar jobs, we would certainly look at those in terms of how effective they would do the job, and also what the cost to do them (inaudible portion) technology arena where somebody comes up and says, let's do this, let's do a directed energy weapon. And somebody else comes in, no, let's do the kinetic energy weapon for SOl. Now those are two different technologies, but they both have the same objective, and that is killing a ballistic missile. The point is that schedule is important, cost is important, survivability of your weapon system is important, and all of these things have to be put into the picture. SCHRIBVER-30 Now on SOl, I don't think there's any question but a space­ based kinetic energy weapon is by all odds the number one choice for the near-term. By the near-term I'm talking about the end of this century, early part of next century. A directed energy weapon certainly has tremendous potential, but we have not yet really come to grips with the survivability of such a system, let's say in space, or the survivability of mirrors, if you put them in space and bounce the energy off the mirrors. Also whether or not we can in fact get the kind of kill--there's several different directed energy approaches. Free electron laser seems to be the one that today is the favorite, but it's further off in time. So you know that kind of thing was always going on. But there, practical good sense and judgment gets into the picture as well. Now in the case of SOl, there is money going into the development of a directed energy capability, with the chemical laser and the free electron laser being the two that are being supported at the present time and also one other. I've forgotten what it is. But we looked at all technology. That's particularly true in the defense field and in the electronic countermeasure field, where you always have different technologies that people are coming up with. They have to be sorted out. The dynamics of the electronics equipment has been such that it's been very hard to keep up with. The military gets criticized frequently for not having the total--like the B-1 was criticized because some of the electronics equipment was not functioning properly, yet they could have put in a generation back technology electronic systems, and it would have been functioning properly, but they probably would have had to replace them because of other considerations. Things that are as dynamic as the electronics industry has been since the end of World War II, you can be caught with some obsolete stuff, and you can also be caught with something that's a little before its time. So it's a matter of taking a certain amount of risk, and if you get caught, and the thing isn't working properly, then you get criticized. That's the way the system works. Collins: I want to go back to your observation about the tension between people on the operational side and people who are on the planning side. You seem to indicate that over the post-war period there's been shifts in the balance of the effectiveness of those two voices in the planning process and the budget process in the Air Force. How was it that in the period that you were there, that the voice for science and technology got, I guess in your characterization, a fair hearing? Schriever: I think it primarily was because Hap Arnold, in teaming with von Karman, was able to institutionalize science and technology as a very important element of Air Force planning. He did that by creating RAND. He did that by creating the Scientific Advisory Board with the specific objective of SCHRIEVBR-31 maintaining a very close relationship with the scientific community. In addition to that, we created facilities like the Arnold Engineering Development Center, Edwards Air Force Base, the test range down at Patrick, the Cape, and so forth. That was a vision that Hap Arnold had. He was the one who said, look, we've got to optimize the technology that has come out of World War II. Then he institutionalized it by getting the people and creating mechanisms, institutions that were recognized. Like the SAB was recognized, RAND was recognized. Therefore, the logic that came out of the institutionalization and the creation of the deputy for research and development, the creation of the Development Planning Office, all of those things. And the support after Arnold left. He created a momentum which held on. [Carl] Spaatz was more or less a caretaker when he took over, when Arnold left, but he wasn't there long, and he certainly didn't make any waves against it, but he didn't initiate anything spectacular as far as science and technology was concerned. Vandenberg, on the other hand, with the strong support of the scientific community, created the Air Research and Development Command in 1950. He got the approval for the Arnold Engineering Development Center, and he kept the ball moving. Twining, after Vandenberg, was a strong supporter of all this. Again, Twining was not a technical man, but he was a man of great judgment and common sense. He was followed by White, who was an intellectual. So we had the people, we had the institution that made it work. And that gradually deteriorated, both from an institutional standpoint and from the standpoint of support from the chiefs. That's the way things work. And then, of course, the vietnam War, and the [Robert] McNamara micromanagement approach and centralization approach: creating these agencies at the Defense Department level, reducing the authority of the service secretaries, and so on. All of that has led to a micromanagement from OSD level which is getting worse instead of better and also from the Congress. It just ain't like it used to be, that's all there is to it. The people are smart. They certainly are as smart as we were, highly educated, but the system needs overhaul. Every overhaul they make is in the wrong direction--more authority at the top and less authority going with responsibility down at the operating level. I'm talking now about the whole R&D and systems acquisition process. I'm not talking about the operation of commands. Collins: Right. I want to go back and look a little bit more at the relationships with the scientific community in this period. You've given a very good account of one side of it, and that is the very helpful and supportive attitudes of people who were on SCHRIEVER-32 the SAB and people who were at RAND. But there was also a thread during this time I guess best represented by Vannevar Bush. Schriever: Yeah, I know that one too, the Joint Research and Development Board, yes. Collins: In which there was an interest in, or at least a point of view, that civilian scientists could do a better job of evaluating, deciding what the military needed than the military. How did that kind of attitude affect or play into the kind of work that the Air Force needed to do with the scientific community? Schriever: Well, Vannevar Bush, [Carl] Compton was involved. I've forgotten the exact year that that was set up. It was the Joint Research and Development Board, and then later it became the Research and Development Board. When that was first set up, there were two members from each service who were members of the Board. In the Air Force, the initial two members were General McNarney, who was commander of the Air Materiel Command at the time, but they had research and development under them. That was before 1950 so that had to be. McNarney and then the deputy for research and development on the air staff, and I've forgotten who the hell the first one was. Collins: LeMay was the very first one. schriever: Oh, Lemay was, but I was one of the briefing officers for that. In the Scientific Liaison Office, a job I had was to be a briefing officer and prepare agenda material for the two board members. Colonel Wood, who later became a genera1--that was when the Air Research and Development Command had been formed in 1950--he was another briefing officer. So I'm very familiar with the Research and Development Board. I didn't mention it simply because I was talking about the Air Force. But they did not get into requirements to the same extent that our development planning activity got into requirements. They were more involved in looking over and supervising the overall research and development programs for the total Defense Department. I'm talking about the services where they were trying to eliminate unnecessary duplication, be sure the appropriate amounts of money were being allocated for important technologies, and so forth. They did not involve themselves to any great extent on weapon system development decisions. That really didn't come until they set up DDR & E. And then when DDR & E came out, it was an evolutionary process and when York was made DDR & E, they became more and more involved in--they didn't have final approval, but they had a lot of review authority over the weapon systems process. When the hell was DDR & E set up? SCHRIEVER-33 collins: I think first you had the director of ARPO which began to serve pretty much the same-- Schriever: Well that was in '58. Collins: DDR & E, I think, was a year or two later after that. Schriever: Yes. York, I think, was the first one, and then I guess Johnny Foster followed York. Anyway, my bottom line assessment of both JRDB and RDB was that they were a definite plus because they brought to bear some of the top scientists in the country to participate in the Defense Department's creation of an R&D program, and they gave us some continuity. Vannevar Bush I got to know quite well, and Compton too, and Vannevar Bush was not necessarily a very visionary guy. He was a guy who in his book was very skeptical about the ICBM program, for example. But just because he was, doesn't make him any less of a topflight scientist, which he was. No, I think that was very definitely a plus, I just don't remember all the details. They were not micromanaging, they were reviewing proposals that came in from the services for research and development activities within each service and I think they performed a valuable part of the overall process of R&D. Collins: Maybe this just simply didn't come up in your experience, but looking back at documents of the period and certainly looking back at some of the comments of scientists who were active in this kind of support activity with the military, there was a strong strain of: we have a better sense of what the military ought to do than the military does. Is that something that you recall as a kind of sentiment that you had to confront and deal with? Schriever: I think that that was true on the part of some people. There were studies made. Project Charles was not a particularly happy one in the eyes of a lot of military. other studies that were made also didn't make anybody jump with glee. I think one of the big problems after the war was that there was a guilt feeling with respect to the atom bomb, which I think made a number of scientists concerned and brought out the idea that maybe the military would run hog-wild with weapons of mass destruction, etc. But I think one thing that's overlooked, is that the military are the guys that get shot at, and nobody particularly likes to get shot at and our main objective, at least mine, and I think all the people I know in the military, was to have the overall capability to deter war, and I think that we have pretty well done that as far as a major war is concerned. Certainly, if you look at the two wars that we became involved in, that were not really wars because they were never declared wars--Korea and Vietnam--you couldn't find two guys in the military, you couldn't SCHRIEVER-34 count them on your fingers, who were happy about those wars. They were started not because of the military. I don't think either one of them. They were both highly political, and then they were conducted in a political manner, not in a military manner. But if you take people like Oppenheimer and some of the old timers up at MIT, a few of them, Zacharias. Charles Murphy wrote an article years ago, I think I have a copy somewhere, in the Fortune magazine. If you want to get a good story. It's on Project Charles. It was written probably in the late '40s, Charles J. V. Murphy, who was an editor of Fortune. If you can find that, it would give you a good feel for what you're talking about. For example, my experience with the scientific community, the von Neumann committee which had on it Jerry Wiesner and Kistiakowsky. After all, Kisty said he wouldn't have anything to do with the military anymore at one point. I think this was during the Vietnam War, and he was the President's science advisor at one point, and Wiesner was, too. Well, those people were on the advisory committee for the ICBM, and I never had any problems with them at all. As a matter of fact, they were my good personal friends, and they were highly supportive of the ICBM program. collins: I guess there's two separate issues in there. One is just, as you put it, this kind of guilt issue, a kind of gut­ level response of the scientific community towards the military. The other one, I think, represented by Vannevar Bush, was the question of who were the best-trained people to manage some of the key elements of the military programs. Schriever: Yes. Vannevar Bush, I think, had a high degree of arrogance. But on the other hand, you take the Comptons--there were two Comptons, they were brothers--that did not apply. Merv Kelly of Bell Telephone Lab was another one who had quite a bit of arrogance in the way that he carried through with his activity. He was very active. Yet, at the same time, I would not criticize Vannevar Bush on balance in terms of his contributions to the military, nor will I criticize Merv Kelly for his contributions to the military. Yet he tried to get me to scrap the ICBM approach and go with a shorter range missile. I can remember meeting him in the Pentagon. I don't know why he ever did it because, hell, the damn decision had already been made that we were going to go with the ICBM and not with the intermediate range ballistic missile. His theory being that, well, that's too much in one bite. Let's take a shorter range missile first. That had certain merit, but that wouldn't do us any good from the u.s. point of view, so I don't know whether he had a hidden agenda there or not. On the other hand, I got the Bell Telephone Labs into the ICBM program. I had to twist their arms, but it wasn't because they were against the ICBM, they just didn't want to get involved. But I SCHRIEVER-35 got them involved in the guidance system for the Atlas program. Well, at any rate, scientists, they are very, very expert usually in a relatively narrow field.

[telephone interruption]

Collins: I think we've gone over that subject sufficiently. Let me turn the discussion a slightly different direction. One of the things that was fundamental in shaping the RAND enterprise, at least as you read some of the early documentation, is a notion that you alluded to earlier, and that's having free access to the most sensitive kinds of planning data, the best information that the intelligence community had to offer. I wonder how well that worked in practice with the RAND people, the quality of the kind of information that was provided to them, as well as the ability to provide appropriate information to all these other advisory inputs that you mentioned, whether it was in universities or in industry, and howJthat affected your ability to carry out an effective development planning activity?

Schriever: Well, the intelligence information was primarily useful to us in developing threat models. It was not really that useful in terms of, well, here's some technology that they've got that we haven't got. So therefore it really wasn't necessary for universities and so forth to really have much knowledge of intelligence, unless the intelligence related to something that appeared to be a technological capability that we didn't have, or what was it, and what will it do. And in those cases, I know in the Air Force we had the Technical Intelligence Office there at Wright Field, which later became the Foreign Technology Division under the systems command, but I worked with them very closely, didn't mention them earlier, during the time I had the Development Planning Office.

When I got out to the West Coast, because the ICBM was a new weapon system, the intelligence community didn't know too much about ICBMs and what the hell to look for, that we set up Project West Wing out on the West Coast which we funded through the technical intelligence operation at Wright Field. We funded a project called Project West Wing, where we actually staffed it with Ramo-Wooldridge people, where we did all the analysis of technical intelligence that we received by whatever sources about the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, that still functions. So there, we of course, did look at the technical intelligence to determine whether or not any of it had any--what was it, were they ahead of us, or what was it all about?

But generally speaking, intelligence is used for threat analysis, rather than for our learning something different, or something that we didn't know before. Now that, of course, is not true throughout the rest of the world, but we were looking at the Soviet Union primarily as a threat, and we wanted to know SCHRIEVER-36 what they were doing rather than get intelligence information that we could in turn use to apply to our own weapon system programs. I think that RAND, at all times, in my opinion, had an adequate access to intelligence to do what they had to do. I think our Development Planning Office had adequate access to intelligence. It wasn't easy to come by at first, but we got it. I think today it is so compartmented with the CIA, the DIA, the other agencies that are involved in black programs, that I'm not so sure that adequate intelligence is disseminated to even the Joint Chiefs. I'm just saying this as an opinion of mine, simply by observation, that we are getting enough assessment of intelligence to get threat information to enough people who ought to have it. In other words, the operational commanders, in my opinion, the six should have access to intelligence. They should have a small staff. I know SAC does, because they've been in business for a long time. I'm not so sure about other commands. But I've always had a concern about that. I know that they haven't had in many cases the kind of information available as to what information in fact we are getting, so that they can use it for operational planning, for example. That I think is being corrected. But that's a different subject, and it has to do with today, and not what happened years ago. collins: Right. This touches on a slightly more general question. For an organization like RAND, information, whether it's of the intelligence variety or just a thorough understanding of military planning positions and operations, requires that, to be able to do an effective job of analysis. I wonder in your judgement, during the time you had this very direct contact with RAND, the degree to which this information in its different varieties readily flowed into the RAND organization for making analysis? Schriever: Yes. RAND had created very effective interface with all the Air Force commands. They had SAC, TAC, Air Defense Command, and so forth. They didn't make studies in an ivory tower environment. They worked very closely with the operating commands in the studies that they made, so I don't think there was any gap there. Collins: Okay. Certainly not everyone in the Air Force supported-­ schriever: I might say that does not mean that the operational commands always agreed with RAND. Frequently, there were sharp disagreements I know, between SAC--and I can't give you examples right now, but I know there were sharp disagreements in some of the studies that RAND made that related to Strategic Air Command, but that isn't because they didn't have the interaction and close interface with the Command. They did. SAC just didn't like the SCHRIEVER-37 answers sometimes that came out. And I think that was true in TAC, too. But that's natural from this kind of business. Collins: One element that RAND worked very hard at was presenting the results of its work to the Air Force. I mean it had a number of different vehicles for presenting its research results--a variety of published forms and briefings. In some cases the briefings were presented to dozens of audiences in the Air Force on a particular research study, which seems to say something about how advisory input is made to the Air Force. I would assume say, for example, in the case of the Scientific Advisory Board, in many cases they would do a report or present a briefing. It would probably be just to the top Air Force brass, and they didn't go through, as RAND often did, a very elaborate presentation process. Why would that be required to bring an idea to the attention of the Air Force? schriever: Well, the SAB is a part-time operation and strictly advisory in nature, and it really is a body that reports to the chief of staff of the Air Force. And as a result, they don't put out a lot of reports; they put out reports in different ways. When I took over command of ARDC [Air Research and Development Command], I insisted that the Scientific Advisory Board be made available to assist me in running ARDC and then later AFSC [Air Force Systems Command]. I got agreement from the chief that I'd set up division advisory groups, DAGs, and I'd get a chairman of a division advisory group like the Space Division, like the Aeronautics Systems Division, like the Electronics systems Division, and so forth. They'd meet periodically, but they were always problem-oriented. In other words, when a major problem of some kind came about, they acted in an ad hoc way and brought their expertise to bear on the problem. It could be a technical problem, usually a technical problem of some kind that they had expertise in. They would prepare a report and submit it to the division commander. Of course, it was always important enough so that it would come to the attention of the commander of the systems command and also usually to the chief of staff, but it was a service that they provided to the working level in the systems command. Now they always do a summer study of some kind, usually on whatever subject that the chairman of the SAB and the chief of staff of the Air Force decide on, and they prepare a written report on that. RAND, on the other hand, was a full-time operating organization. They were, as I pointed out earlier, given independence in the selection of studies they did. So, as a result, while they interacted with the Air Force in doing those studies, they didn't get approval from the Air Force to make that study or some other study. They went ahead and did the study, and they developed a system of reports. I've forgotten what they called them now, but there were several different titles that SCHRIEVER-38 they used for the reports depending upon the maturity of the report, and whether it was a major report or just a minor report. Then they'd go around and brief--remember they were advisory in nature--and they'd brief the appropriate organizations in the Air Force at the operating level and the air staff. That's the way they operated. I think it was a satisfactory way of operating as far as I was concerned, looking back, on the part of RAND.

Collins: I'll think about that question a little bit more and perhaps phrase it in a slightly different way. I guess this is a good point to either go on for a few more minutes or stop at this point. What would you like to do? Schriever: Why don't we stop at this point, and let's see what more you want to do on this RAND thing. I recall now you wanted more information about RAND or my interaction with RAND or specifically what I don't know--early days of RAND. Collins: We can conclude the interview here. Thank you.