156 ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR 



Performance of Equipment 



One phase of liaison between NDRC and the Services was related to the 

 transmission of operational information from the Army and Navy to the 

 divisions, where the information was concerned with the performance of 

 instruments or weapons developed by an NDRC organization. The lack of 

 an adequate supply of such information points to a chief defect in the liaison 

 organization. Operational research groups (or operational analysis groups) 

 of scientific personnel working with the armed forces as described in the 

 preceding chapter, provided a sound remedy for this defect where such 

 groups existed, but they were formed gradually and covered only a fraction 

 of the field. Setting up advanced laboratories in England in 1943 by the 

 radar and the countermeasures divisions of NDRC solved the problem for 

 those two divisions in the European theater. 



It is almost axiomatic that a development engineer must have full knowl- 

 edge of the operational setting in which the instrument or weapon under 

 development will find itself, and of the performance of the first models of 

 the device which go into Service use. Through improving liaison during the 

 war years, the Services came to enable the divisions of NDRC to approach 

 this requirement more and more closely. Information as to how items already 

 in use were performing was at the outset very difficult to obtain, for two 

 principal reasons. The overcoming of these causes took time, because the 

 situation was inherently a new one for all concerned. 



The first cause was that the reports from which such information could 

 be obtained usually were regarded by the Services with such secrecy that 

 they were reluctant to make them available to a civilian organization. Gen- 

 eral operational information of a really significant sort was likely to be held 

 very closely. In the second place the Services did not in general have a 

 systematic method of collecting and analyzing operational experience in 

 terms of the technical performance of equipment. The paucity of informa- 

 tion was not unique with NDRC but was apparent within the Army and 

 Navy whose own technical branches did not receive timely information. 

 Adequate machinery for obtaining data on performance simply did not exist, 

 although the arrangements for "Group A" (described in the next section) 

 mitigated the situation somewhat. 



What OSRD did not know it could not correct. In the Army the diffi- 

 culty lay in the lack of adequate reporting by the using troops to the tech- 

 nical branches of the Army Service Forces, and the lack of an adequate 

 follow-up inspection system operated by these branches. It is possible that 

 exchange of information could have been expedited by the assignment of 



