SCIENCE SERVING THE NATION — DUBRIDGE 183 



I turn now to a discussion of the mechanisms by which military 

 research is carried out. These show great diversity, and this is both 

 desirable and troublesome. 



Broadly speaking, military research may be carried on either in a 

 government-owned and govermnent-operated laboratory, in a govem- 

 ment-owned-contractor-operated laboratory, or in a contractor- 

 owned-contractor-operated facility. In true military style these are, 

 I understand, called respectively : gogo, goco, and coco. 



Examples of goqo would be the Naval Research Laboratory, the 

 Army Ordnance Arsenals, the Fort Monmouth Signal Corps Labora- 

 tories, the Naval Ordnance Test Station (Inyokern), the Wright- 

 Patterson Air Base Laboratories, and many others. In each case the 

 facility is under the command of a military officer, and tliere is 

 normally a chief civilian scientist to whom varying degrees of 

 responsibility for the technical program may be delegated. 



In the GOCO class we have such laboratories as Los Alamos, Argonne, 

 and, indeed, all the AEC laboratories, plus such facilities as the Jet 

 Propulsion Laboratory, operated by the California Institute of Tech- 

 nology, the Lincoln Laboratory operated by the Massachusetts Insti- 

 tute of Technology, etc. In these laboratories the land, buildings, 

 and equipment are owned by the Govermnent. However, after the 

 general goals of the teclinical program have been agreed on jointly 

 between the Government and the contractor, the contractor is given 

 managerial responsibility for all operations. For example, all per- 

 sonnel and other administrative policies are set by the contractor — 

 normally to be in line with those he employs in other operations. 



Finally, in the coco class come the great mass of contractual projects 

 in industries and in universities. Some of these are small basic re- 

 search projects only remotely related to a military problem. At the 

 other extreme are vast industrial projects for development of a new 

 airplane, a new radar, or a guided missile. Then there are establish- 

 ments like this new Applied Physics Laboratory, and the Rand Cor- 

 poration of Santa Monica, Calif., in which a privately owned facility 

 is wholly devoted to government work — in these cases to a broad pro- 

 gram of applied research rather than to the development of a single 

 device. 



Now it is easy enough to classify military research centers in this 

 way. But it is not easy to draw any general conclusions from such a 

 classification. It would be simple if we could say that all laboratories 

 of one class were dismal failures while all of another were great 

 successes. But in human affairs things are generally not so simple. 

 We can find examples of successful and productive centers of all three 

 kinds. We can also find members of each class which, let us say, have 

 not been as productive as could be expected. 



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