120 Research and National Purpose 



terns, a large share of the total budget resources; only recently 

 are some of these efforts being seriously delayed. 



So altogether we pay honor to our hosts, and especially in- 

 deed to the small and rare company it is, of gifted men and 

 women, of teachers, researchers, scientists and engineers who 

 have felt the meaning or even had the funding, of the Office of 

 Naval Research. We refer also to the coordinate or comparable 

 programs of the government and of the dwindling company of 

 independent institutions and corporations. For it is from these 

 few leaders, that have come the bases for critical systems judg- 

 ments and concepts, critiques and decisions of the past two 

 decades. And this was when our nation has for the first time 

 in its history, and for one of the few times in world history, 

 taken a lead nation role in seeking the security and stability of 

 a Free World. 



It is intriguing to note that in the distinguished Study of 

 Basic Research in the Navy, conducted by the Naval Research 

 Advisory Committee (many of whose eminent members or 

 former members are present this afternoon, such as Dr. Seitz 

 and Dr. Piore, who have already been heard from), the report 

 hardly mentioned the word "system" in its conclusions and 

 recommendations, published in June of 1959. Naturally the 

 ideas of system analysis were familiar to the executors of the 

 study, at Arthur D. Little Inc., and the report speaks of 

 responsibilities of the Navy, such as oceanography and me- 

 teorology and marine phases of biology and biological sciences 

 and the claustrophobic phases of psychology and the behavioral 

 sciences, as special areas for research. We now know something 

 of how to conduct systems developments in these fields and, 

 indeed, in the less than ten years since the report was com- 

 pleted, we have industrial as well as federal resources which 

 provide increasingly coherent technologies for these broad mis- 

 sions. But we have also learned in these decades very much 

 more about what basic and applied science do in the evolution 

 of complex systems. The NRAC report pointed out that of the 

 2% of college graduates who receive a doctorate in science, only 



