34 



Outside the Navy, other Department of Defense programs were 

 later established to support basic research, including the Army Re- 

 search Office (ARO) established in 1951 and the Air Force Office of 

 Scientific Research (AFOSR) founded in 1952. 30 This essentially 

 amounted to an institutionalization of the wartime cooperation be- 

 tween scientists and the military. The services maintained their 

 link with civilian scientists. With each of the armed services sport- 

 ing its own scientific office, Vannevar Bush's call for a civilian na- 

 tional research foundation with jurisdiction over defense-related re- 

 search was effectively superseded. Military research would be con- 

 ducted in, and supported by, the military itself. 



Summary 



Several polarizing issues fueled the science policy debate between 

 1945 and 1950, delaying for that entire period the creation of a Na- 

 tional Science Foundation. As a result, the pattern for the Federal 

 support of science was firmly established during those five years, 

 most of it filling the void left by the dismantled OSRD. This delay 

 ultimately meant a weakened NSF— at least the NSF envisioned 

 by Vannevar Bush, with strong components of military and medi- 

 cal research — and also assured the pluralistic, loosely coordinated 

 nature of the nation's science effort. 



30 For a general account of the military support of research after World War II, see the rele- 

 vant chapters in Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change; and Harvey M. Sapolsky, 

 "Academic Science and the Military: The Years since the Second World War," in Nathan Rein- 

 gold (ed.), The Sciences in the American Context: New Perspectives (Washington: Smithsonian In- 

 stitution Press, 1979), pp. 379-399. For the Air Force in particular, see Thomas A. Sturm, The 

 USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 19U-1964 (Washington: GPO, 1967); 

 and William J. Price, et al., "Science-Technology Coupling: The Experience of the Air Force 

 Office of Scientific Research," in William H. Gruber and Donald G. Marquis (eds.), Factors in the 

 Transfer of Technology (Cambridge. The MIT Press, 1969), pp. 117-136. 



