90 Dahlgren 



competence needed for modern development projects nor was the climate at all 

 good for increasing that staff by recruiting from the professional field. Con- 

 gress was not willing to believe that anybody in Washington really worked. 

 They were willing to believe that somebody out in a field station might conceiv- 

 ably do some work sometime, but they knew those guys in Washington were not 

 doing anything. Any time the departments tried to increase their Washington 

 staffs, they ran up against a stone wall. The lesson became perfectly clear. 

 Technical competence was felt to reside with either the defense contractor 

 establishment or with one of the field laboratories. 



So this was the other factor that came into this business that the several 

 ■laboratories were now competing for. "Put the new capability at my place, not 

 his." The point I'm now making that I didn't make before is that there was this 

 new shift of responsibility out of Washington and into the field, so we were 

 trying to compete for this, and we were competing under some difficulties. We 

 were small and we were old. We were an old established activity. That may seem 

 to be an advantage, and it was in some regards. However, in some regards, it 

 was a considerable disadvantage because there were too many people around 

 who knew us "back when." You know, "When I was at Dahlgren as a JG in the 

 early 1930's" — this is an Admiral talking — "when they didn't have anybody, it 

 was a very remote, primitive, picturesque isolated spot. My goodness, you 

 wouldn't think about putting anything modern and new there. Hasn't that been 

 closed yet?" I suffered through that many times. None of it was true anymore. 



How did the Fleet Ballistic Missile [FBM] Program begin at Dahlgren? 



It started when the JUPITER missile development was under consideration. 

 The Navy did not want to be left out of the ballistic missile picttire any more 

 than the Army did. Here again, we had a real under-the-cover fight. The Air 

 Force said missiles were its prerogative. 



The big development money now — we're talking about 1955 or 1958 — was 

 all in ballistic missile development. The Army had picked up Wernher von 

 Braun, and he was down at Redstone Arsenal, anxious as hell to continue the 

 work he had done on the V-2 and inching and pinching and scraping and 

 getting a dollar together here and there for little pieces of work. So this was the 

 real big opportunity. 



One of the results was the Navy planned the most cockeyed scheme I'd ever 

 heard in my life which was the JUPITER missile. The JUPITER was going to be 

 a liquid-fuel missile about like the ATLAS, which was the technology of the 

 day. It was smaller but a big beast, and it was going to be launched from the deck 

 of a merchant ship. 



The idea of launching from the deck of a surface ship something as fragile as 

 a JUPITER was preposterous. For example, you couldn't ship an empty 



