Davis '\.-'\-'- ~~~ /
NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE !1USEUM RAND CORPORATION
JOINT ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE HISTORY OF THE RAND CORPORATION
EDITORIAL USE FORM PREFACE
This ~anuscript is based upon a tape-recorded interview conducted by Mart~n I Call j ns on January I 7. 1991 The ~ape ~nd the manuscript are the property of the undersigned: however, ~he originals and copies are indefinitely deposited, respec"::..·:ely, at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Ins~itu~~~n and at the RAND corporation. I have read the transcript · and have ~ade only minor corrections and emendations. The reader is therefore asked to bear in mind that this manuscript is a record of a spoken c=nversation rather 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 t= place the condition as selected below upon the use of this interview material by others and I understand that the Smithsonian Institu~:..~n and the RAND Corporation will make reasonable efforts to enforce ~~e condition to the extent possible.
CONDIT~:!~S (Check c::e) PUBLIC. THE MATERIAL MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE TO AND MAY BE USED BY ANY PERSON FOR ANY LAWFUL PURPOSE. OPEN. This manuscript may be read and the tape heard by persons approved by the Smithsonian Institution or by the RAND Corporation. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any mea~~ ~his material except with the written permiss ~ · ;_ ::.f the Smithsonian or RAND. MY PERMISSION REQUIR.:..:..o...... ';.) QUC'TE, CITE OR REPRODUCE. This manuscript and the tape are open to examination as above. 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 in which permission I must join. Upon my death this interview becomes open. ·--"!'~
EDITORIAL USE FORM (CONT.)
MY PERMISSION REQUIRED FOR ACCESS. I must give writen permission before the manuscript or tape can be utilized other than by Smithsonian or RAND staff for official Smithsonian or RAND purposes. Also my permission is required to quote, cite or reproduce by any means. Upon my death the interview becomes open. &d.A~ (Signature) Mr. Robert A. Davis (Name, :::ed/) II L!_3. 91 (Dater' j Robert A. Davis January 17, 1991
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
1-2 Davis's family background, educational training, and early professional background 2-5 Davis recounts his hiring at RAND, and discusses his first responsibilities, early colleagues, and first project {the bomber defense missile for the B-52) 5-7 Davis discusses what he learned about RAND methods and approaches during his first project 7-8 Davis discusses the advisory role played by RAND in relation to the Air Force, and the effect RAND had on Air Force actions and relations 8-9 Davis describes the degree of involvement RAND's Economics and Cost Analysis Departments had in weapons development and procurement projects 10-11 Science Departments at RAND; Davis's work with the strategic analysts, especially Albert Wohlstetter; the SWEEP project; the bringing together of various professional skills at RAND
TAPE 1, SIDE 2
11-12 How RAND engineers felt about the non-technical people, and the division between the two groups; the role of personalities in dominating "communities" within RAND; the Life Magazine article featuring Roger Johnson and the ring-shaped wing; the role played by "experts" at RAND 13-15 The manned bomber project; the technical versus strategic implications approach to the manned bomber project; the contributions of Social Scientists and Strategic Analysts to this and other projects 15-17 Davis summarizes his discussions about his interactions with other elements at RAND, with an example; how the interaction of the various RAND groups formed a RAND culture 17-18 Davis describes his analysis of bombardment satellites project; ADO #38 18-20 The nature of RAND's interactions with the Air Force during the bombardment satellite project; sponsorship of the pr0ject--BMD or SAC, brief discussion of SWEEP and DASH {Development of Advanced Strategic Hardware) 20-21 RAND's role in helping the Air Force evaluate and develop requirements; General Flickinger and the "Worth of Man" symposium 21-22 Davis's views on RAND's concern about its mission, Force; the question, "What is RAND?" TAPE 2, SIDE 1
23-25 The exodus of engineers from RAND to Lockheed in order to get more "hands on" experience; Davis's views of this phenomenon 25-26 Davis's views on the surpassing of RAND in technical expertise by the aerospace contractors in the mid -fifties; the formation of the MITRE Corporation and this context 26-28 Davis's assessment of his most significant work at RAND-- The Dynasor project Interviewee: Dr. Robert A. Davis
Interviewer: Mr. Martin Collins
Date: January 17, 1991
Place: Dr. Davis home Woodland Hills, California
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
Mr. Collins: Just to get started, could you quickly sketch for me your family background and your early professional background, including where and when you were born and your educational training?
Dr. Davis: It's Rohert Arthur Davis, middle initial A, of course. I was born in Weehawken, New Jersey on June 15, 1926. I attended the Manhattan High School of Aviation Trades until 1942. I entered NYU (New York University) College of Engineering in 1943, and I accumulated bachelors, masters and doctors degrees in engineering science over the years. My doctoral thesis was on the downwash lag phenomenon connected with the Sparrow missile, which was a "cruciform" configuration and, I understand, was just successfully used i~ the Persian Gulf. So that makes me feel good.
Collins: Let me quickly ask where was your graduate training? Was it also done at NYU?
Davis: Yes. My graduate and undergraduate training was at NYU. When I graduated with my bachelors degree, World War II was just over, and there wer~ only two of us offered any jobs at the time. Both Grumman and NYU offered me a job. I accepted NYU's job. I was just as glad because it turned out that the Grumman job didn't last very lo;1g for the fellow who took it. There were only two of us in the class, as I say, who received offers I became a graduate assistant at NYU and went on from there to become an instructor in the College of Engineering, Department of Aeronautics. I began my masters studies at that time. My masters thesis was on supersonic duct analysis, flow through supersonic ducts and some theoretical methods that were being developed at the time. It was kind of fun, so that's what I did.
But meanwhile, I got interested in going out in industry, and I sent out job applications. By 1950 had improved tremendously. I got a lot of acceptances and decided to accept DAVIS-2
the offer from Sperry Gyroscope. It happened to be at home, and I was there for only a few months when they decided to ship me out to California to work at Point Mugu on the Sparrow project.
Douglas was a subcontractor to Sperry at the time. We had had a problem with this "cruciform" missile taking off and suddenly spinning up, and the boat tail would unscrew. It was very embarrassing. The whole thing would come apart. There were a couple of experts in the field arguing over the thing, and I took a look at the problem because we had to solve it. They only had to discuss it, but we had to solve it. I figured out what was wrong with the analysis and why the boat tail was coming off. It suddenly occurred to me that that demonstrated my understanding of the field, so I got that accepted as a doctoral thesis.
I finished my postgraduate studies for the doctoral degree at NYU and had a year of residency to fulfill, so Sperry very kindly shipped me back to New York to complete my thesis. I turned it in and defended it successfully, and it was published in the Journal of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences. The IAS was the predecessor to the AIAA {American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics} at the time. It later became the AIAA in other words.
While I was back east, the RAND Corporation did a very rare thing. They ran an ad in the New York Times for help. It looked like I could fulfill the responsibilities, so I responded to it. They called me up within a few days and said, "Please come on out for an interview." They paid my way out. I went out, and I was interviewed by Ed Williams and hired on the spot. I went back on the very same equipment that I had flown out on and told my wife, (I was married to my first wife at the time) that we were headed back to California, which was just as well.
So I came back to RAND and started working for them on July 8, 1955. I worked for RAND through April 13, 1962, which was a Friday, and started at Aerospace on April 16, 1962, continuing essentially my work for RAND, a point I'll touch on later.
Collins: Let me pi~k up a couple of points from your introductory remarks. Did the aeronautical faculty at NYU have reasonably close ties with what you might call the aerospace industry in that pa~t of the country?
Davis: Not that I was aware of. There might have been some casual contacts occasionally with people, but by and large it was pretty much an ingrown sort of thing. I don't recall anything, in other words. We had a wind tunnel there. It was able to do a marvelous sixty miles an hour, I recall. I had to run the wind tunnel there for a while. We accepted some jobs from people who came in and wanted to test the aerodynamics of signal towers and DAVIS-3 things of that sort. I had a picture of myself with one of those silly things some place around, but I can't find it. But no, as far as I know, there wasn't much intermingling with the field. I was interested in aerodynamics, not so much in strength and materials, that sort of thing, structures. One of my fellow instructors, however was striving to become a renowned expert in that particular end of things and I was aware that there was an awful lot of competition going on there between experts in various fields, but that was the extent of the interaction. There would be an expert working for a company and an expert working at NYU, and they'd either cooperate or they'd argue. I think that was the nature of it. At the time, I don't recall that the aerospace industry was making a heck of a lot of use of NYU, as such. But that certainly wasn't true as far as NACA {National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics} was concerned.
Collins: I'm curious. Who was your thesis advisor, if you recall?
Davis: Dr. Gordon Strom, who just recently passed on. His middle name was Haaxon. I believe he passed on within the last year.
Collins: How receptive was he to your doing a thesis subject on something like the Sparrow missile at a time when missiles were a relatively new applied interest in aeronautical engineering? Was he receptive to it, or did he think it was a little harebrained?
Davis: No. As a matter of fact, there was more of a personal benevolence there. He was a very wonderful guy in many ways. He ran the wind tunnel; this was an aerodynamic problem I was coming up with. He had no compunction about working with missiles per se. Any sort of aerodynamic shape or problem, that sort of thing, interested him.
Collins: What was it about the RAND ad that attracted you and made you say, 11 I wa·:1t to apply for this position? 11 It sounds like you had the opportunity to go back to Sperry if you wanted to.
Davis: Oh, yes, I could have stayed at Sperry, and as a matter of fact, after I came to work for RAND, I got a call from Sperry to come back to wor1c for them. They were setting up some new facilities someplace. I told them no, I was very happy at RAND. But what it was in particular about the ad, I don't know it just looked good. It clicked. I saw the things at RAND Corporation, Santa Monica looking for what--aerodynamicists or whatever and all of a sudden her.-a was an outfit in California advertising back in New York City, by gosh, for someone to come out. I mentioned that I had filed applications all over the place, including Lockheed, early on in 1950. I had gotten an offer from Lockheed. I'd gotten an offer from several outfits out here, and all over DAVIS-4 the country. I could have moved out to California then, but I chose not to for one reason or another. I don't know why. But that ad, when it appeared in the Times, just spoke to me, let's put it that way. It hit me at the right psychological moment and it looked like I could fulfill it. It was a good way to get back out to California when I finished everything up and I was just interested to see if I'd qualify. Well, apparently I did.
Collins: Do you recall that meeting in which you went out and interviewed for the position and what you learned that you'd be walking into if you went to work for this organization?
Davis: Well, in terms of what I learned I'd be walking into, I don't really recall that too much was explained to me at the time. I was more interested in selling myself than in having RAND sell itself to me, I'm afraid. I did not really learn what the RAND Corporation was all about until after I had gotten into it. I had the same experience with the Aerospace Corporation. Aerospace eventually used me to explain to newcomers what it was they'd gotten into. It takes one to know one.
At the time, looking back on it now, it seems to me that RAND was still finding its way in many ways. I don't recall that rather brief interview that I went through covering too much at all of the sorts of things that RAND actually was doing. That I didn't really find out about that until after I'd come to work for RAND.
Collins: Did you h~ve some waiting period to get a clearance before you got going there? Or did you have one already when you worked for Sperry?
Davis: You know, I don't really recall. I probably did have a waiting period. They usually take some time, and that was one thing that was a little bit different with RAND because of the nature of the work that they were doing which went beyond the top secret categories. That didn't become evident to me until later, so I just merely ac=epted it. There had to be a waiting period, just because of the paper work problem I'd had to go through. You just don't fill out the forms and all that sort of thing and have them come in. I had a flock of those forms up until about a year or so ago. I guess I got rid of all of them things that I've filled out, you know, previous education and employment addresses and all that sort of thing. They would have had to check that out and I think I might have gotten a provisional clearance and then a full clearance for whatever. In my case, "whatever" was still being decided, so it didn't make too much difference to me.
Collins: Let's talk about you first responsibilities there, who you were working with, and what the projects were that you were involved in. DAVIS-5
Davis: Well, the first thing they put me to work on was a bomber defense missile. This was an idea somebody had for launching a defensive missile from the rear of a B-52 to counter interceptors that would come up. The big problem was that if you fired something toward the rear and you were going forward, didn't that mean it would go through a period when the velocity relative to the air would be zero? And the region around that time, wouldn't it just plain fall? You'd have a terrible time. It seems to me that. I was put on that to try to investigate a whole flock of aspects of it just of see if it, made sense or not. There was a fellow in upstate Nf~W York--I 'm trying to remember the name of the university, it might have been the University of Rochester but I 1 m not sure--wl.lo at the time actually did get some tests conducted, groundtests in which they went on a rail and fired the thing backwards and the darn missile worked just fine. It's almost as if, afterwards, the missile said, 11 0h, did I really go backwards?" It had zero effect.
Collins: It sounds like a straightforward problem in Newtonian dynamics.
Davis: That's right but there were always the arguments back and forth. But RAND was asked to look into it, and I wound up having to face into it. Later on ·there was an exercise at RAND in which we were to look at various penetration aids, including decoys, as well as bomber defense missiles. By that time the bomber defense missile project had gotten enough interest so that Raytheon was in charge of it. They'd won the contract to build one. Ivan Getting was at Raytheon at the time, and all of a sudden a request came into RAND from the Air Force, "Would you please rank all the penetration aids in order of what RAND thinks their value might be in an attack?" As I recall, the gaming had been done at RAND to see what would happen, with hypothetical raids using red and blue forces. It fell to my hand I don't know why they always picked me to do the3e nasty jobs--to write the assessment up and send it in to the commanding general, gee I can't remember his name right now.
Collins: Would this have been somebody in SAC (Strategic Air Command)?
Davis: It was back at Headquarters Air Force. Maybe the name will come to me in a while but I haven't thought about this for years. But as I recall, I had to rank them all, and the bomber defense missile fell down at the bottom of the list. I had to give all of the reasons why. The decoys really looked very good at least theoretically. Everything was theoretical. As I recall, Ivan Getting had to come down to see the general about it and he was thoroughly miffed about the thing. I thought it was rather interesting ·that but later on, he and I had to work together. He gave me promotions personally and all that sort of thing and patted me on the head and things like that, later on. DAVIS-6
So I must say, Ivan Getting was evidently not a man to hold a grudge. But I doubt that the failure of that project ever really sat well with him. It couldn't have.
Collins: What grou? were you working with in RAND on these studies?
Davis: This was the Engineering Divison and i think it would have been-- I was looking for an organization chart that I had. I'm sure I didn;t throw it out, but I can't find it right now--I believe it was called Systems Operations. I haven't thought about that penetration aid thing for quite sometime.
Collins: Was Jim Digby heading up that group of people?
Davis: Yes, I beli:ve so. Wait a minute, I think Jim came in a little bit later.
Collins: Well, we can always fill this in later.
Davis: This would have been before Sputnik. I can use that as a "dawn of a new age•u type thing. It 1 s either AS or BS, after Sputnik or before s :;mtnik. Let 1 s see, I don 1 t know what I can add to that. Oh yes, one thing. There was in a recent addition of the Los Angeles Times an article written by one of the current vice presidents, I ilnderstand of RAND. A Mike Rich. Does that make any sense?
Collins: I know his name, yes.
Davis: Okay great. Well he's got an article in the Los Angeles Times about RAND and how it went through advising the government what to do on the development of new projects and I thought it was accurate. right down the line. I said Great, at least something's been p~eserved about what RAND finally learned to do and how to do it."
Incidently, RAND was set up to look into these sorts of things and give some advice. That's fine to tell a group of people to do that, but more importantly, almost, is to tell them how to do it so as to have the desired effect. You've got to persuade somebody in terms that they can use to combat others who would want them to spend a lot of money and take a Congressman or various lobbyists to vote the money to do this,to do that rather than taking what we thought was a more intelligent approach to the development of things. Mainly, fly before you buy. Take it for a couple of runs around the block. Invent the way to get into it. Develop an understanding of your problems step by step as you go along. Look into the fundamentals and see if you got the right technology in the first place. Don't get surprised. Leave your options open. RAND was always great. I DAVIS-7
learned so darn much at RAND myself about development planning that I was able to pass a lot on to the gang at Aerospace later on. But it began with that particular thing.
Collins: Several threads come out of that response. You mention the substantive issue of examining the details, but in the case of RAND,there•s the equally important problem, if you will of being able to communicate what you've done in research. What did you pick up and learn as you went along about RAND methods and approaches in this respect?
Davis: Well, for ohe thing, I learned that you had to take a look at the fundame~tals and actually game the whole thing out. There were some of us who had a little joke we'd pass on. We'd say, "It's okay to cheat and look at the answers at the back of the book." In other words, do a dry run. Play the game out. Try to uncover a bunch of surprises. Don't inadvertently foreclose on your f~ture options. Build a little forgiveness into what you build because nobody's perfect. I used to add was an old line there, "Nobody's perfect that's why they put rubber mats around cuspidors." Nevertheless, it's a little expensive to find out later that you made a mistake you could have anticipated in the beginning and guarded against, worked around, accommodated in some way. I think NASA's going through the very same thing with their space station. That's another story. I don't want to get too much into that, although I got rubbed into an awful lot of it with the AIAA;.
Collins: Your story about the defense missile for the B-52, I think, brings out an interesting element of what we're talking about here and that, is that you can put together a cogent argument of why you should do one thing or another, or methods for doing things one way or another. But in the big world out there with the Air Force and the contractors, you've got sets of economic and political relationships that are always in place and obviously this new information doesn't always fit well into that world. You mention the example of Raytheon with respect to that missile. How did you find the advisory activity in relationship to making a reasonable inroad into these existing relationships that were usually, probably, fairly resistant to change?
Davis: I can't speak for RAND as a whole, but my experience at RAND was that I found that rather easy. RAND was being set aside almost on top of the mountain, whereas everybody else was fighting around the base, and every so often a pilgrim would work their way up to the top of the mountain to ask RAND," What is the meaning of life?" We were in that exalted position, that's one way to put it. It seems to me now, as I look back at it,that I always felt very comfortable going back. Later on I'll give you an example about the bombs and orbitable bombardment satellite project. I found it not only easy to communicate, but the Air Force was actively ~ooperative in pursuing that particular thing. DAVIS-8
Similarly with the Dynasoar program. So we got a good reputation, I believe in most Air Force circles, if not all of them. We got a good reputation for being objective observers who had the good of the Air Force, let's put it that way, or the good of the United States in our hearts. We were friends. We were not hamstrung by the profit motive. Yes, we had our views to sell, and we felt very proud about them. And we naturally had a certain self-adherence for that reason. What the heck we're all human, but in other words we didn't have the same sorts of things driving us that the contractors did, namely the need to make a buck. That particular experience was extremely invaluable to me at Aerospace because Aerospace had a very similar problem in educating its people about what Aerospace was about. There was a lot of similarity.
Collins: In talking about building up a how to establish methods of appropriately developing and procuring weapon systems, to what degree did you work with the people, say, in the Economic and Cost Analysis Departments in RAND, which were also very much concerned with those kinds of issues?
Davis: When we'd get enough together so that the, should I use the word, the "cost weenies" could go to work on the thing, great, we'd give it to them. But normally, and this again was reflected in the experience at Aerospace where some of the cost people from RAND came to work, you needed to have so much detail available that you ~ould have achieved an awful lot of answers as to the overall feasibility or the desirability of a particular weapon system or whatever, without having to go with that much detail. You could get an order of magnitude estimate as to what things might cost, ~hich was, as we used to say, close enough for government work at the time. We weren't down to the details of saying one guidance system versus another guidance system. It was the overall approach and never mind the amount of money involved but could you do it at all? Was it physically or techically feasible? Those were the sorts of things, did it make sense? Were there easy things that the enemy could do to put you out of commission regardless of what you'd spent on it? And if you had to spend umpteen billion dollars in addition, that was still a further reason you'd never get there.
I think this was the sort of thing that went through people's minds, and just ranking things. I learned how to do some ranking at RAND, which I later used for the AIAA and the National Research Council and others, in ranking space technology that they ought to pursue and knowing what sort of arguments and economics rarely ever entered into these things.
Collins: In the period we're talking about?
Davis: Well, either in the period or even later, for that matter. Economics enters into it, as I learned by working DAVIS-9 closely with the cost analysts at Aerospace, where there were very, very elaborate cost models that were developed. Evolved is a more accurate word there, over the years, and in every case it was the question of how well you could define--how minutely you could define, let's put it that way--the particular concept and so that they would find out the long poles of the economic tent, the ones that would really get you. But if you just said,"Listen I want to put up a bombardment satellite system," for example" it was awfully simple, and I gave some illustrations of this sort of thing later on you could estimate roughly the cost per pound of a satellite. Maybe it was $10,000 maybe it was $30,000 a pound. It depended on what kind of launching system you had. Then you'd be able to figure out what sort of benefits you'd get, or multiply by the numbers, or figure out how many you'd need. You'd be able to get a rough estimate of what it would cost. We used to have a small joke that went around that said, and I used this later at Aerospace--if a certain cost figure looked very big, you could always make it look a lot smaller by finding a suitably large deno~inator by which to divide it. For example, if you cost the strategic defense initiative system, you imagine it's going to cost you 300 billion dollars. That sounds like a lot of money one-third of a trillion or so. For step number one, divide by the number of people that it's going to protect. There are 250 million in the United States alone and maybe another 250 million,elsewhere well that's a half a billion right there. So you've got half a billion, maybe It's what $600 apiece. Is that so much? Compare that with how much we spend, and the figures are available, on alcohol, on cigarettes, on automobiles, on gasoline and all that sort of thing, and you begin to put it into perspective. That 3rgument has never failed to have a telling effect on an audience when they started to see how easily these things can be manipulated.
So again, we c•::>me back to the whole idea of costing and how closely we worked with the economics people. The ecnomics people, at that stage of the game at RAND, were, I would say, just feeling their way and beginning to wake up what was involved. I don't believe it until, I would say, the 1980 1 a that cost community really began to get its act together,particularly with the aid of computers. They got lot of experience and made mistakes and finally really began to come up with trustworthy, very useful sorts of economic analyses. You'd still check it out, just as you run dow~ a list od figures with your eye to see if the numbers add up. that's reasonable so you'd at leasde avoid any gross errors. So therefore, I'm saying in retrospect, I can understand why we :r·:1rely had saying in retrospect, I can understand why we rarely had much to do with them.
Collins: That suggest an aditional question of what was the character of the projects that you worked on? And what was the character of your interaction with the other departments within RAND, especially the so-called social sciences--economics, cost DAVIS-10
analysis, and political science?
Davis: Mostly through upper levels, but at a working level, very little indeed. We were on the technical end, the social scientists were someplace else and it was like there were two corporations, Corporation A and Corporation B, and neither A nor B liked each other. The social scientists eventually took over from the technical types, I found out later and on things changed. The whole character of RAND changed from being a technical evaluation group. It's like what I like to say about France: there are two countries in France. Country A which is Paris and there's Country B, which is the rest of France. They hate each other.
Collins: So when you say that interaction took place at higher levels,did you just. mean like department heads getting together or did you mean som~thing differently?
Davis: Slightly different. Yes, Albert Wohlstetter for example. I was involved in a project, I can't remember the details of it right offhand, with Albert Wohlstetter, who was the time one of the leading strategic analysts in the United States His wife, actually, was more active than he was. She served on some committees later on. I'm having to really dredge up memories, but I there were a couple of analyses I seem to recall. I worked with Jay Wakeley and Claude Culp--I'm trying to put some of that stuff together right now and I don't really recall too much of it. Herman Kahn, I remember, was part and parcel because Jim Digby was involved · Digby can fill you in on some of the details.
There was a triumvirate of Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, and Jim Digby, the go-between who managed to get a successful working group out of the triumvirate. God bless him! Herman had his own view of life and it was wonderful. He was full of fun. I liked him very much. But Albert was very lofty about the whole thing and tended to· look down his nose at a lot of things and openly scoffed at anybody who was not in his particular field. I think this rankled .quite a few people and gave Herman quite a laugh. I'm trying to remember what the heck was the particular project was that Jay, Claude and I were working on at the time. I might have to go back. I don't know if I can rouse it.
But the strategic analysts were the closest things we had to social scientists a~ the time, I would say.
Collins: Wohlstetter was a logician and economist by training and sat in the Economics Department. What I have here--Maybe this is something you produced. I have a document from the RAND B Series which is an index of Engineering Division publications and one of the projects that lists the names you were talking about, Culp, yourself,and Wakeley,was "The Strategic Weapons Employment Placement Project." DAVIS-11
Davis: Sweep--good ' lord, don't press me on the details of that one All I know is that the three of us, Wakeley, Culp, and I, became close buddies. That's why Jay Wakeley signed my going away card and gave us that wedding gift. I can't recall all of the details of that SWEEP Project. I guess you'd have to get hold of Claude or Jay, really, or Jim Digby, for that matter. Look at the D if you can. Will they allow you to look that stuff over?
Collins: Yes.
Davis: Oh, good. Fine that'll take care of it. Let's put it this way, predence thatwe take into appropriate account whatever the leader of the porject in this case, Albert Wohlstetter had to say. We were caught between Wohlstetter and Khan, but fortunately Jim Digby had a shoulder we could cry on. Jim is just an absolutely fabulous guy at making things work together. Ah, yes. Good Lord. I'd really have to dredge dep memory to come up with the things we did in that SWEEP project. I haven't thought of it until now.
Collins: I'm interested in the general characterization of your interaction with pe·:>ple like Albert, where there was interest on the part of the corporation in bringing together these different sets of professional skills.
Davis: Usually we'd have to keep in mind what the latest cult offering of the strategic analysts and sociologists, was for example, the" Escalation Ladder." You had to get the jargon right, whatever it 'neant. "Preemptive strikes" and all that. You had to learn what to say and when to say it. "Drawing down" was another. There was a whole list of things that you had to use in the appropriate context, and you had to take into account the fact that aha! We'd think through what Albert might say at this,point and would interrupt, and could we create a diversion to finish the sentence. You know, that sort of thing. All in all, we had a very good time working our way around this, but these were somewhat ethereal heights of discussion.
TAPE 1, SIDE 2
Collins: It sounds like there were a fair number of people on the engineering side of the house who had the same feelings that you did about their colleagues on the other side of the house as you put it. Is the a fair perception?
Davis: Well, to a ~ertain extent it is fair? At least I mingled with those who had those feelings. But we were aware, Nan (Davis) and I were discussing it before, of some people in the Engineering Divisio~ who had their own world. Note that she's nodding her head vigorously. I don't want to mention too many DAVIS-12 names right now, but there were a lot of little communities; occupied by a single person, so to speak, from whom you couldn't get much cooperatio~. That's one of the technical things because they had their own little thing to sell and that was it. Well, I will mention one name: Roger Johnson. This is a good reference because h~ had this ring-wing concept. All right with that little lead in, Nan's going to the kitchen now to pull in her memorabilia here. you may have seen this. This was a Life Magazine article, and here is Ring-Wing Johnson as he known. (don't have citation for article). This article came out in the middle of my stay at RAND, and Nan's too, just about. But that's a good example. There were a couple of others protrayed in thay article, and you'll see what they were working on, for example, Al Lang with his experiental work. RAND encourged us to individual sorts of things and bring them up. Well, when you encourage that, you're encouraging individuality, as opposed, I'm afraid, to teamwork. Some of us had to work on teams together and learn how to trade ·things off, but it worked out. There was a variety of people.
Our feeling, I would say--Jim Digby, I think, would have a better, more generous view--but our feeling about some of the nontechnical types was that becuase they were nontechnical, perhaps, they had to defend themselves automatically against this. Traditionally awesome" technicall expertise." An expert. Well, you know, an ·~xpert is an expert is an expert. I don't know what the heck that really mean, but it's the usual things you run into in academic ci~cles.
Collins:In your refc~rence to pockets of communities, were you referring mostly to within engineering or around the corporation generally?
Davis: I mean within the corporation generally yes.
Collins: I'm interested,in names butunless if you feel uncomfortable namin~ names.But names are always helpful to just give me a picture of the landscape then, as you saw it, in terms of these different interests or subcultures within RAND.
Davis: I think that Life article actually will help considerably because it will name names and with pictures. Some of the guys were very insistent on pursuing their own thing.
At one point, for example, another project I was tied up with was to evaluate why we had to have manned bombers. Why couldn't we just us9 missiles? What did the humans ever contribute? Let me cut to the chase here and say that it began to get down to a point where we were beginning to think that the only thing that a human could contribute in the cockpit of a bomber was the facility of recognition being able to recognize things. So I had to go into some detail about the whole DAVIS-13 phenomenon of recogilition. How does one recognize something? Can you have a computer recognize something? Well, maybe it seems obvious now.You have certain identifying characteristics, is it black or white or blue, or does it have a curled edge, or whatever. Certain characteristics you can describe and quantify. Maybe these days, well if you can teach a computer to play chess, why not? I'd hate like heck to get involved with the artificial intelligence types because that'r still another community. Anybody who reads the book Chaos can find out in a hurry how many little divisions you can get into trouble with within a particular community and not even being a member of it. So we had to deal with a variety of interests. They weren't necessarily bad, but at one point with that manned bomber thing, I had thrust upon me a guy whom ~y boss, Ben Rumph, hired. He was a very wonderful boss but ~e felt that I needed a human factors expert to work for me. Ben knew as well as I did that nobody could really put their arms around this damned issue. But somehow, in the innocence of a lot of technical experts who believe, Oh man, that's an expert in human factors, therefore he should know everything about what goes on. What is the soul? What is the soul? Ah, we' 11 as~c him! That's how naive some of these things -anyway.AThis was in discussions on the B-2 bomber and whether it was worthwhile building the darn thing. We just couldn't simply make a case for or against the man onboard. This is in contrast, by the way, to late~ years in the military when the Manned Orbiting Laboratory went up and there was a logical argument which was later dev i ~loped by the Air Force. The Air Force did not have this logical argument to begin with, with the manned bomber. They said other things like," Bombers are meant to be manned. We don't like these here missiles." That sort of a thing. That was sort of a cultural problem within the Air Force that you had to deal with. It's like a religion, and you want to be darned careful w ~·:lenever you mix with somebody on a question which is religious Ln nature. So we had to treat them with the negative respect one accords lightning and tigers in this particular regard.
Later on the a :::-gument came up with the Manned Orbiting Laboratory
You can check with Sam Tennant, who is the president of Aerospace now, he used to love to tell that story about how people would say, ~Now suppose the men in the Manned Orbiting Laboratory get ill?" The answer was, well, we've got a machine to back them up. And, bingo, let's leave him out and we'll just count on the machine in the first place. It's a lot cheaper. After a while people caught on to that and it became very, very difficult to work up an intelligent argument, except of course
1Gleick, James. Chaos, Maing a New Science, Viking 1987 l,
DAVIS-14 with those off in the corner who still say," Oh, our destiny is to go out in space. It's a religious sort of a thing, a cult. I had to deal with a lot of that later on with the AIAA workshops that I had to run on the future of the civil space program.
Collins: Going bac:< to the manned bomber issue at RAND and what would go into an analysis of that problem, I would be interested in how you approached it. Part of the analysis, it seems, would be, what kind of mission are we talking about for this manned bomber? What function is it serving in Air Force strategy? Did those kinds of ques·::ions serve as background for what you were trying to do, or was it much more technically oriented, as opposed to a consideration of the strategic implications?
I think it was in a sense, fifty-fifty. The strategic implications were, what would you do? What about a surprise target? Something ·that came up there on very short notice, and you had to go out and bomb the thing, and you were lacking adequate information and had to depend upon the wonderful facility we as humans possess. Right, right, right, right, everybody agrees, right. they won't deny it, for pity sake, but you can recognize things and deal with them. Recognize and deal with surprises. The unexpected. Ah, wonderful. That's akin to the idea of building in some forgiveness. You put a man up there because we can repair the satellite and make up for the errors. It builds forgiveness into the thing. So it was that sort of argument. But when we try to get down and actually hypothesize credible circumstances under which you would want to use the man, we had to get into certain details like, what's the minimal size of an object that can be recognized? Like, for example, when does print get too small to read without a magnifying glass? That's a practical version of that in everyday terms. Can you recognize this thing? What are the characteristics you would look for? Once again, there was the idea of recognition.
Well, I think there's probably a RAND D which deals with this. We had to write some sort of report. But it seems to me that that particular project was never adequately discharged. It kind of got left up in the air because on the technical side, if you tried to hold things off at arms length and be abstract about it, you really couldn't muster many people, in the way of technical expertise, who really knew what in the hell they were talking about when it came to human beings and what human beings can do. Whereas you could certainly get yourself involved in an awful lot of cultural arguments, shall I say. And you'd be warned ahead of tim.a, in various unmistakable ways, that you were about to brief somebody who was a staunch advocate. That's why he joined the Air Force in the first place. Now he's a general or whatever. So it became difficult, and I'm afraid the social scientists and strategic analysts were not very good. We can only hypothesize certain situations, but we couldn't really make an argument which said, "hey, listen, you really had to have a DAVIS-15 man aboard." A man was absolutely essential. So the Air Force went both ways. Missiles on the one hand and manned bombers on the other.
Collins: Clearly the Air Force had already made the decision to develop the ICBM (Eintercontinental ballistic missile) force before you came to RAND, so what was the value of the study at that point? Did you end up reaching some set of conclusions that you then briefed to the Air Force?
Davis: I can't recall exactly what developed out of that whole project at the time. Nothing really comes to mind that's worth remembering. Let's put it that way. I think we did our best at the time to come up : with some sort of analysis, but my memory tells me that we didn't really come up with anything convincing to anybody.
Collins: Just to summerize your discussions about interactions with other elements at RAND. Most of the time, most of the projects that you worked on were pretty much within the Engineering Department and did not involve interaction with other groups. Is that true?
Davis: To a large extent, let me put it that way, that's true. There were inevitable intractions with the strategic analysts, the sociologists, the economics types. The computer gang we certainly worked with, and I can cite you an example there. I almost had his name. I have to tell you a little story there.
Collins: Are you thinking of Willis Ware?
Davis: Close but no cigar. I'm thinking of a young fellow who used to ride his bike to work. His first name's was Barry Boehm . He worked for me on this particular project, which I '11 tell you about it and all of a sudden I was not surprised later on to find out, he became an executive at TRW. He was young fellow and we had a passing relationship which tested. He remembered me because I really appreciated what he had to do. That was a very strJng interaction. It had to do with the questions about the:--I can go into the details of the project and what it led to, which I think is another good example, along with Dynasoar, of action: something following something through from concept, past all the cultural problems into some action. Anyway, in this particular case, as far as the interaction was concerned, it was very close interaction with the computertypes at the time. Computers were a lot more primitive,as you can imagine. They were oig.
2 Barry Boehm! DAVIS-16 Collins: In some of the material that's been written about RAND up to this point, a good deal is made of the RAND culture, much of it revolving around the strategic analysts and things that went on at lunch time, working out on the patio and that sort of thing. Is that a r!~asonable characterization of what some people were doing? Is it .:;omething that you ever involved yourself in at all? ·
Davis: Peripherally at most. There's a picture in there of Albert Wohlstetter with his entourage around him including Harry- what's his name--who later became president of RAND.
Collins: Harry Rowen.
Davis: Harry Rowen! Thank you very much. I believe Harry was a mistake, but that's another story. There was a certain amount of interaction at the time, but everybody was learning how to get along with everybody else in those years, as the implications of various technical advances, if they can be called that, came to be appreciated. I'll tell you, the ones who I appreciated most in this particular regard were the ones who did the war gaming, because they were the ones who were really at the forefront of testing ideas out ih a practical context. They were at least trying to simulate 'N'hat it would be like to actually employ the object you had in mind. I incorporated this into my analysis of the bombardment sat.ellite, my notion which I'd like to tell you a little bit about.
Collins: Why don't we move into that then.
Davis: Good. The idea is that after Sputnik went up, there was a lot of commotion ~bout the possibility using satellites to deliver nuclear weapons. Is that a new way to deliver them? It's part of a big high altitude missile of sorts. Just imagine these nuclear weapo::1s orbiting overhead. that was a very scary thing, to begin with. Did it make any sense?
We had some estimates of how accurately these things could be delivered, the guidance systems on board and and how we would uset them. We figured, all right, now suppose we had a force of these up there. I'm. covering very rapidly months and months of work trying to figure things out. But essentially what we said, suppose we did have. a retaliatory capability in orbit. This would require a ce,rtian number of warheads to assure a 90 percent probability of kill. You would have to have enough of them so that a sufficient number would be in position, once you pressed the button, that they would strike. If you needed to hit one thousand targets, you would have to have several times. One thousand number of warheads up in orbit, because a lot of them would be on the wrong side of the earth at the time you needed them, and it would take perhaps too long for them to come around into position. Thinking still has to go forward, but DAVIS-17 nevertheless that's the way some of us, including Barry thought. We put that sort of, a system together and pretended that we were being attacked and we had to retaliate. How many warheads would it have taken? And then we figured out what the weights of the warheads would be, what the weight of the whole satellite would be, and the guidance requirements. How many launches on our part successful launches, by the way, would it take? I think I at least touched on ths idea of satellite maintenance. We wouldn't be launching them a~d using them immediately. They'd be up there for some untold length of time. Things get old in orbit. You have to go up and make repairs. You have to inspect them to see that they haven't been tampered with. Oh ho, what? Yes, that's right. We had to point out that things like this would inspire others to take countermeasures, including going up and taking a look at them. That . idea persisted in terms of having to remind people of possible countermeasures, including satellite inspectors and things of that sort.
Anyway, we put the whole thing together, and there was a lot of support for that sort of thing, an extension right away of strategic Air Command into space. I had to go up and brief SAC on what was going on with the study in the first place, and I had some general in the beginning say to me, "Well, what I really want to have is a satellite that will hover over the North Pole." Now, that gave me my first big lesson in how you gently inform the Pharaoh, God, Moses, whoever, that boy is he ever dumb, and he's made a serious mistake, and he's being laughed at in the back of the room and how to correct it so that he comes along. Well, I'm not saying how I handled it, but evidently things went along very well.
Speaking of the interaction I finally came up with a briefing on the thing, and by that time I had made several friends back in Washington on the Air Staff. I called back and said--it was an unclassified phone call, I might add--that I was ready to come back and give a briefing, but that I usually liked to brief for action. These last charts should say,'' Here's what we want you to do, ~nd we could hit first. Sir, here's what we want you to do by, ,~osh. The first chart, we could let you hint at it, and that sort of thing. I was advised about something I never knew existed, something called advanced development objectives. To make a long story short, I wrote up something called ADO (Advanced Development Objective) #38. You may find some of that in the RAND library/archives.
Collins: Were ADOs . ~ir Force document or RAND documents?
Davis: They're really Air Force documents, but I'm not sure what's available thare. The ADO 38 led to an actual study project on the part of the Air Force. This had to be something which was developed around 1962. It came to a head around 1962, because when I left RAND and went to work at Aerospace, the very DAVIS-18 first day I showed up at Aerospace, which was April 16, 1962, I was told to please go directly to work. I had to go to a meeting which was the first meeting of its kind on ADO 38 because it was being implemented. And one of the first things they wanted to do was check out all the calculations that we had done at RAND, and I seemed like the ideal person at the time. I was never given an indoctrination briefing of any sort at Aerospace. I was just thrown into the heap right away. They figured, well, I didn't need it. Maybe that's because I came from RAND, because I was hired into Aerospace by Ed Barlow who used to be in charge of the Engineering Divisio:1 at RAND. Ed knew me very well and told me that--! was very complimented by this--he said to me, "Bob, you were one of the few people at RAND who ever accomplished anything." I think, if you haven't talked to Ed Barlow you should.
Collins: I have.
Davis: Good. He was on the Board of Trustees at Aerospace too, I think. I'm not sure, maybe not.
Collins: As you were going through the study, what was the nature of your contact with the Air Force? Was it a situation in which you can across an interesting question, or the Air Force raised it and you Wt~nt off and worked on it for a while and came back when it was mostly done? Or was there a series of interactions?
Davis: There was a series of interactions. One thing I would say, on some of these projects we tried to limit the amount of time we devoted to them because we had a waiting lists of projects. So we trit~d to get some sort of definitive answer, close enough for government work, so to speak, in that stage of the game, so as to 1nake an intelligent sort of decision on what to do next. Therefore I might have worked on it for as long as a year, I don't know. I suspect it was less than that. But we did brief--well, as I say I was interacting with people from SAC at various levels. Some of them would come to me and others I would go to, depending upon the circumstances.
Collins: So this w~s a SAC-sponsored study and not something sponsored by the Bailistic Missiles Division?
Davis: As far as I can recall, that's right. It was early on, and as I say, the question of who was going to run the space program in the Air Force was up in the air. As you know, as later history proves, it's only recently now that SpaceCom itself--even given :.hat it's been in existence now for several years, since twenty years after the time we're talking about right now, it didn'~ come into existence until the early eighties--it only now acquired control over Vandenberg. I'd have DAVIS-19 to look up it the details again Air Force Base but the thing moved with glacial celerity, I believe, is the phrase. The ballistic missile guys were off in their own world, which I had to interact with later on when some of them were given to me to run, and I spent pa:ct of my time commuting out to San Bernadino for the Aerospace Corporation, and in the process getting a snoot full of what that m•)de of thought involved. The ballistic missile guys, at RAND at the time, we were starting to talk about mobile missiles. Bill Graham at RAND was a guy who had an idea for a Midgetman, which is what he called it at the time, instead of Minuteman. But they were talking about really small missiles which could deliver a useful, if that's a good word to use, nuclear payload or be transported around on rails. Those ideas kicked around for an awfully long time, always rising and falling and continuing the same sorts of analyses over and over again until it got boring, boring, boring. But nobody was ever tremendously convin'=:ed. There were practical problems involved, of course, but I don't want to go into too much detail. But as far as ballistic missiles were concerned, satellites, no it was really the Strategic Air Command. Now that we're bavk to talking about SWEEP, something does come back to me. How could I have forgotten?
I wanted to finish talking about the bombardment satellite issue and ADO 38. Fortunately they got the idea through their thick heads, if I c~n use that phrase, that it wasn't a good idea when they began to •vrap their arms around it and found they couldn't get their arms around the whole problem. You can just imagine the difficulties they would get into. You didn't need any numerical analyses to really get the feel of it. Well, the only numerical analysis you might need is very rough order sort of a thing. It's like the expectation of failure calculations one does with the shuttle. What's the reasonable expectation of a shuttle failure and how many Challenger type disasters are you going to run through? That sort of thing, if you believe in probability theory.
It seems to me, if I can go back to the SWEEP issue right now, that we had--well, let me put it this way. I have to sort some things out in my head because I got involved in an awful lot of what turned out to be top level studies of a similar nature at Aerospace when the Air Force set up their mission analysis facility over in Inglewood. That was in the early sixties '68 or 69.I'm trying to sort out in my mind what sorts of things we did on SWEEP that were similar to those sorts of things that we would do on some of those-mission analyses. I don't want to get those two confused because we're talking about RAND.I'd like to check into it and make sure that was the particular thing. I know at one point after I left RAND for Aerospace we did have to worry an awful lot about the targeting put into our missile force. At one point, I know, I was taken down to the NMCC, National Military Command and Control Center, to look at what the president would DAVIS-20 be looking at in the event of an atomic war, and I was dismayed at how crude the displays were. Some of them were sort of like old-fashioned airport displays of timing. You still see it, some of the things flick around like that, nobody had a really clear cut idea. You were trying to make several service work together and pool their information and things were still in a primitive state. No, I'm beginning to think I'm confusing some things with what we did at Aerospace. So I want to stay away from that.
Collins: Once you see the transcript, it will trigger some memories
Collins: It sure did Bob.
Davis: Yes, that right.
Collins: Referring ·to this index and throwing another acronym at you, also apparently had some responsibility for something called DASH. This may be part of what you've already been describing, Development of Advanced Strategic Hardware. Does that ring a bell?
Davis: A very dim bell, I'd have look it over. I'd have to look over the documents to get my memory jogged again. Maybe that's not a bad idea.
Collins: Okay.
Davis: Maybe I should take a look at some of those things. It might just be worth my while to go over to RAND. I've got to go back down to Aerospace and get my new badge and say hello to a bunch a people down there of well-wishers who I think would very much like to see me , walk in under my own power. If we couldn't set up getting together with Vivian Arterberry and digging out the appropriate it would help me recall because it's impossible for me at home, with classifield documents involved, to have any reference. :
Collins: Let me initiate another area of discussion. One thing that I think you may have been involved with something I'm interested in getting a better understanding of, is RAND's role in helping the Air Force evaluate and develop requirements. They had several different categories of requirements. Were you part of any of that activity at RAND?
Davis: I suppose I was, but in terms of requirements we tried to say, "Do you really need the thing in the first place?'' Requirements referrad to how big, how fast it should be able to fly, how many bombs it should be able to drop, what should it be able to see and that sort of thing. I didn't really get involved in requirements until I got on some of these mission analyses at Aerospace. I was fortunate enough to be able to develop some DAVIS-21 very fundamental requirements which I will insist, may have got a lot of people thinking about what eventually became the strategic defense initiative. But that's another story. I actually sat down and had to develop some sample requirements for my audiences to consider so they could see what the heck I was talking about in the first place and then make their own changes.
That was at Aerospace, you see, but those were techniques I developed there, inGluding giving the audience pencil and paper and asking them to please write down what they thought were better numbers if they could put their hands on them. A lot of times they would give me back the pencil right away and say, "No, no, that looks great." That's another story, though.
Collins: I've got a couple of notes here, and I think you've covered them. I was looking through a couple of documents that Arnold Mengel prepared. He prepared a newsletter on RAND/Air Force relations and these date from 1958. He listed some trips that you were taking during the period, and one of them was in February of 1 58. This was the Gen. Whose nsme I tired to recall with regard to the ranking of bomer penetration Aids, on page 9. You went to see General (Flickinger re: Human Factors--that's what you were discussing--and went to a symposium called "The Worth of Man symposium."
Davis: Oh Lord, I don't even recall. I think memory is mercifully--bless his heart, so Arnold pulled that together. Oh, great. Mrs. Davis Y•)U 1 re really pulling out some old memories.
Collins: That's what we're supposed to be doing.
Davis: Yes, that's wonderful. General Flickinger, I'll be damned.
Collins: I just wanted to get a sense of the character of your experience there. Is there anything you want to add to what we've discussed?
Davis: Nothing but a positive overall view of the whole experience. Things were evolving at the time. The Air Force was getting used to RAND and learning how to use RAND. For it's part, RAND was learning how to work with the Air Force in an instructive persuasive way making its opinions count and be really worth something, and not only selling them but making them worth selling. So there was an evolution taking place on both sides.
Collins: It's interesting that you should phrase it in that way, because in the middle of this period--you were there from '59,' into '61 there was ·.:remendous ferment at the RAND management level about RAND's mission, about RAND's relationship with the Air Force. This was about the time that something called the DAVIS-22 Research Council was established. And a little bit earlier than that, some outside ..:::onsultants were brought in to examine the RAND work, and one of them was Ed Lindblom. I don't know if you know him. At one level there was a lot of back and forth and discussion and hand wringing about RAND's future and RAND's relationship with the Air Force. Do you recall that atmosphere and concern?
Davis: Yes. But I recall it from the day I got there. What I'm saying is that you ~ave particular examples in hand right there of something which I will assert, I will claim was going on--now that I look back on it--the day I got there and before. "What does RAND mean? Why are we here? Well, to look at the ocean, no!" Come on.
Let me put it to you this way. One of the little things I had to do at RAND was that I was elected president of the RAND Co-op, which was the RAND Employees' Activities Association. We put on the tenth anniversary bash for RAND. Of course,that would have had to have been in 1956.By the way, that was only a year after I got to RAND. We reserved a room at the Ambassador Hotel, with Freddie Martin and his orchestra and Carol Channing singing "Hello Dolly." She got Frank Collbohm up there in front of the audience there and she said, "Mr. Collbohm, I've got something special to ask you, really a question that's been bothering me." And he said, "Oh, oh go ahead." And she said, "Tell me, Mr. Collbohm, you're president of the RAND Corporation. What is a RAND?" T~at was wonderful, and with that she gave him some diamonds to th=ow over his shoulder at the audience I remember. At the time Bob Buchheim was working on a document to give to Congress ab~ut the space project, the whole space activity. It's called The Space Handbook. 3 You'll find a copy of that. I'm mentioned as one of contributors there, because that was where I had to do some work on Dynasoar.
Collins: That would have been about 1958, I think.
Davis: I think it finally appeared then. It was published commercially. I'm ·trying to remember the name of the publisher. I remember that Bob Buchheim came into the tenth anniversary celebration late because he was working on testimony to Congress, including this document.
Collins: Actually, there's one more question I want to put to you, but since I'm at the end of a side of the tape, let me put another one in here.
3Buchleim, Robert W. Space Handbook Astronautics and its Applications. New Y)rkL Random House, 1959. DAVIS-23
TAPE 2, SIDE 1
Collins: Just about the time you came to RAND, as I understand it, there was substantial exodus of RAND engineers. One specific example is a number; of people who had been working on Project Feedback who went o'ver to Lockheed to continue development of 117-L. A timing question, did that happen before or after It raised a question about the place of engineers at RAND. I think the reason some people left RAND at that point was a sense that as engineers, they wanted to be tinkering with hardware and RAND, however, was making this transition from an organization very much oriented towards development of hardware problems to one that was moving mor·~ towards consideration of these broader issues that involved the economists and the social scientists. I'm wondering if you were aware of that transformation,f exit of people, and what the feeling was among the staff?
Davis: Yes. Let mr:! characterize it the following way with some actual experience, but from the Sperry Corporation and the Sparrow Project. I started off back at Great Neck with a whole bunch of other engineers, working in a vacuum. When I was transferred to the field test section--even though I was assigned to data analysis in part of that group, I could always go downstairs in the h~:1ngar and pat the hardware and to know that I was actually workin9 on something substantive. It wasn't concrete, it was metal, but at least it had a really solid feel to it, this really meant something. To be able to go out and watch the launches, to be able to run away from an errant missile, gave you a sense of participation, of significance in what you were doing. Your calculations and analyses actually meant something, good, bad or indifferent, which was why I was able to successfully put together a doctoral thesis out of it. I had passion. I had conviction. I had the sense of experience. I knew what in the hell I was talking about specifically and I was able to explain something. Well, you don't get that as an engineer working in a vacuum.
I doubt that a~lY scientist of any sort could stay long away from his laboratory. Now the computer people guys at RAND had their laboratory right there. They could work anytime they wanted to. I don't know what sort of laboratories the economics people work in, exc3pt that at Aerospace, I learned that they were just now, as I mentioned earlier, developing a lot of cost models and things like that, which they couldn't have done before and that was something useful that they could work with. And satellite designers are beginning to learn that there are ways in which they can even simulate experience. But you have to be able to touch something concrete and know that your stuff is not all in the abstract, that there is something you can point to as a solid example.
So yes, I was aware of that feeling, and it would be DAVIS-24
incredible to me that that thinking didn't affect an awful lot of decisions by engineers there to go out.
I think you should talk to John Huntzicker, by the way, since you mentioned this specific thing. We have Huntzicker's name, address and telephone number. John's recently retired from RAND and he, along ~ith Mert Davies, are regarded as some of the basic historians, the guys who know what is going on. And it has been mentioned to me by several people several times. I'm proud to say that John's one of our dear friends. He was very willing for me to reference him to you so that you could talk to him as well. I really think you should because John had a lot to do with the higher classification-type projects. I can say no more than that. But he was stationed back in Washington for RAND to work specifically on those sorts of projects.
Collins: Did this leaving of people to go and work on Lockheed projects occur before or after you came to RAND?
Davis: There might have been some before I came to work for RAND, but it seems to me the thing was building up all the time while I was there. I think you can get the facts and a really good perception out of John.
Collins: Okay. au:.: I guess there's another question given your passionate statemen·t about the interest in hardware. During the time that you and your colleagues were at RAND, were there discussions about, " 'tlell, it's time for me to get back and do something hand-on and enough of this intellectualizing about hardware and weapons systems"?
Davis: I don't recall any discussions of that sort, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of those sorts of things were held. But at the same tim•~, there was the lure of money. There was the fact that these fellows had intimate experience at high levels with those particular projects, something which Lockheed valued. and I'm sure several of these guys must have interacted with Lockheed and the "Skunk Works" and whatever and so that was a natural sort of thing. And given the fact that you could spend just so much time with an organization and finally the relationship gets old and you want to move on,I'm not surprised. It's part of the no~mal turnover.
Collins: When I wa3 talking to Bob Salter, one of the trends he cited,d one of the reasons he cited for departing at this time was the sense that ~ND was becoming relatively disadvantaged in terms of assessing 5ome of these technical issues because the aerospace contractors, as opposed just after World War II, had by the mid fifties built up very large technical staffs. They could put ten or twenty or thirty or forty people on a particular set of very specific problems, whereas RAND, given its limited resources had maybe two or three or four experts in any one area. DAVIS-25 Did that sort of change in the demography of expertise, if you will, Did it ever make itself evident to you? Davis: Yes, and in a very peculiar way. First of all, Bob was right. There were large groups, and people at RAND felt disadvantaged. This disadvantage was being materialized for the people at RAND by the Air Force types who came in with their three year tour of duty, and just showed up without any previous history and knew that they were being lobbied by some rather strong professional interests out in industry, and then told RAND, "Well, you guys obviously can't match them because you have only a couple, so I~m going to listen to them rather than you." This takes place often enough that it has an effect.
But let me give you still another fact of life. In 1960 Congress decided to create the MITRE Corporation and the Aerospace Corporation as nonprofit corporation--does that sound familiar?-- in oder to inferface betwen the Air Force and the contractors. Ans this was a rather skeletal force which was being created for that particular purpose, a force which has been able tp build up only gradually and still doesn't have a monopoly on experise to this day. So yes indeed, ther was this effect. But at the time, it was mixed bag, I might say, in the situation in which it was being realized that you needed somebody without a profit motive to ta~ce a presumably objective look which would be technically excellent. So Aerospace has put a lot of push into devloping its techical expertise and establishing it.
I don't see that RAND could have been steered around to become a counterpart--not counterpart. there's a better word than conterpart-- to the Aerspace Corporation and build its technical expertise to the sa!ne extent. But granted, people like Amron Katz, for example, 'Nere invaluablr as far as technical expertise was concerned. When the contractors like Lockheed was saying, "Well, let us add t~:1e following adi tional feature on the satellite that would delay it and Air Force would buy it. And then theyd add ano·ther thing. Finally Amrom said, "Will you launch something, anything so that we can get some results back," and they finally did it. I'm speaking of these highly classfied programs right now. But Lockheed, as I recall, was first and foremost among the one ones who kept delaying the launch, trying to add something new.
And you see the same phenomenon takign place with respect to the space station and the mess NASA had allowed itself to get in to with the contrac1:ors, with the connivance of NASA, to keep adding things, changing the design, stretching the thing out, increasing the cost.
This is a very. real concern, I will assert right now, and you can quote me, t~at contractors do not necessarily like to see something go from d~velopmenr into operation becuase it signifies DAVIS-26 a tremendous change in the thing. The developers don't have much to do anymore. Oh, they can fiddle around, but maninly the staff are taken off to new projects. Meanwhile the factory guys over and churn out whatever it is and take the order for the A-12s or whatever it is, if any they ever get one that flies.
But take a look at Mike Rich's article, for example. I'm very pleased becuas.e I never heard of Mike Rich before, but he's got the message.
Collins: One last question. What do you regard as your most interesting or significant or important work at RAND?
Davis: I'm pausing not just for effect, but because I think that- ! look back at it and the first thing that comes to mind is that Dynasoar project and the surprise I felt at the impact that had. You talk about interactions. Here we are sitting around a swimming pool at a motel in Dayton. We were sitting there with the Air Force Colonel and Lieutenant Colonel. The Colonel later went on to become a General by the way but that's alright, I won't hold that aga:lnst him. I was telling them that there was so much to learn about the technology, including the human technology of man in orbit, of the materials that would be required to withstand the--oh, the shuttle-type questions, these eventually became s~uttle-type questions. That they should not try to go into a we~pon system development--it was called System Requirement 126. I ~rote you a page on it.
We were called a couple of days later and told that the Air Staff liked what RAND, and I in particular, had to say about that and were adopting t~at course of action. They were not going to develop a weapon system but were going to do some research and development work on it first.
Eventually, co·.ning down the pike, that has led to the work on some types of vehicles. I'm trying to remember the acronyms right now--that get launched, airplanes that get launched up in orbit, single-stage to orbit type things NASA's still working on those things right now, the X-30, I think it's called.
But whatever i·~ is I've given lectures on that particular experience for the AIAA as part of a systems engineering course. To my surprise, I h4d not only people from other countries in the back of the audience, but also people who were at Boeing at the time who got up in :che back of the room and said, "Bob, you told it exactly the way 'it was, " how it developed and it was a question of pickin9 up something from the Germans. They were going to do it in Peenemiinde eventually and bring it over and take a look at it, and they were thinking,"Oh boy, we should go for a weapon system," but RAND was advising them, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, listen. Let's just check and see. There are a lot of things we should do ahead of time, tests we can develop to see DAVIS-27
if this thing really makes sense or what we're going to have to do to make it make ~;ense. "
Collins: But it was led as a weapon system?
Davis: Originally yes, WS-126. Weapon System No.126. I remember that because 126 was also the number of my Boy scout Troop, for whatever that ' s wor;:h.
Collins: So in other words, your decision was tied in to the eventual cancellation of the project. Is that what you're saying?
Davis: Changing th(~ project around from a weapon system development to a research and development. It became System Requirement 126, which they began to study more and more as a result of that. So RAND was successful in that particular thing, other people were successful for RAND.
RAND was succe:>sful in persuading the Air Force, in many cases, not to rush headlong into things. Had they had that sort of advice with respect to the A-12, it would have helped out tremendously, which I think is the gist of Mike Rich's article. People weren't listening to RAND anymore, they were listening to the contractors. Contractors and engineers want to touch something concrete. They start walking away. RAND gets doubly disadvantaged, a double curse falls on it. The audience changes. The resources RAND has to call on change.
I don't know \ In this particular case I think RAND was in a changing picture. in a way--RAND you might look into this--RAND might have been a victim of i t1; own success, at lease in terms of techicall things. And the natural tendency of contractors to begin, is to say, "What RAND wor:dng on? What seems to be the hot technology? We should get some 1:xpertise in it--in devloping something to compete with RAND,not necessarily for the sake of cometition but simply becuase, 'Ah ha, that's what the customer is listening to! We want to be able to show that we have a tremendous capability in that regard, or at lease equal, and that we can duel with those guys at RAND. Ha, Ha, Ha. How can we do that? We'll hire them!" Now you couple that with a natural tendency as I think I DAVIS-28 mentioned, of engin~ers wanting to get off this abstract kick and go out and bend a l~ttle tin. I'd come home, and I loved to work out in the yard, to get my hands on something solid. I loved my years at the trade school, Manhattan High School of Aviation Trades, just becaus~ I learned that airplanes meant something to me. I knew how to 'uake a wing rib, how to make a wing, how to cover it how to fix an engine, how to repair a piston when you dropped it on the s:hoolroom floor. But anyway, you had to have something that way. Bear that in mind when you're thinking through the natural trend of things, because these are things that I think should be recognized for any corporation or any organization of that type. Collins: Okay. Why don't we end it there for today. Davis: Good. Collins: Thanks.