144 Dahlgren 



That was the period when Barney Smith began to introduce his executive 

 rotation policy. I was working in K Department* in those days, and I happened 

 to be chosen to be that department's representative in the program. I was 

 assigned the billet that David Sloan had, and he went somewhere else. Sudden- 

 ly, I became not a ballistician anymore but the Chief Engineer working for Jim 

 Kirschke in the Armament Division. 



Well, he was concerned about naval gunnery. Instead of using me as Chief 

 Engineer, he assumed those duties himself and asked me to organize an effort 

 to see if there was any future in gunnery, in our opinion. The Naval Ordnance 

 Station at Indian Head was working frantically to try to get into the R&D end of 

 gunnery in those days, and Jim wanted to know if there was something that 

 Dahlgren ought to be interested in. Is it worth anything to the Navy? Lots of 

 questions were on his mind. 



So we organized a little study group. Roy Shank was the main assistant, and 

 we used the other resources that Jim had available in his group and set out to 

 investigate the area of naval gunnery. When we got through with that, we 

 concluded that naval guns were not worth pursuing unless we could improve 

 the intelligence in the bullet. We absolutely had to do better with the bullet or 

 we could forget it. The concept of the guided projectile came out of that. We 

 didn't know how to begin, and we didn't really know whether the whole world 

 would start giving us the big laugh, so what we did from that point was to 

 introduce this idea to the rest of the world and see if we could get some opinions 

 from people who had been working in missile guidance. 



We came up with the idea for the first Naval Gunnery Conclave. At that 

 conclave, we brought together experts from all over the United States in just 

 about every area that involved naval gunnery, but we did have a group that 

 addressed guidance for projectiles. That group was headed up by a Mr. Shep- 

 pard from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, and he had a lot 

 of people that were interested in the guided projectile concept working on that 

 committee with him. We worked night and day for about 3 days, and they 

 heavily endorsed the pursuit of guided projectiles. In fact, they said that 

 technology had indeed advanced well enough for us to have a chance to do it. 



After we got that endorsement from the experts, we started charging as hard 

 as we could. The first guided projectile that worked was fired at Barbados, West 

 Indies, with a lot of the initial work done by Jerry Bull, a very controversial 

 gentleman that works for Space Research Corporation in Vermont. He had 

 attended the Naval Gunnery Conclave and had been doing some very early 

 work in high-altitude probes using guns. So he was capable of launching 

 electronics from a gun. We asked him to join us in this venture, and he was 

 eager to do it. Under contract, he provided us with the first guidance package 

 that was successfully fired in this program. 



*Warfare Analysis Department. 



