0.5 Science and security: national defense perspectives through 1

The military ask for the impossible, but they can pay for it. It's a rather odd way of getting scientific and technologicaladvance, but this has been the situation ever since the end of World War II.

—I.I. Rabi, 1980

Accomplishments and ambitions of vannevar bush

Vannevar Bush's contributions in organizing science through the World War II OSRD and legitimizing government's directsupport of non-government science have largely overshadowed his concern with preserving close working relations in peacetime between OSRD and the military.He was directly involved in that effort into the early years of the Eisenhower administration (1953-1961), a decade after he had stepped back from activeinvolvement in the broader debate about post-war science policy. One of Bush’s biographers has made a sound case that he aspired to become Secretary ofDefense, convinced that effective national defense must be based on close relations between the military and civilian science and technology. G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

As World War II drew to a close, Bush and his senior OSRD colleagues had apparently believed that a new agency to support universityresearch and a peacetime science policy could be established. But by 1947, Bush had abandoned hope that the Congress would ever establish the National ResearchFoundation (by that time renamed the National Science Foundation), which was his principal recommendation in Science—the Endless Frontier . Bush’s report envisioned the NRF as the sole federal agency supporting research in universities and other nonprofit institutions. That thisdid not happen was due in large measure to the five-year lapse between Science—the Endless Frontier ’s transmission to President Truman in July 1945 and the creation of the National ScienceFoundation in May 1950, a lapse due in large measure to Truman’s veto of legislation creating the NSF on grounds that it appropriated funds to a non-government National Science Board.

Maintaining close lines of communication between civilian scientists and the military departments was a less difficultpolitical problem than linking science with government more broadly. In view of the long history of science- and technology-based contributions to warfare,defense is the one area in which direct government involvement in science has always been regarded as legitimate. Relation of the Federal Government to Research tacitly recognizes the primacy of national defense by placing it at the head of a list of twelve functionalcategories of significant federal activity in both the natural and social sciences. More recent enumerations of federal science activities (contained, forexample, in appendices to the president's annual budget request to the congress) maintain that convention, in part because since World War II, even duringrelatively lean periods of federal support for military research and development, national defense (rechristened national security) has dominatedfederal R&D expenditures. In fiscal year 2007, the following seven federal organizations accounted for over 95 percent ofthe federal R&D budget: Department of Defense (DoD), 49.6 percent; Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 25.7 percent; NationalAeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 7.1 percent, Department of Energy (DoE), 7.1 percent; National Science Foundation (NSF), 3.5 percent; U.S.Department of Agriculture (USDA), 1.8 percent, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 0.9 percent. (National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators–2008 1 (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2008), 4.22-25. However, the R&D budget of the Department of Defense is heavily weighted towards development, with its relatively minuscule budget for basic researchhaving been reduced in recent years by comparison. Civilian science- and technology-related agencies account for the bulk of federal researchexpenditures, with the National Institutes of Health accounting for approximately 50 percent.