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DOI: 10.1177/0032329218773711
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Article
Building the Problem-Solving
State: Bridging Networks
and Experiments in the US
Advisory Specialist Group
in World War II
Gerald Berk
University of Oregon
Abstract
Hidden within the office of the Secretary of War during World War II was a little-
known agency called the Advisory Specialist Group (ASG). Strategically located
between the laboratory, the factory, the battlefield, and civilian bureaucracy, the
ASG solved the complex problem of reconciling new technologies and new military
operations. In doing so, it combined incongruous domains of activity, contributed
to Allied victory, and opened a channel to the problem-solving state. It is easy to
overlook or misunderstand the ASG, because it was born in processes, addressed
problems, and took a form unfamiliar to historical institutionalists. Drawing on
Padgett and Powell’s networked theory of organizational genesis and pragmatist
theories of experimentalist governance, this article explains the ASG’s emergence,
networked form, and experimentalist procedures. A founding moment for the
problem-solving state, this case provides empirical and theoretical guidance to study
its historical and ongoing evolution.
Keywords
state building, experimentalist governance, networked governance, organizational
emergence, technological innovation, World War II
Corresponding Author:
Gerald Berk, 1284 Department of Political Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1284, USA.
Email: gberk@uoregon.edu
773711PASXXX10.1177/0032329218773711Politics & SocietyBerk
research-article2018
2 Politics & Society 00(0)
Long before the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) orga-
nized a network of laboratories to foster technological innovation and the US Fish and
Wildlife Service devised an experimentalist architecture for habitat conservation plan-
ning, 1 an agency hidden within the office of the Secretary of War in World War II built
an experimentalist network to reconcile the coevolution of technologies and military
operations. Strategically located between the laboratory, the factory, the battlefield,
and civilian bureaucracy, the US Advisory Specialist Group (ASG) assembled scien-
tists and soldiers to solve complex, uncertain, and urgent problems. Among its many
accomplishments, the ASG integrated microwave radar and strategic bombing,
LORAN radio navigation and air-to-ground communications, and the B-29’s configu-
ration with heavy bombing. In doing so, it combined incongruous activities, contrib-
uted to Allied victory, and opened a channel to durable networks with problem-solving
capacities. At war’s end, scientists and soldiers redeployed the ASG’s experimentalist
network into Project RAND. Looking back, the ASG’s experience marks a founding
moment in the development of the problem-solving state. By analyzing its origins,
form, and experimentalist capacities, this article provides empirical and theoretical
guidance to bring the problem-solving state out of the shadows and understand its
evolution.
It is easy to overlook or misunderstand the ASG, because it was born in processes,
addressed problems, and took a form unfamiliar to students of state building in war.2
World War II was a multifaceted enterprise, which took a variety of forms within a
single national order. It is well known that the United States mobilized advantages in
mass production for massive force in war. But Americans also learned to solve com-
plex technical problems associated with reconciling new technologies and new mili-
tary operations amid the urgency of war. State building for massive force reproduced
skills, practices, and protocols associated with the modern corporation: the capacity,
that is, to mobilize, plan, and control the flow of resources from factory to theater
operations through organizational hierarchy.3 The reconciliation of new technologies
and new military operations, by contrast, was unprecedented. As the military historian
Paul Kennedy writes, unlike mobilization for mass production, there were no relevant
experiences, theories, or protocols for reconciling radar and antisubmarine warfare or
strategic bombing. Moreover, the “proper application” of massive force, as Churchill
called it, depended on technical problem solving. And in 1943, massive force was
failing.4
The ASG’s problem-solving accomplishments were no small feat. It came to life in
a dysfunctional situation familiar in institutionalist accounts of American political
development. A crisis in antisubmarine warfare ignited a bitter conflict between scien-
tists in a new executive branch agency, the Office of Scientific Research and
Development, and officers in an older naval bureaucracy. A legacy of late state build-
ing, this sort of conflict between old and new institutions is a durable feature of
American political development, where organizational innovation never fully dis-
places older forms. Orren and Skowronek call it “intercurrence.”5 Moreover, the ASG
was born a paradigm “adhocracy,” a reactive organization without legal warrant, plan,
or explicit governing principles. That too was typical. As Finegold and Skocpol write
Berk 3
of the War Industries Board and the National Recovery Administration before it, the
ASG was cobbled together in response to a crisis.6
Historical institutionalism explains why the ASG was born an adhocracy into an
intercurrent conflict, but it is less successful in explaining how the ASG turned a dys-
functional situation productive, for two reasons. First, the process by which the ASG
was born looks little like an institutionalist account of agency within institutional con-
straints.7 Second, the architecture by which the ASG fostered cumulative learning and
improvement looks little like the bureaucratic hierarchies institutionalists expect from
state building. I turn to two theoretical strains for help: John Padgett and Walter
Powell’s theory of how new organizations come to life through networked processes
and pragmatist theories of experimentalist governance. The former is helpful in
explaining how the ASG was born into an intercurrent conflict between scientists and
soldiers, because it conceptualizes the mechanisms by which new organizations
emerge from recombinations of incongruous domains of activity. The latter are helpful
in explaining how the ASG overcame the deficits of adhocracy, because they theorize
the processes by which public officials govern effectively under conditions of confu-
sion, novelty, and deep uncertainty.
This article recounts and explains the ASG’s emergence and success in four sec-
tions. The first three proceed in narrative sequence, each explained by a different the-
ory. Therefore, I leave the analytical framework to each section. The first draws on
historical institutionalism to explain why the ASG was born an adhocracy into an
intercurrent conflict between the Office of Scientific Research and Development and
the Navy. The second draws on concepts and methods from Padgett and Powell’s
theory of organizational genesis to explain how the ASG emerged through networked
processes that flowed through the career of its founder, the electrical engineer Edward
Bowles. The third section draws on pragmatist theories of experimentalist governance
to explain how the ASG turned a reactive organization with no governing principles
into one with the capacity to integrate new technologies and new military operations
through experimentation, learning, and improvement. The fourth section draws both
on Padgett and Powell’s analysis of new organizations and on pragmatist theories of
experimentalist governance to explain how the ASG overcame impediments to its
success.
Stalemate in the Shadow of American Political
Development
In the spring of 1941, four months into US participation in the war, the German navy
launched a devastating submarine attack on merchant shipping from the Americas.
The response of the US Navy, perfected in World War I, was defensive: assemble mer-
chant ships in convoys, escorted by naval battleships. The convoy system was failing.
German U-boats put a stranglehold on supply lines to England and Europe: oil and
bauxite from South America and coal, iron, lumber, and manufactured products
shipped from the United States. In the first two weeks of 1942 alone, Admiral Karl
Doenitz’s famed “wolf packs” sank more than thirty-five ships. Thousands of tons of
4 Politics & Society 00(0)
freight were lost. Conditions looked dire to many: without a constant flow from the
Americas, it would be impossible for the Allies to launch a successful invasion of
Europe.8
The crisis in the Atlantic ignited a bitter institutional conflict within the American
state. On the one side were scientists in a newly formed executive branch agency, the
Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), who argued that microwave
radar and operations research made offensive antisubmarine warfare possible. It would
succeed, however, only if civilian authorities reorganized Atlantic command. On the
other side was the US Navy, which would subordinate new technologies to the status
quo. In the United States, this sort of conflict augured a paralyzing stalemate: as his-
torical institutionalists have shown, there was a long legacy of such struggles between
incongruous institutions, formed at different times to serve different ends, which
resulted in dysfunctional outcomes.
State building came a generation after industrialization and two generations after
democratization in the United States. Therefore, efforts to construct national adminis-
trative capacity had to displace entrenched patronage parties, congressional govern-
ment, federalism, and courts.9 As early as the 1880s, military modernizers faced
opposition from state militias tied through patronage parties to governors and Congress.
Aligning themselves with the presidency, state builders theorized military reform for
the age of industry and US imperialism; and they designed institutional blueprints to
nationalize and professionalize the military and to rationalize civil-military relations.
Helped along by industrial violence and international war, they mobilized executive
power and sympathetic members of Congress to nationalize state militias, vest mili-
tary command in a general staff, and augment the power of the Secretary of War. But,
as Skowronek shows, their successes by 1920 depended on compromises that insinu-
ated old-order institutions into modern designs.
Although the General Staff had been institutionalized as the centerpiece of the new
professionalism, its relationship to the Secretary of War above and the [military] bureaus
below was clouded by lateral connections to Congress. Although the position of Assistant
Secretary of War had been established to integrate the War Department with the corporate
community, his relations to the Chief of Staff, the regular Army hierarchy, and Congress
were mired in confusion. . . . Professional insulation and executive control failed to
displace lateral political ties and particularistic interests.10
These problems were not resolved during the interwar years. Military state build-
ers, who hoped to augment earlier successes by constructing public institutions devoted
to preparedness, failed. Demobilization left intercurrent conflicts to fester. And mili-
tary research and development was taken up by two ad hoc, voluntary organizations:
the National Academy of Sciences and the National Advisory Committee on
Aeronautics.11
Thus, when American scientists mobilized in support of government-sponsored
research and development in 1938, there was no state capacity to employ or obvious
authority to lobby.12 Among the small group of institutional entrepreneurs who
Berk 5
emerged to press the case was the MIT electrical engineer Vannevar Bush. Like insti-
tutional entrepreneurs before him, Bush theorized warfare in the age of modern sci-
ence, conceptualized the state’s role in research and development, and crafted a
blueprint for a national defense research council. Recently appointed president of the
Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, DC, Bush learned to negotiate national
politics. He found little receptivity in an overwhelmingly isolationist Congress.
Instead, Bush plied elite networks for a meeting with Roosevelt’s adviser, Harry
Hopkins, who agreed to deliver his proposal to the president. With enthusiasm and
little deliberation, Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1940 to establish the National
Defense Research Council (NDRC). In time it was redesignated the Office of Scientific
Research and Development (OSRD).13
The OSRD was an ad hoc organization. When state building comes late and remains
durably mired in intercurrent conflict, the institutional response to crisis is ad hoc.
Like the War Industries Board in World War I, the OSRD had little in-house capacity
or formal authority.14 It was staffed by private sector scientists and administered by
contract with industry and university laboratories. The OSRD’s warrant was contra-
dictory. On the one hand, it had the imprimatur of the president and a substantial bud-
get, through which it redirected private sector behavior.15 On the other hand, the OSRD
was a new agency, with little legitimacy in the military establishment and no clear
relationship to civilian authority in the Department of War. When Bush attacked the
Navy for its backward approach to antisubmarine warfare, there was no authoritative
protocol for resolving the conflict.
In 1942, Bush told President Roosevelt that two of the OSRD’s foremost projects
could reverse fortune in the Battle of the Atlantic: microwave radar and operations
research. Discovered in a small British laboratory in 1939, the resonant cavity magne-
tron revolutionized radar. The magnetron produced extraordinary power with unprec-
edented efficiency, making it possible to fabricate smaller and more mobile radar
systems. Microwave radar became the OSRD’s largest project, and MIT’s Radiation
Laboratory, which was created to develop it, became its biggest contractor.16 A second
OSRD project lay behind Bush’s appeal: the application of mathematics to warfare. In
1941, the OSRD let out a contract to the Applied Mathematics Panel (AMP) at
Columbia University. Operations research, the application of classical mechanics to
optimizing military resources, was high on the list of the AMP’s priorities.17 It could
be used to analyze budgets, organize research and development, or optimize the
deployment of technologies and personnel. Coupled with airborne microwave radar,
Bush proposed to use operations research to optimize antisubmarine search-and-
destroy missions.18 Together, he said, these technologies so increased the “probability”
of siting and destroying submarines that they warranted a “fundamental reorientation
of strategy” from defensive convoys to offensive “airborne attack.”19 The Navy needed
only to catch up.
Admiral Ernest King, head of naval operations in the Atlantic, bristled at Bush’s
transgressions.20 Air-assisted search-and-destroy missions had been repeatedly tried in
World War I and they failed. There was no finding a “needle in the haystack.”
Experience, King wrote, proved that “escort is not just one way of handling
6 Politics & Society 00(0)
the submarine menace; it is the only way that gives any promise of success. . . . The
so-called patrol and hunting operations have time and again proved futile.”21 To be
sure, King welcomed new technology. He had been instrumental in the design of a
small and nimble destroyer, meant to accompany shipping convoys. And he welcomed
microwave radar and operations research, as long as they were subordinated to naval
doctrine and line of command. In short, whereas Bush conceived science and technol-
ogy as determinants of warfare, King saw them as instruments.22
The Bush/King controversy developed into a familiar stalemate. Like state builders
before him, Bush mobilized the power of the presidency to chart a path to reform. He
moved on two fronts: direct negotiations with King and rationalization through author-
ity and hierarchy in the office of the Secretary of War. In an extraordinarily tense meet-
ing, Admiral King agreed to compromise with Bush’s proposals. He would bring
scientists into antisubmarine operational planning, and three OSRD advisers would be
granted open access to the chief of antisubmarine warfare, Admiral Francis S. Low,
and to Admiral King himself.23 On the second front, Bush maneuvered to place the
head of the OSRD’s Microwave Division, the MIT electrical engineer Edward Bowles,
in the office of the Secretary of War as special adviser to Secretary Henry Stimson.
Bowles took up Bush’s campaign to build an offensive “search and kill” strategy from
air-to-surface vehicle (ASV) microwave radar and operations research.24 On May 20,
1942, Bowles delivered a report to Secretary Stimson on the “Vitalization of ASV
Submarine Destruction Program.” He proposed to assert civilian authority over the
crisis in the Atlantic through a “Special Bombardment Group for Submarine
Destruction,” under the direct command of the War Department and independent of
the Navy. Staffed by scientists and soldiers, it would mobilize a fleet of heavy bombers
equipped with ASV-10 radar, which would serve simultaneously as a “combat labora-
tory” and an “operational unit.” Staff scientists would “deduce” offensive “tech-
niques,” which could be tested in battle, monitored for verification, and “promulgated”
in antisubmarine doctrine.25 None of this would work, Bowles added, without the
“establishment of operational research centers through the use of civilians with great
analytical ability charged with the study of techniques, efficiency in the use of these
techniques, and changes in tactical procedure essential to successful application of
these techniques”: that is, without a heavy dose of operations research.26
Although Secretary Stimson supported Bowles’s proposal, it never got off the
ground. Nor did the Bush/King compromise. Admiral King reorganized naval com-
mand to consolidate his authority over operations in the Atlantic, because, as the naval
historian Montgomery Meigs writes, “he wanted to be able to resist further outside
interference in anti-submarine warfare.”27 And resist he did. OSRD advisers had little
influence over strategy, and despite ongoing efforts by Secretary Stimson and Army
Air Force brass to revise Bowles’s plan to make it workable for the Navy, the Army Air
Force ultimately agreed to relinquish all antisubmarine responsibility to the Navy but
retained exclusive responsibility over all other long-range offensive air operations.
Bush and Bowles’s failure to build a new American state in 1942 is well explained
by historical institutionalism. The legacy of failed efforts to rationalize civil-mili-
tary relations and institutionalize war mobilization meant that institutional responses
Berk 7
to World War II would be ad hoc and authority relations confused.28 Like crises
before it, the Battle of the Atlantic opened possibilities for state-building entrepre-
neurship. Bush, who developed an increasingly close relationship with Roosevelt
throughout the war, mobilized the power of the presidency;29 Bowles followed with
ideational innovation, institutional redesign, and efforts to lobby civilian authority.
Their state-building efforts ran headlong into institutional constraints.30 The result
was a compromise, which reproduced a dysfunctional division of labor within the
military and between it and the office of the Secretary of War. Like military state-
building efforts before it, compromise reproduced ongoing confusions over
authority.31
Career Analysis and the Organizational Genesis
of the ASG
The ASG came to life on the ruins of the Special Bombardment Group. As institution-
alists expect, Bush’s tactical maneuver—placing Bowles in the office of the Secretary
of War—had unintended consequences. 32 Suddenly, Bush was only one of many peti-
tioners who called on Bowles for service. Secretary Stimson, Radiation Laboratory
administrators, Army Air Force officers, and OSRD contractors lined up next to Bush.
They called on Bowles not only for his scientific expertise but also for his knowledge
of and reach into the ongoing work of the executive branch, the laboratory, industry,
and the military. The ASG emerged from this petitioning and counterpetitioning pro-
cess, not from Bowles’s intentions. How should we make sense of it?
Padgett and Powell write that new organizations emerge through, not by, the inten-
tions or works of their founders. This pattern occurs because founders find themselves
in “strategic locations” between multiple domains of activity, whose practices and
protocols are “recombined” to form new organizations. The mechanisms of recombi-
nation, such as the transposition of skills from one domain of activity to another, wend
their way through the careers of their founders. It is in these processes that new orga-
nizations come to life.33
How, more precisely, does organizational genesis occur and why is it so important
to train attention on the careers or biographies of founders? For Padgett and Powell,
new organizations are never created de novo; they are always recombinations of exist-
ing modalities of activity.34 For example, as Powell and Sandholtz show, dedicated
biotechnology firms emerged from recombinations of production protocols, skills, and
practices from university science, venture finance, and industrial production.
Individuals were important to those processes of recombination because they took on
multiple roles in multiple domains of activity.35 “Amphibious” scientists bridged uni-
versities, pharmaceutical corporations, and venture capitalists in their respective roles
as researchers, consultants, and entrepreneurs. Moreover, in this theory, individuals
with multiple roles can broker the flow of resources, people, and practices between
multiple domains of activity when they take on “strategic locations” between them.
The careers of founders, in other words, become sites through which the relationships
between incongruous domains of activity are “rewired.”
8 Politics & Society 00(0)
The emergence of strategic locations among founders and processes of rewiring
through their careers do not, in and of themselves, result in organizational genesis.
Although the associations between university science, venture capitalism, and indus-
trial production were “poised” for recombination by the careers of amphibious scien-
tists, a new form of organization—the dedicated biotechnology firm—did not emerge
until the skills, protocols, and practices from one domain were “transposed” and
“refunctioned” for new purposes in another. “Transposition” and “refunctioning” is
the “movement of a relational practice from one domain to another and its re-use for a
different function or purpose in a new domain.”36
Methodologically, Padgett and Powell’s theory guides us to study the recombina-
tory process by which new organizations come to life by tracing the careers or biogra-
phies of their founders. Watch how they take on multiple roles in different domains of
activity; ask whether multiple roles evolve into strategic locations between those
domains; look for flows of people and resources through their careers; ask whether
those flows rewire relations between diverse domains of activity; and search for the
transpositions and refunctioning of skills and practices that form new organizations.
The method of tracing careers, then, is a historicized way of tracing structural pro-
cesses. As the sociologist of professions Andrew Abbott writes, the “historicity” of
individuals is important to the development of social structures, not because of their
“quality or actions” (because they are “great men or great women”), but rather because
“it is they who are the prime reservoir of historical connections from past to present”;
their biographies or careers are the “conditions in which social structures emerge and
stabilize.”37
This section recounts the genesis of the ASG through Edward Bowles’s wartime
career. It shows how military, industrial, public administrative, and scientific activities
were not static, rule-bound institutional orders. Despite the propensity for conflict
among the OSRD, the office of the Secretary of War, the Radiation Laboratory, and the
Army, scientists, administrators, and soldiers needed one another’s help. We shall see
how a process of mutual petitioning passed increasingly through Bowles’s career and
how the ASG came to life through that process.
Origins of the ASG
When Edward Bowles was appointed technical adviser to the Secretary of War, he
already held two positions in different domains of activity. He was secretary of the
Microwave Division of the OSRD and adviser to the MIT Radiation Laboratory.38 The
OSRD, recall, was situated in the executive branch—where by Bush’s design its pri-
mary activity was to write and manage research and development contracts. Bowles’s
role was to help manage contracts in the OSRD’s largest division. But research and
development is a notoriously difficult process to specify ex ante in a written document.
As a result, OSRD contracts were repeatedly renegotiated (the ones that were not usu-
ally failed). Contract management was thus not so much a legal as a relational process
of assessing and reassessing scientific and engineering prospects.39 To put it in Padgett
Berk 9
and Powell’s terms, Bowles’s role in the OSRD “transposed” and “refunctioned” skills
and practices from the scientific to the political-administrative domain.
Moreover, so intimate did Bowles become with the work of the Radiation Laboratory
(his division’s largest contractor) that its director, Lee Dubridge, recruited him to serve
as an adviser.40 In that location—the domain of laboratory science—Bowles was use-
ful, not for his scientific skills (Dubridge had no dearth of those), but for his skills in
and substantive knowledge of OSRD contract management. The transposition of
Bowles’s administrative skills and contractual knowledge to the laboratory, for exam-
ple, would be instrumental in fostering the Radiation Laboratory’s quick shift in pri-
orities from fixed ground radar to mobile airborne and then to mobile ground radar.
To summarize, when Bowles was appointed to advise the Secretary of War, he was
already strategically located between two domains of activity, where he transposed
skills and practiced different roles: the administrative domain, where he managed rela-
tional contracts, and the domain of laboratory science, where he participated in
research and development management.
Bowles’s appointment to the office of the Secretary of War not only added another
role to his career but extended his strategic reach from science and public administra-
tion to civilian administration of the military and, in time, to the military itself. Initially,
that meant that Secretary of War Henry Stimson drew on Bowles’s scientific skills for
civilian administrative purposes. Stimson sent Bowles to inspect radar operations in
Panama and the Caribbean and make recommendations for improvement. He asked
Bowles to attend military planning meetings, which involved operations that utilized
radar. And he sent him into theater operations to assess and report on radar and com-
munications needs. But the more Stimson sent Bowles into military domains, the more
military officers petitioned Bowles directly. His strategic location within the office of
the Secretary of War meant that the US Army Air Force (AAF), which was dealing
more and more with radar and communications problems as it moved into the European
theater, could reach him and he, in turn, could reach them. Bowles and the Air Force
leadership—Generals Ira Eaker, Carl Spaatz, and Henry Arnold—now consulted one
another regularly.41 The AAF was in the midst of plans to invade Germany and, like
naval operations in the Atlantic, early efforts had proved disastrous. Targeting was
wildly inaccurate, weather conditions did not cooperate, and the AAF lost far more
planes than did Germany.42
So dependent on Bowles did the AAF leadership become for radar and communica-
tions advice that in August 1943, Commanding General Henry Arnold and Chief of
Staff General Barney Giles asked Bowles to drop his other jobs to become the civilian
head of communications for the AAF. By now Bowles understood that his value
derived from his strategic location between domains and his capacity to transpose and
refunction skills among multiple domains of practice. He was valuable to the AAF not
merely because he could transpose scientific knowledge to military problems but also
because his role in the OSRD provided him with the skill to project research and
development schedules and logistics. He was valuable to the OSRD and the Radiation
Laboratory because the more he learned about bombing in the Atlantic and European
theaters, the more he could help the scientists reevaluate schedules and priorities. Were
10 Politics & Society 00(0)
Bowles to become AAF staff and give up his other roles, he would abandon the strate-
gic location that made him so useful to mediating the coevolution of technologies and
military operations. So Bowles told Arnold he could best serve the AAF as his per-
sonal adviser, while retaining his positions with the Secretary of War, the OSRD, and
the Radiation Laboratory.43
By September 1943, Bowles served multiple roles in four domains of practice, each
with its own institutional location. He was secretary of the microwave committee in
the administrative domain of the OSRD, where he transposed scientific skills to man-
age relational contracts. He was adviser to the Radiation Laboratory, where he trans-
posed executive branch management skills and protocols to the scientific domain. He
was technical adviser to the Secretary of War, where he transposed scientific and con-
tract management skills to civilian administration of the military. And he was special
adviser to the chief of the AAF, where he transposed scientific and contract manage-
ment skills and communication protocols to the military.
The emergence of Bowles’s strategic location made possible the ASG, but it did
not bring it to life. In fact, Bowles initially thought his work in the office of the
Secretary of War would take up little of his time and that he could do it alone.44 But
petitions from all directions multiplied and became increasingly urgent. If Bowles
were to maintain his obligations to the OSRD and the Radiation Laboratory, he
needed help. Initially he drew on his association with the Radiation Laboratory.
Having worked at MIT, Bowles knew many of its personnel; he was a Rad Lab
adviser; and, as manager of the OSRD’s many microwave contracts, he drew on his
broad knowledge of expertise to help enlist new technologists to the laboratory.
Bowles recruited four full-time specialists from the Rad Lab: Julius Stratton, David
Griggs, Louis Ridenour, and Ivan Getting. Stratton, a physicist with expertise in elec-
tromagnetic wave propagation, was hired to address communications problems in the
North Atlantic and radar adaptation to AAF bombing in Europe and the Atlantic.
Griggs, a geologist by training, but also an accomplished pilot who had tested air-
borne and ground radar for the Rad Lab, joined the ASG to adapt and install micro-
wave radar in a variety of aircraft. Bowles recruited Ridenour, a nuclear physicist and
assistant director of the Rad Lab, to brief Army commanders in the European theater
on the “operational aspects” of the full range of radar innovations coming into line.45
Getting, an astrophysicist who worked on the first microwave fire control radar at the
Rad Lab, was recruited to work on applications of radar to ground operations in the
European Theater.46 Bowles also drew simultaneously on his laboratory and military
roles to recruit a full-time secretary: Army captain Allen V. Hazeltine, who had stud-
ied electrical engineering with Bowles at MIT and then gone on to work as an engi-
neer at Philco. Thus, like Bowles, Hazeltine was strategically located to take on
multiple roles within the ASG: personal secretary, military adviser and liaison, tech-
nical specialist, and ASG historian.
Bowles recruited additional specialists on a temporary basis. Two constraints lim-
ited the size of the core group of full-time specialists: pressing obligations elsewhere
and limits on core group expertise. As Bowles put, he “corrall[ed] . . . outsiders on a
temporary basis”—“just long enough,” that is, “to do the job” and return to their home
Berk 11
organization where they were also desperately needed.47 Among this much larger and
fluid group of people, the ASG recruited specialists from Bell Laboratory and AT&T’s
Long Line Division, the Communications Division of Transcontinental and Western
Air Corporation, the Technological Institute of Northwestern University, and laborato-
ries at Western Electric, General Electric, RCA, and Sperry Gyroscope.48
Once its core group of advisory specialists from the Radiation Laboratory was in
place and the practice of corralling temporary specialists became routine, the ASG was
born.
Adhocracy
The ASG was an exemplary adhocracy. There were no design principles or blueprints
to steer its birth, no organization chart and governing rules to guide its management.
Though a division of the office of the Secretary of War, the ASG drew expertise from
private laboratories and the military. It was a reactive organization, which responded
to pressing petitions from the military and the laboratory. Its capacity to meet those
needs depended not on its autonomy but its embeddedness within a network of labora-
tories, business enterprises, administrative agencies, and military organizations.
The ASG’s ad hoc organization rested on three practices, each of which transposed
and reconfigured skills and practices from one domain to another: joint committees,
cross-placement of scientists and soldiers, and matching skills and situations. In the
fall of 1942, Bowles asked Julius Stratton to form an ad hoc committee of scientists
and soldiers to study the role of radar in air defense. Over the next two years, Stratton
reconfigured his committee to study airborne radar aids to bombing, airborne radar fire
control, air warning systems, radar assisted blind bombing, and radar bombsights.49
The “Stratton Committees” assembled soldiers from the Army Air Communications
Office and the Signal Corps to work with engineers and scientists from the Rad Lab,
General Electric, RCA, Westinghouse, Bell Labs, and the OSRD Applied Mathematics
Panel to reconcile edge technologies with Army protocols and practices. They wrote
policy papers, made proposals to introduce new technologies into theater operations,
and prioritized technologies in development. Along the way, scientists and soldiers
trained one another in their respective skills.
The ASG also became a conduit for the ad hoc cross-placement of scientists and
soldiers between domains for the purpose of learning more about one another’s skills
and practices. As Bowles prepared to depart Panama, for example, Colonel Stuart
Wright asked him to take several Army technicians with him. Bowles continued his
relationship with soldiers, assigning and reassigning them to “liaison duty in centers
of research and development.” Moreover, the ASG sent Rad Lab personnel to the
Pentagon, with no other purpose than to get a “better understanding of Army prob-
lems” and to “help the Army better understand the Laboratory, its problems and its
capabilities.”50
Finally, the core of the ASG’s mission was to match technical skills with pressing
military problems as they arose. Sometimes Bowles drew on his strategic location to
recruit specialists himself for particular purposes. However, like the rest of his tasks at
12 Politics & Society 00(0)
the ASG, Bowles was unable to match skills and situations alone. As his core special-
ists gained experience with the military, they began to sort themselves into pressing
situations and to call on Bowles to corral temporary specialists to work on particular
problems. Specialists mobilized specialists in a tree-like pattern. Among the many
military problems that temporary and core specialists addressed were adapting and
installing radar and communications technology, consulting on military theater opera-
tions, designing the Army air-to-ground communications net, and integrating radar
into the Very Heavy Bombardment program in the Pacific.51
The ASG came to life as a reactive organization. Drawing on Bowles’s strategic
location, it responded to pressing petitions by forming and joining ad hoc committees,
mobilizing skills to situations, and placing scientists and soldiers in one another’s
domains. If this were all there was to ASG organization, we might join the normative
debate over state building through adhocracy. Was the ASG a reactive, irrational
response to crisis, which borrowed its capacity from elsewhere? Or was it an adaptive,
creative, flexible, nonbureaucratic organization, an appropriate response to a complex
and uncertain situation?52 It was both and it was neither. The ASG was reactive and
reflective, ad hoc and organized, adaptive and directive. The next section explains
how.
Experimentalism
Bowles and the specialists turned the ASG’s ad hoc features—committees, cross-
placement, and matching—to learning and cumulative improvement by embedding
them within an experimentalist architecture. Experimentalism, as I use it here, is a
pragmatist theory of public administration under conditions of deep uncertainty,
“the inability to anticipate, much less assign a probability to future states of the
world—more directly than before.”53 In such situations, write Sabel and Simon,
“public officials are uncertain about both the definition of the problem and its solu-
tion . . . and stakeholders may find it difficult to map proposed solutions onto their
selfish interests.”54 “A variety of names serves to characterize [such] situations,”
wrote John Dewey. “They are disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, confused, full of
conflicting tendencies, obscure, etc. It is the situation that has these traits. We are
doubtful because the situation is inherently doubtful.”55 Bowles called the prob-
lems the advisory specialists were petitioned to address “anomalous”—unexplain-
able, that is, by current theories, deviations from common order, or marked by
constant motion.56
In experimentalist responses to troubled situations, public officials discover simul-
taneously what is possible and what is needed by attempting to change the world
around them and their habitual ways of handling it. Such “experiments” are treated
“diagnostically”—they reveal systemic weaknesses in current ways of doing things
and “opportunities for systemic improvement.” Moreover, because the stakes of paral-
ysis, prompted by habit or stalemate among stakeholders, are intolerable, Sabel and
Simon hypothesize that “people . . . [will] figure out a mode of collaboration even if
they have severe differences.” Prescriptively, then, experimentalism “emphasizes
Berk 13
stakeholder participation to elicit and reconcile the diverse views and interests of the
people affected by and knowledgeable about matters” under consideration.57
When effective, experimentalist governance produces cumulative improvement,
but not because experiments, such as those in the laboratory or in randomized clinical
trials, produce increasingly confident generalizations. Rather, learning from experi-
mentation is cumulative or “evolutionary”58 through continuous revision, integration,
and learning from difference. Initially incomplete understandings of the problems to
be addressed are “continually revised in light of shortcomings revealed by efforts to
address them.”59 Or, experiments devised to address partial problems, because they are
more tractable than the larger ones of which they are a part, are integrated more holisti-
cally over time with the results of other partial experiments.60 Or, local experiments
provide usable insights, through benchmarking and comparison, for learning in another
setting.61
Warfare Troubled by Novelty, Coevolution, and Urgency
The ASG was born into a situation troubled not merely by institutional conditions but
also by three technological and operational conditions. First, technologies and opera-
tions were new. Theory and experience were wanting. Second, technologies and oper-
ations were interdependent or coevolutionary. It was impossible to know precisely
how to proceed in one domain without knowing first what was necessary and possible
in the other. Third, time was compressed. If the ASG solved the first two problems too
slowly, their work was inconsequential. The experimentalist response to novelty was
to assign core specialists to accompany technologies throughout the deployment pro-
cess and to grant them a great deal of discretion. The response to coevolution was
mutual consultation and problem solving between scientists and soldiers. The response
to urgency was to collapse the linear process from research to deployment; experiment
at multiple phases; and learn recursively.
Novelty. Microwave radar and strategic bombing were new. When a British delegation
of scientists and soldiers brought the magnetron to the United States in 1940, search-
ing for expertise in mass production, the device was less than a year old.62 “For all its
power and promise,” writes the radar historian Robert Buderi, “no one on either side
of the Atlantic really . . . understood how the strange transmitter worked.”63 There
were endless problems to solve before mass production. They went from the most
theoretical—Was the physics of acoustics applicable to microwaves?64—to the practi-
cal—How can manufacturers fuse copper to glass or machine copper to tolerances
necessary to withstand the rigors of warfare?65 Bench science ruled in the Radiation
Laboratory, where its historian writes that experimentation was ad hoc,
“cut-and-try.”66
Whereas radar engineering faced a theory deficit in 1943, strategic bombing against
the sources of an enemy’s fighting capacity had nothing but theory. Developed rapidly
between 1880 and 1914, air power was initially conceived as a support to direct attacks
on enemy forces. As the range of aircraft grew in the interwar years, strategists
14 Politics & Society 00(0)
“envisaged deploying bombers directly against the sources of the enemy’s fighting
capacities: the industrial plants and shipyards, hundreds of miles behind the front
line.”67 But all this was theory in 1943. Strategic bombing, writes Kennedy, “lacked
historical experience.” Unlike previous theories of war, which were “distilled” “les-
sons” from hundreds of years of European land wars and naval warfare, “airpower
theorists could only look forward: there was no past. . . . Their visions . . . were wildly
conjectural. They were hypotheses. And, the theorists felt, they needed testing.”68
The ASG developed two experimentalist responses to novelty: continuity and dis-
cretion. By accompanying new technology from production through deployment,
advisory specialists ensured that learning in one phase could be applied in another. By
according specialists discretion in the field, Bowles told General MacArthur, they
could “visualize problems that might otherwise pass undiscovered.”69
Coevolution. The problem of novelty was compounded by the interdependent or coevo-
lutionary relationship between technology and military operations. It created a particu-
lar sort of Deweyan troubled situation: a predicament or antinomy of means and ends.70
It was impossible to know how to proceed technologically without first settling on
operational requirements, but it was impossible to settle on operational principles with-
out first knowing technological capabilities. Ansell calls these sorts of problem “com-
pound.” They are “ill formed” and hard to decompose into analytically tractable parts,
because they involve “high interaction” between multiple domains of activity.71
From a pragmatist perspective, compound problems are especially hard to solve
because it is difficult to formalize them neatly into means and ends by holding one
domain of activity constant. This was the flaw in the Bush/King controversy. Bush
held technological capacities constant in order to derive optimal tactics, while King
held tactics constant in order to apply technologies to improve their performance. But,
as Bowles learned, radar and military operations were “rapidly developing art[s],”
which no one knew how to reconcile. Or as the advisory specialist David Griggs put
it, the mutual adaptation of technology and operations presented a “mare’s nest” of
technical, operational, and monitoring difficulties, any one of which could subvert
military performance.72
Initially a partisan to the Bush/King debate, Bowles learned to see the flaws in mili-
tary and scientific thinking from the compound nature of the ASG’s work. He called
the former “equipment thinking”: the fallacy, that is, that technology is “merely . . . the
means to implementing [an] initial plan.” He called the latter “commodity” thinking:
the mirror fallacy that technological “gadgets” could be developed independently of
operational considerations and sold as “mere commodities” to the military. Either way,
the results were “disastrous,” especially in the midst of war, when rapid reconciliation
was imperative.73
Bowles called the ASG’s experimentalist response to the coevolution of technolo-
gies and operations “integration.”74 By this he meant hands-on collaboration in all
phases of a compound process, from joint planning and devising operational experi-
ments to tuning equipment and operations to one another, evaluating performance, and
working with command officers on tie-ins between technology and operations.
Berk 15
Urgency. War compresses time.75 The faster weaponry lost in battle is replaced or
technical problems solved, the greater the competitive advantage. As Kennedy
writes, the situation in 1943 was urgent, because the application of massive force in
the Atlantic and Europe was failing for want of solutions to intractable technical
problems. Unless the ASG tackled novelty and coevolution quickly, their work
would be for naught.
The experimentalist response to urgency was threefold: compress the lengthy linear
process from research to deployment by shortening and consolidating phases; experi-
ment at all stages, not just in research and testing; and circulate specialists along with
experiments to help design, monitor, revise, and learn from them. As Bowles put it,
urgency drove soldiers and scientists to send imperfect technologies into battle, effec-
tively collapsing testing and deployment into a single phase he called “experimental
procurement.” In retrospect, Bowles told Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington, had
the OSRD Microwave Committee not approved and the ASG not shepherded experi-
mental procurement, “we would scarcely have been able to apply radar to bombard-
ment, for we would have lost a year or two.”76
The following section explains how the elements of experimentalist governance
worked to integrate airborne radar and “blind bombing,” the practice of strategic
bombing at night or through heavy cloud cover.
Experimental Reconciliation of H2X Radar and Blind Bombing
In the fall of 1943, the AAF launched a strategic bombing campaign against
Germany, targeting shipyards, munitions production, oil refineries, ball bearing
factories, rail yards, and more. Early efforts had mixed results; while US bombers
destroyed a number of critical targets, American forces lost more in trained person-
nel and equipment than they gained. Worse, heavy cloud cover threatened to ground
American bombers, as winter loomed. Air Force meteorologists estimated that
opportunities for visual targeting over Germany would occur, on average, only 20
to 30 percent of the time. Blind bombing could improve performance, if only
microwave radar were ready. In anticipation of the German campaign, Generals
Arnold and Eaker had called on the ASG in February 1943 to evaluate the technical
prospects for blind bombing. Over the next eighteen months, the ASG developed a
four-part experimentalist program to reconcile microwave radar and blind bomb-
ing. It compressed the process of integration by collapsing stages in the process
from research and development to deployment. It fostered cumulative learning by
assigning specialists to accompany new technology from manufacture to deploy-
ment and back again to the laboratory and military headquarters. It turned ad hoc
committees of technologists, industrialists, and soldiers into forums to assess the
feasibility of early deployment, design operational experiments, and evaluate those
experiments for continuing adjustment and improvement. And it steadily improved
the integration of technology and operations by situating advisory specialists along-
side military planners, radar operators, and navigators in battle, and commanding
officers at all levels of operation.
16 Politics & Society 00(0)
Feasibility. In February 1943, the AAF high command called on the ASG and the Radi-
ation Laboratory to assess American progress on airborne microwave radar. The Radi-
ation Laboratory’s Microwave Committee convened an ad hoc committee of Rad Lab
technicians, advisory specialists, and operations officers from the Navy and the Air
Force. Bowles sent three core specialists, all of whom had been former Radiation
Laboratory employees: David Griggs, Norman Ramsay, and Dale Corson. The British,
the committee learned, had deployed a ten-centimeter mobile radar on the continent
without much success in destroying strategic targets in Germany. The Radiation Labo-
ratory was hard at work on a more powerful technology—a three-centimeter set called
the H2X, which promised to make blind bombing viable. Speaking for Bowles in his
role as OSRD Microwave administrator, the specialists assured participants from the
Radiation Laboratory that sufficient resources were forthcoming to speed develop-
ment. AAF officers agreed to plan for deployment in the fall. And by the early spring
the laboratory turned its full attention to H2X.77
Experimental manufacturing and installation. As skies clouded over Germany in the
fall of 1943, the Rad Lab closed in on a workable model. It still needed to test and
refine H2X and solve a pile of manufacturing problems. Was it physically possible
to compress these stages without sending a faulty technology into battle? The
OSRD Microwave Division had been considering this question for some time. The
interdependent relationship between research, development, and production had
dogged the radar program from the outset. More often than not, design solutions
raised manufacturing problems and manufacturing problems constrained design
possibilities. Add to this, the urgency to get experimental devices into theater oper-
ations and the long lead times that commercial vendors needed to “tool up” were
prohibitive.
Bowles’s multiple roles and strategic location enabled an experimental response to
the compression problem. Acting as an OSRD administrator, he convened an ad hoc
committee of industrial and Rad Lab engineers to consider alternatives. They decided
to build a small manufacturing facility nearby, but independent from, the Radiation
Laboratory. Funded by the OSRD, the “Model Shop” was designed to “speed” manu-
facturing research and “produce . . . Radiation Laboratory gear” faster than “a regular
manufacturing organization.”78 It would subcontract parts it could not make itself,
thereby extending the ASG’s experimentalist network and creating a new and “power-
ful source of critical war materiel.”79 As Bowles put it, this was to be a “hit-and-run
job shop,” whose proper emphasis was on small batches and “speed.”80
Bowles’s strategic location also made it possible to mobilize a diverse management
team. He recruited the Model Shop’s director from the OSRD Microwave Committee
and its oversight committee from the Radiation Laboratory, the OSRD, Sperry
Gyroscope Company, Bell Laboratories, Westinghouse, RCA, the Navy Bureau of
Ships, and the Army Signal Corps.
In the summer of 1943, the advisory specialists David Griggs and Louis Ridenour
relocated to the Model Shop, where they helped hand build fifteen H2X radar sets.
Griggs followed the sets to Langley Field, Virginia, where they would be installed in
Berk 17
Boeing B-17 bombers destined for the European theater. Griggs and the Langley engi-
neers improvised a quick and easy installation protocol. They removed the ball turret,
where forward gunners sat beneath the B-17’s nose, and replaced it with an H2X unit
in a retractable plastic sphere called a Radome. As legend has it, the first pilot to see a
Radome ridiculed it as “Mickey Mouse,” and H2X was dubbed “Mickey” ever after.81
Devising an operational experiment. What should the AAF do with a mere fifteen B-17s,
equipped with H2X? This was far too few to make a dent in the exercise of massive
force against Germany. At first blush, the scientific and military responses were
incommensurable. Science dictated a randomized controlled experiment. Create two
groups of B-17s, assign H2X to one, send them on missions under similar weather and
combat conditions, and compare performance. Military doctrine dictated massive
force: B-17s organized in enormous wing formations, which targeted strategic indus-
trial sites. Performance was evaluated by targets destroyed measured against costs to
equipment and personnel.
Assembled in an ad hoc committee for experimental design, scientists and soldiers
decomposed their respective protocols and recombined them into a syncretic experi-
ment called the Pathfinder Formation.82 Equip a single lead plane—the Pathfinder—
with H2X. Once the Pathfinder located a target, it would drop a cluster of flares, which
the bombers behind it would use for visual targeting.83 The Pathfinder formation was
more like what Ansell calls a “design experiment” than a randomized controlled
experiment. It introduced a test “into a real world situation and then closely followed
its interaction within this context. As feedback about the design [became] available,
the design [was] iteratively redesigned” to refine the intervention. And “research ques-
tions [were] updated as the intervention unfold[ed].”84 As the next two sections will
show, the Pathfinder experiment necessitated two procedural innovations to ensure
iterative learning: first, advisory specialists accompanied lead planes to diagnose
problems, make adjustments, and devise new experiments; and, second, reconnais-
sance planes monitored Pathfinder performance.
Experimentation and improvement in theater operations. Ridenour and Griggs accompa-
nied H2X into battle. They worked with radar operators, navigators, and bombers to
“tune” skills and technology to one another and with field commanders to evaluate
blind bombing.85 Moreover, scientists and soldiers discovered technological problems,
which necessitated unanticipated skills, and technological limitations, which caused
them to reevaluate blind bombing’s purpose.
Griggs accompanied the first Pathfinders over Germany. As he experienced the
intense noise, vibration, and freezing cold of winter bombing, he learned the best
laboratory tests provided little guidance for H2X settings and coordination with
other technologies. Side by side, operator and technologist learned to “detune” the
H2X to improve its image quality and target accuracy. They also learned how to
coordinate H2X readings with the Norden bombsight settings and pilot decisions,
by “adjusting” aircraft “speed,” bomb “drift,” and the “distance” at which payload
was released.86
18 Politics & Society 00(0)
Sending specialists into battle also quickened technological development by recom-
posing a lengthy linear procedure into a shorter recursive learning process. Deploying
new technologies experimentally meant that radar operators inevitably experienced
performance flaws, which only airborne specialists could explain. When the scientists
were stumped, moreover, they turned to the ASG’s network for apt expertise. Consider
the poor performance of H2X in rain and snow, which taxed Griggs’s diagnostic skills
because he was a geologist. Griggs reported the problem to Bowles, who recruited the
physicist H. N. Frank to work on it. Frank searched in vain for obvious hardware
flaws, hypothesizing instead that the culprit was static electricity. He reported his find-
ings to Bowles. Bowles, in turn, transposed the OSRD’s contractual network into a
knowledge file, in which he unearthed experiments at Bell Labs and General Electric
on the effects of “precipitation static” on radio performance. Bowles convened a diag-
nostic conference of AAF and industry engineers, who decided to test H2X transmit-
ting gear at a GE mountaintop facility. They learned that static electricity accumulated
on the “sharp edges” of “antennae wires and hardware.” Turning from his role as ASG
coordinator to OSRD administrator, Bowles contracted with the Aircraft Radio
Laboratory to rush a new line of hardware (which was also useful for aircraft de-icing)
into production.87
Placing dedicated specialists in theater operations, then, quickened the pace of per-
formance improvement through real-time and recursive problem solving. In the for-
mer, scientists and soldiers tuned technologies, skills, and situations during battle. In
the latter, when experimental deployment revealed technological problems, which
specialists were unable diagnose and solve, they searched the ASG network for apt
expertise. In doing so, specialists circumvented a long linear protocol (from research
and testing to deployment) with a much faster recursive process. Either way, sending
experimental technologies and specialists into battle together reconciled new tech-
nologies and military operations better and faster.
Monitoring. The ASG also helped the AAF create monitoring systems to track radar, tar-
geting, and bombing performance. Advisory specialists with expertise in high-speed
photography were dispatched to improve reconnaissance work in the European Theater.
And specialists with expertise in operations research data systems helped the AAF create
“log sheets” to “collect data . . . on the operational performance of radar and communica-
tion equipment” for use by operational commanders and the AAF Signal Corps.88
Although monitoring revealed information about how to improve radar and bomb-
ing performance, it also caused reevaluation of strategic bombing theories and goals.
This was especially true of reconnaissance data, which showed that blind bombing
was effective within a half-mile to one-mile radius under conditions of close to 100
percent cloud cover. Military theorists had been far too optimistic: blind bombing was
not, as they imagined, precision bombing. It was effective for large strategic targets,
like railroad yards, shipyards, or oil refineries. To be sure, specialists, radar operators,
and pilots learned to improve performance through “offset bombing,” the practice of
locating an unclear target by focusing on a nearby landmark with a clear radar signa-
ture.89 But even the best blind bombing performance resulted in lots of civilian
Berk 19
casualties.90 And that sparked an intractable normative debate. For some, civilian
deaths were a cost worth bearing, as long as blind bombing did not indiscriminately
target civilians. For others, the goal of blind bombing became as much about demoral-
izing German citizens as about destroying strategic targets. For others still, blind
bombing represented an unacceptable turn in American warfare.91 My point is not to
address the vital normative debate about the morality or necessity of blind bombing in
World War II. It is to show how experimentalist governance was not an efficiency
machine. Experimentalism is a process that places means and ends in provisional rela-
tionship, in which each is revised in the light of experience with the other. AAF strate-
gists and operational planners had little choice but to revise their goals in the light of
what they learned from reconnaissance monitoring.
Overcoming Impediments to Experimentalism
Experimentalism was fragile. It was easily disrupted by the reduction of the special-
ists’ role to military staff, by turf battles between the laboratory and the military, and
by existing institutional practices. The ASG devised two solutions: circulate special-
ists among laboratories, factories, and military sites and reconfigure networks to
bypass institutional impediments.
Circulation
The more specialists were situated in military sites, the greater the danger they would
fall prey to pressing demands and lose the productivity associated with their strategic
locations. Stateside planners would depend on them to formulate strategy. Field com-
manders would depend on them to plan operations, collect and interpret data, and
maintain technologies. Radar operators would depend on them to augment skills and
tune technologies. At best, Bowles told the AAF’s chief signal officer, Major General
William Rumbough, “these individuals will gradually fall into being just another pair
of hands,” mere staff, that is, to military planning and operations. Bowles had rejected
this role for fear it would undermine the strategic location, which made him so valu-
able. The same, he now said, was true for advisory specialists. Worse, the more the Air
Force attempted to hold on to temporary specialists, the more turf battles were likely
to break out with their home institutions. Either way, the transformation from advisory
specialist to military staff threatened all that made the ASG so useful. It undermined
the capacity of specialists to transpose the skills, practices, and knowledge from one
domain to another. It severed the specialist’s “multiconnectivity” to the office of the
Secretary of War, the OSRD, the laboratory, and industry. And it threatened to slow the
flow of knowledge between science, administration, and warfare.
The solution was circulation: “the requirement,” Bowles told Rumbough, “that . . .
advisory specialists not stay in one place too long but return . . . to their home bases in
industry or elsewhere and there serve, so to speak, as impedance matching devices.”
Only in this way can “advisors look ahead and assist in recommending means for cop-
ing with specific problems while they themselves go on to new ones.”92
20 Politics & Society 00(0)
Bowles’s technical metaphor warrants analysis. Electrical impedance is the measure
of opposition a circuit presents to a current when a voltage is applied. Impedance match-
ing is the practice of designing the input or output of an electrical load to maximize the
power transfer or minimize the signal reflection (by which power is sent back to its
source) from the load. Telephone systems matched impedances through the device of a
two-wire circuit in and out of a central exchange, in order to minimize echo (due to sig-
nal reflection) along long-distance lines.93 In Bowles’s metaphor, it was necessary to
match skills and situations and circulate advisory specialists to maximize the benefit of
their participation and minimize signal reflection—the echo by which scientists and sol-
diers simply reflected their home domain habits and knowledge back to the location
where they started. If, instead, they reflected back what they had learned, they were
likely to augment and speed the gains in learning and improvement.
As Bowles saw it, the gains of impedance matching were calculable. Leaving a
specialist on “one job indefinitely, we have merely added one minute increment to the
total effect,” but we will have “failed to make the experience” from working on “spe-
cialized problems” of general applicability widely available to the military, the labora-
tory, or industry. If instead, specialists “visualize[d]” problems for which their
replacements should be recruited, and then “spend some time” in AAF headquarters,
industry, or a new theater, there would be a “greater dividend on investment . . . a
multiplication of his contribution.”94 Circulation, in short, reproduced the ASG’s stra-
tegic location in the network of science, industry, and warfare; checked the tendency
to turf battles; and sped the process of adaptation, innovation, and improvement.
Network Reconfiguration
The second impediment to experimentalism and organizational fitness was resource
blockage. When the ASG attempted to recruit core specialists for a second major proj-
ect—reconciling SCR-584 mobile ground radar with air-to-ground operations—it
found that existing institutional rules stemmed the flow of personnel. Padgett and
Powell theorize why this sort of resource blockage is typical of new organizations. In
order to stabilize and thrive, new organizations must attract people and resources from
the domains of activity from which they were formed. But that occurs only when orga-
nizational innovation feeds back into those domains and reshapes current protocols
and systems of valuation (or what Powell and Sandholz call “registers of worth”).95
The ASG considered, but rejected, this solution to resource blockage, because it was
too slow. It was quicker to reconfigure the network, by tinkering with the careers of
strategically located administrators.
In the fall of 1944, Bowles complained to Griggs that the specialists’ work on
mobile air-to-ground radar (SCR-584) was flagging. The program failed to “pay divi-
dends” comparable to blind bombing (H2X). Griggs defended the specialists. Poor
performance was not, as Bowles charged, for lack of skill or effort. It was caused by a
resource blockage, caused by a conflict between the ASG’s experimentalist procedures
and OSRD rules. This diagnosis was not obvious to someone in Bowles’s position,
wrote Griggs. It necessitated analysis from the wild, where a “mare’s nest” of problem
Berk 21
solving had “crystalized” into a four-stage process in the H2X program.96 Griggs out-
lined the architecture of this process and used it to compare performance in the H2X
and SCR-584 programs.
Griggs classified the work of advisory specialists in four phases: (1) equipment
modifications to meet operational requirements; (2) training theater personnel; (3)
analyzing results for weaknesses in equipment, operational procedures, or command
utilization of equipment; and (4) advising officers at all levels on how to improve the
operational employment or organizational tie-in of equipment. Each phase was “vitally
necessary,” “equally important,” and required roughly the same number of “man-
hours of work per month.”97 Failure in any one would subvert the whole.
Comparing the H2X and SCR-584 programs revealed that performance differentials
were caused by differences in the “distribution of effort” to each phase in the process.
In H2X, specialists worked as a team, under the direction of a single leader, “intimately
tied in with the Army,” “on all phases of the problem.” They “pitch[ed] in to train the
operators, fix the radar sets, pick the most likely target and aiming point for a mission,
prepare briefing material, analyze the results of previous missions, or whatever seemed
to make the H2X effective.”98
By contrast, the ASG shared responsibility with the British Branch of the Radiation
Laboratory (BBRL), which followed administrative not experimentalist protocol.
Under contract to the OSRD, BBRL’s role was limited to “ensur[ing] the technical
reliability and design of the equipment [was] adequate to meet operational needs”
(phase 1). ASG specialists shared responsibility for phase 1 and executed the rest of
the process alone. The problem with the SCR-584 program, then, lay in the “maldis-
tribution” of personnel. The BBRL had sixty “competent” specialists to devote to a
single phase, while the ASG had two full-time specialists for all four phases. This not
only overburdened the ASG; it impeded learning. Isolated from the full range of prob-
lems, BBRL technicians suffered from “incomplete comprehension” of the experi-
mental process. Though no less skilled, Griggs wrote, “they do not live with these
problems and have them thrust down their throat morning, noon and night.”
“Misdistribution of effort,” Griggs informed Bowles, not only hobbled SCR-584; it
undermined progress on the ASG’s microwave early warning and microwave beacon
programs.99
The root cause of maldistribution lay in the conflict between registers of worth in
the ASG and the OSRD. The OSRD, recall, was part of an administrative domain that
organized the flow of resources between science, industry, and the military by con-
tract. Although it repeatedly renegotiated its contracts in response to urgency and
uncertainty, officials in the Bureau of the Budget cajoled the OSRD to live up to its
ex ante obligations.100 Sometimes they succeeded. In the BBRL’s case, this blocked
the flow of resources to experimentalist governance. Compare the ASG. Although it
also recruited specialists from OSRD contractors, experimentalism revalued the
ASG’s system of valuation. As Griggs wrote, the ASG measured its worth in “divi-
dends in actual operation” and the “lives of American soldiers saved.” These
“transcend[ed] . . . all legalistic definitions of contracts.” The work of advisory spe-
cialists cashed out not in “taxpayer’s money, but in tens of thousands of lives.”101
22 Politics & Society 00(0)
Although Griggs considered a more durable institutional solution to the problem of
maldistribution, he knew urgency demanded an expedient response. In the former,
merging the BBRL into the ASG under the authority of the Secretary of War would
unblock the flow of resources and stabilize the ASG by diffusing experimentalism
more thoroughly into the administrative domain. But Griggs thought institutional
reform was too slow or too likely to fail. He proposed to reconfigure the experimental-
ist network by altering the strategic location of BBRL’s director instead. Make “one
man the Director of BBRL and at the same time the senior member of the Advisory
Specialist Group.” Although this solution failed to institutionalize experimentalism in
the administrative domain, it would break the logjam of resources from the BBRL by
realigning its practice to experimentalist ends. Within a month of Griggs’s proposal,
the Director of BBRL, John Trump (uncle of the forty-fifth president of the United
States), was appointed to a leadership position in the Advisory Specialist Group and
sorely needed specialists flowed into the SCR-584 program.102
Conclusion
The Advisory Specialist Group thrived, accomplished a lot, and opened a channel to
the problem-solving state. Secretary Stimson reported that by 1945 there were seven-
teen advisory groups deployed in AAF locations around the world, employing thirty-
two mathematicians, twenty-one radio and radar engineers, fourteen terminal
ballisticians, eleven physicists, and some hundred other specialists. Surely, this under-
estimates the number of advisory specialists, because it fails to count temporary per-
sonnel, corralled to address specific problems.103 Among its many accomplishments,
the ASG’s work on blind bombing not only improved winter bombing over Germany
but helped clear the beaches in Normandy for a successful D-Day landing. Specialists
worked with the Army Signal Corps to reconcile new communications technologies
and military operations in North Africa. They accompanied microwave radar, the
Norden bombsight, short-range navigation (SHORAN) radar, microwave early warn-
ing, and microwave beacon radar into theater operations, where they worked with
soldiers to adjust technologies and operations to one another. And, as Allied attention
turned to the Pacific, the ASG corralled specialists from Douglas Aircraft to reconfig-
ure the B-29, so it could deliver atomic bombs over Japan.104
At war’s end, AAF General Henry Arnold and Edward Bowles mounted a cam-
paign against the demobilization of the ASG’s network and experimentalist capacities.
In the aftermath of World War II, they argued, US security depended on advantages in
intercontinental warfare, which required an independent Air Force devoted to techno-
logical superiority and bridging institutions to reconcile technological, operational,
and strategic innovations.105 Arnold and Bowles enlisted engineers from Douglas
Aircraft to redeploy the ASG’s network and experimentalist capacities into Project
RAND. Housed in Douglas facilities, under an open-ended contract to the newly
formed Air Force, RAND became a site where protocols, skills, and practices for inte-
grating intercontinental technology and warfare were developed, tested, and debated.
RAND assembled a network of engineers, scientists, and social scientists to reconcile
Berk 23
the development of long-range bombers, missiles, and nuclear weapons with opera-
tional protocols and grand strategy.106 RAND researchers pioneered the study of tech-
nological innovation and designed management systems, which promised to hold the
military-industrial complex accountable. In doing so, they unleashed a debate over
state building, which resonated with the Bush/King controversy. Like Bush and
Bowles’s initial promise to rationalize antisubmarine warfare through hierarchy and
operations research, RAND systems analysts promised to gain civilian control over
runaway military spending by rationalizing the relationship between budgeting and
research, development, operations, and strategy. They met with resistance from stu-
dents and practitioners of technological innovation from RAND, universities, and the
Air Force.107
We still know little about how RAND’s bridging work and the controversy it pro-
voked shaped the fate, form, and governing procedures of the problem-solving state.
If this study of the ASG is indicative, however, continuing research on the problem-
solving state will necessitate empirical and theoretical innovation. We will have to pay
more attention to strategically located bridging organizations that organize experimen-
tal processes. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National
Institutes of Health’s organization of scientists in university and industry laboratories
are good examples that follow in the ASG’s lineage. But bridging agencies before
World War II, such as the Federal Trade Commission’s Trade Practice Division or the
Department of Agriculture’s experiment stations, prefigure the ASG.108 We will also
have to develop analytical tools sensitive to recombinatory processes of organizational
genesis, the development of state-sponsored networks, and the workings of experi-
mentalist procedures.
If the ASG’s genesis is indicative, a state born in response to compound, urgent, and
uncertain problems may come to life through relational processes, which look little
like conventional state building in the United States. We will have to learn how to trace
the relational processes between diverse domains of activity that fabricate new admin-
istrative species in the state. In these processes, existing institutional practices will
become resources for recombination, rather than mere constraints on innovative
action. And, state builders will be distinguished by their multiple roles, strategic loca-
tions, and the relational processes that flow through their careers, rather than by their
qualities or actions. That is not to suggest that we abandon attention to creative agency,
only that it will be more likely to take the form of reflexive learning than institutional
entrepreneurship in the problem-solving state.
If the ASG’s form is indicative, a state that recombines skills, communication pro-
tocols, and practices from incongruous domains of activity to solve compound prob-
lems may take the form of a network, rather than a hierarchy. In order to thrive,
ameliorate turf battles, and hasten the pace of learning, a networked state will develop
protocols to ensure the flow of resources into bridging organizations and the circula-
tion of personnel across diverse domains of activity.
If the ASG’s procedures are indicative, a state that solves novel, compound, uncer-
tain, and urgent problems will devise very different procedures from those devoted to
war mobilization for massive force, resolving class conflict in mass production, or
24 Politics & Society 00(0)
delivering uniform social services. It will enlist stakeholders from multiple domains of
activity to craft joint field experiments and create information systems and delibera-
tive procedures to monitor, interpret, and adapt to what they learn. Those procedures
will be both substantive and organizational. They will teach public administrators and
networked stakeholders how to reconcile incongruous practices, improve perfor-
mance, and reorganize networks in response to unanticipated problems.
The experience of the Advisory Specialist Group, in short, prompts us to look anew
and think differently about postwar state building in the United States. If we accept the
challenge, the evolution of the problem-solving state will continue to emerge from the
shadows and contribute to the study of diversity in state-building processes, organiza-
tional forms, and governing procedures.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Chris Ansell, Hyeong-ki Kwon, Gary Herrigel, Mark Wilson, and the editors of
Politics & Society for their extraordinary help and encouragement with this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for
funding research for this article.
Notes
1. Fred Block, “Swimming against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State
in the United States,” Politics & Society 36 (2008), 169–206; Fred Block and Matthew R.
Keller, eds., State of Innovation (London: Routledge, 2016); Craig W. Thomas, “Habitat
Conservation Planning,” in Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, eds., Deepening Democracy
(New York: Verso, 2003), 144–74; Bradley C. Karkkainen, “Toward Ecologically Sustainable
Democracy,” in Fung and Wright, Deepening Democracy, 208–24.
2. Historians also overlook the ASG. For brief accounts, see Daniel J. Kelves, The Physicists
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978), 318–20; and Martin J. Collins, Cold War Laboratory,
RAND, the Air Force and the American State, 1945–1950 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian,
2002), 20–22.
3. Bartholomew Sparrow, From the Outside In (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996); Mark Wilson, Destructive Creation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016); Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy (New York: Da Capo, 1973).
4. Paul Kennedy, Engineers of Victory (New York: Random House, 2013), xix–xxiv, 71–73,
382–83.
5. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order,” in Laurence
Dodd and Calvin Jillson, eds., The Dynamics of American Politics (Boulder, CO:
Westview, 1994), 311–30; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American
Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108–18.
Berk 25
6. Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
7. Stephen Skowronek and Michael Glassman, eds., Formative Acts (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, eds.,
Explaining Institutional Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8. David Syrett, The Defeat of the German U-Boats (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1994); Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, 6–11.
9. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 41–47; Edwin Amenta and Theda Skocpol, “Taking Exception: Explaining
the Distinctiveness of American Public Policies in the Last Century,” in Francis G.
Castles, ed., The Comparative History of Public Policy (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1989), 292–333; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982); Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda
Skocpol, “Introduction: Understanding American Social Politics,” in Margaret Weir, Ann
Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–36; Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class
Formation,” in I. Katznelson and A. Zolberg, eds., Working Class Formation in Western
Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–41.
10. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 246–47.
11. Roger E. Bilstein, Orders of Magnitude: A History of the NACA and NASA, 1915–
1990 (Washington, DC: NASA Office of the Management of Scientific and Technical
Information Division, 1989); James Phinny Baxter III, Scientists against Time (New
York: Little, Brown, 1948), 13–16; Collins, Cold War Laboratory, 2–13.
12. Kelves, The Physicists, 293–301; Robert Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 114–16.
13. Kelves, The Physicists, 293–301; Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World, 114–
16; Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War (New York: Little, Brown,
1948), 26–27; Larry Owens, “Vannevar Bush,” in Frederic Holmes, ed., Dictionary of
Scientific Biography, vol. 17 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 134–38.
14. Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1973); Skowronek, Building a New American State, 238–42.
15. Gregory Hooks “The Weakness of Strong Theories: The US State’s Dominance of the
World War II Investment Process,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 1 (1993):
37–53; Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex (Champaign-Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991).
16. G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier (New York: Free Press, 1997), 112–36; David
Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1966), 50–79; Buderi, The Invention That Changed
the World, 49; John Burchard, MIT in World War II (New York: John Wiley, 1948), 219;
Baxter, Scientists against Time, 13–16.
17. Warren Weaver, Scene of Change (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 85–89; Warren Weaver,
“Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36 (1948); Philip Mirowski, Machine
Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 175.
18. Philip Morse, In at the Beginnings: A Physicist’s Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
1977), 177–78; Keith R. Tidman, The Operations Evaluation Group (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press, 1984), 36–37; Mirowski, Machine Dreams, 171–73.
19. Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World, 162.
26 Politics & Society 00(0)
20. Stephen Howarth, To Shining Sea: A History of the United States Navy (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
21. E.J. King, Memorandum to General Marshall, Subject: Antisubmarine Operations—
Protection of Atlantic Shipping, June 21, 1942, Edward Lindley Bowles Papers, Library
of Congress, Washington, DC, box 31, folder 7; Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehall,
Fleet Admiral King (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952), 457.
22. Quoted in Montgomery C. Meigs, Slide Rules and Submarines (Washington, DC:
National Defense University Press, 1990), 91. On the failure of science and technol-
ogy to affect the course of Allied defense against German U-boats in World War I, see
Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange, 14.
23. Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World, 163; Meigs, Slide Rules and Submarines.
24. Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World, 144–48; Collins, Cold War Laboratory,
19; E.L. Bowles to Frank D. Lewis, September 11, 1942, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 8.
25. E.L. Bowles, Memorandum to Secretary of War, Subject: Vitalization of ASV Submarine
Destruction Program, May 20, 1942, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 7. See also sub-
sequent summary of the proposal in Bowles, Memorandum to the Secretary of War,
Subject: A. Submarine Destruction Program, August 7, 1942, Bowles Papers, box 31,
folder 7.
26. E.L. Bowles, Memo to the Secretary of War, Subject: B. JNW Report Section III-Navy
Allocation, August 7, 1942, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 7. For an excellent summary
of Bowles’s participation in the antisubmarine program, see also Allen V. Hazeltine, “A
Summary of Activities, Office of Edward L Bowles, Expert Consultant to the Secy of
War and Special Consultant to the Commanding General, Army Air Forces, April 1942
through August 1945,” November 1, 1945, Bowles Papers, box 43, folder 3, 6–8.
27. Meigs, Slide Rules and Submarines, 97, 137.
28. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 85–120, 212–47.
29. Stanley Goldberg, “Inventing a Climate of Opinion: Vannevar Bush and the Decision to
Build the Bomb,” Isis 83, no. 3 (September 1992): 429–52.
30. Hierarchical state-building efforts faced similar obstacles at the dawn of the Cold War.
See Aaron Friedberg, “American Anti-statism and the Founding of the Cold War State,”
in Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 239–66; Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the
Garrison State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
31. The Bush/King controversy also resulted in a naval organization like the ASG called the
Anti-submarine Warfare Operations Research Group. On this parallel process, see Gerald
Berk, “State Building by Mediation: The US Anti-submarine Warfare Group in World
War II,” Polity, forthcoming.
32. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, “Historical Institutionalism in Political Science,” in
Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner, Political Science (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000);
Finegold and Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal.
33. John Padgett and Walter Powell, “The Problem of Emergence,” in John Padgett and
Walter Powell, eds., The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–29.
34. Others make a similar point about the role of recombination in institutional change. I draw
on Padgett and Powell because they conceptualize mechanisms of recombination, which
are especially relevant to the origins of the ASG. See Gerald Berk and Dennis Galvan,
“How People Experience and Change Institutions: A Field Guide to Creative Syncretism,”
Theory & Society 38 (November 2009): 543–80; Gary Herrigel, “Institutionalists at the
Berk 27
Limits of Institutionalism: A Constructivist Critique of Two Volumes by Wolfgang Streeck
and Kozo Yamamura,” Social Economic Review 3 (2005), 559–67; David Stark and Laszlo
Bruzst, Postsocialist Pathways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Colin
Crouch, Capitalist Diversity and Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
35. Walter Powell and Kurt Sandholtz, “Chance, Necessité, et Naiveté: Ingredients to
Create a New Organizational Form,” in Padgett and Powell, eds., The Emergence of
Organizations and Markets, 379–433.
36. Padgett and Powell, “The Problem of Emergence,” 12.
37. Andrew Abbott, “The Historicality of Individuals,” Social Science History 29, no. 1
(2005): 1–13. For a productive critique of my account of institutional order and change
(creative syncretism) for paying too little attention to the location of agents in ecological
processes, which influenced this article, see Chris Ansell, “Ecological Explanation,” in
Gerald Berk, Dennis Galvan, and Victoria Hattam, eds., Political Creativity (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 55–77.
38. William Thomas, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940–
1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 75.
39. Larry Owens, “The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World
War: Vannevar Bush and the Office of Scientific Research and Development,” Business
History Review, 68, no. 4 (1994). On relational contracts, see Stuart Macauly, “Non-
contractual Relationships in Business,” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 55–69;
Ian Macneil, “Relational Contract,” Wisconsin Law Review (1985): 483–525. On the role
of “relational work” in economic exchange, more generally, see Viviana Zelizer, “How
I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean?,” Politics &
Society 40, no. 2 (2012): 145–74.
40. Burchard, MIT in World War II, 218, 220, 226–27; Collins, Cold War Laboratory, 19–20.
41. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 5, 88–92.
42. Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, 99–116.
43. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 63–73; Collins, Cold War Laboratory, 19–20.
44. Thomas, Rational Action, 76; Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 60–68, 155–61.
45. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 25–27.
46. Ibid., 25–29.
47. E.L. Bowles to Frank D. Lewis, September 11, 1942, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 8,
emphasis mine.
48. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 30–33, 74–76, 81–111.
49. Ibid., 44–60.
50. E.L. Bowles to S.J. Simmons, “NDRC Radiation Laboratory,” Cambridge, January 29,
1945, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 1.
51. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 84–87, 115–20.
52. Robert Waterman Jr., Adhocracy: The Power to Change (Knoxville, TN: Whittle Direct,
1990); Timothy E. Dolan, “Revisiting Adhocracy,” Journal of Future Studies 15, no. 2
(November 2010): 33–50.
53. Charles Sabel, Gary Herrigel, and Peer Hull Kristensen, “Regulation under Uncertainty:
The Co-evolution of Industry and Regulation,” Regulation & Governance (2017): 2.
54. Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon, “Minimalism and Experimentalism in the
Administrative State,” Georgetown Law Journal 100 (2011): 82.
55. John Dewey, “The Pattern of Inquiry,” in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works of
John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 12, The Logic of Inquiry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2008), 109.
28 Politics & Society 00(0)
56. E.L. Bowles to Major General William S. Rumbough, February 6, 1945, Bowles Papers,
box 31, folder 1; “Special Consultant to the Commanding General, AAF, Dr. Edward L.
Bowles,” Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 3, 88–92; E.L. Bowles to General MacArthur,
February 26, 1945, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 1.
57. Simon and Sabel, “Minimalism and Experimentalism,” 80.
58. Christopher Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
59. Sabel, Herrigel, and Kristensen, “Regulation under Uncertainty,” 2; Charles F. Sabel and
Jonathan Zeitlin, “Learning from Difference: The New Architecture of Experimentalist
Governance in the EU,” European Law Journal 14 (2008): 271–327.
60. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy, 84–85, 88–89, 93.
61. Sabel and Zeitlin, “Learning from Difference.”
62. Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange, 50–79; E.G. Bowen, Radar Days (Bristol: Adam
Hilger, 1987), 150–63.
63. Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World, 49.
64. Morse, In at the Beginnings.
65. Otto J. Scott, The Creative Ordeal: The Story of Raytheon (New York: Athenaeum, 1974),
107–17, 127–28; Don Murray, “Percy Spencer and His Itch to Know,” Reader ’s Digest
(August 1958), 114.
66. Burchard, MIT in World War II, 219–21.
67. Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, 79–82.
68. Ibid.
69. Bowles to General MacArthur, February 26, 1945, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 1.
70. John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 14, Human Nature and Conduct, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (1922; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 28, 155.
71. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy, 97.
72. Bowles to General MacArthur; Dave Griggs to Bowles, October 8, 1944, Bowles Papers,
box 33, folder 4.
73. Bowles to Major General William Rumbough, February 6, 1945, Bowles Papers, box 31,
folder 1.
74. Ibid.
75. Philip Scranton, “Urgency, Uncertainty and Innovation: Building Jet Engines in Cold
War America,” Management & Organizational History 1, no. 2 (March 2006): 127–57.
76. E.L. Bowles, Memorandum to Symington, October 2, 1946, Bowles Papers, box 31,
folder 5.
77. Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World, 182–89.
78. E.L. Bowles to Dr. Karl T. Compton, “Memorandum on Model Shop,” January 29, 1942,
Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 7, 7.
79. Ibid., 15.
80. Ibid.
81. “How H2X ‘Mickey’—Got Its Name,” 482nd Bombardment Group; online at http://
www.482nd.org/h2x-mickey.
82. Berk and Galvan, “How People Experience and Change Institutions”; Gerald Berk and
Dennis Galvan, “Processes of Creative Syncretism,” in Berk, Galvan, and Hattam, eds.,
Political Creativity, 29–54.
83. Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 235–36;
Charles W. MacArthur, Operations Analysis in the US Army Eighth Air Force in World
War II (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1990), 69–71.
Berk 29
84. Chris Ansell, “What Is a Democratic Experiment?,” Contemporary Pragmatism 9, no. 2
(December 2012): 163–64, 172.
85. On “tuning” technologies and social processes, see Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of
Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
86. Marvin Laufer, 603rd Squadron Navigator, “BTO, PFF, H2S, H2X, Mickey: Enter
the Mystical World of Radar Navigational Bombing,” 389th Bomb Group Memorial
Association; online at http://www.398th.org/FlakNews/Articles/Laufer_Radar.html. On
Griggs, see Ivan A. Getting and John M. Christie, David Tressel Griggs, 1911–1974: A
Biographical Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1994); and John
J. O’Neil, “How ‘Mickey Mouse’ Helped Win the War,” 482nd Bombardment Group;
online at http://www.482nd.org/how-mickey-mouse-helped-win-the-war.
87. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 89–91.
88. W.L. Everett, Director Operational Research Group AAF to Directorate of Planning, re:
Proposed Plan for the extended Activities of the Operational Research Group, Office of
the Chief Signal Officer, January 5, 1942, Bowles Papers, box 31, folder 8.
89. Frederick Fooy, One of Thousands: A Navigator in the European Air War (Lulu
Publishing, 2015), 79–83.
90. MacArthur, Operations Analysis in the US Army Eighth Air Force, 68–71.
91. Miller, Masters of the Air, 234–35; Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, 138–39.
92. Bowles to Major General William Rumbough, February 6, 1945, Bowles Papers, box 31,
folder 1; italics mine.
93. Rudolf L. Graf, Modern Dictionary of Electronics, 7th ed. (Boston: Newnes, 1999),
364–65.
94. Bowles to Major General William Rumbough.
95. Padgett and Powell, “The Problem of Emergence,” 7–11; Powell and Sandholtz, “Chance,
Necessité, et Naiveté,” 385–86.
96. Dave Griggs to Bowles, October 8, 1944, Bowles Papers, box 33, folder 4.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Owens, “The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World War.”
101. Griggs to Bowles, October 8, 1944.
102. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities.”
103. Kelves, The Physicists, 320.
104. Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 39, 101–4, 121. On the ASG’s work with the Signal
Corps, see Memorandum from E.L. Bowles to Eisenhower, “Military Communications
and National Security,” March 21, 1947, box 31, folder 6. On the ASG’s work on the
B-29, see Memorandum for Bowles, “Special Bombardment Interim Report,” Bowles
Papers, October 7, 1944, box 34, folder 8; and E.L. Bowles, Memorandum to Arnold,
August 28, 1944, Bowles Papers, box 33, folder 3.
105. Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1977); Hazeltine, “A Summary of Activities,” 178.
106. Collins, Cold War Laboratory.
107. David R. Jardini, “Out of the Blue Yonder: The Rand Corporation’s Diversification into
Social Welfare Research, 1946–1968” (PhD dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University,
1996); David A. Hounshell, “The Medium Is the Message, or How Context Matters:
The RAND Corporation Builds an Economics of Innovation,” in Agatha C. Hughes and
30 Politics & Society 00(0)
Thomas P. Hughes, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000), 255–310; Ralph Sanders, The Politics of Defense Analysis (New York: Dunellen,
1973).
108. Block, “Swimming against the Current”; Erica Fuchs, “DARPA Does Moore’s Law,” in
Block and Keller, eds., State of Innovation, 133–48; Gerald Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and
the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), 115–215; H.C. Kornbluh, E.M. Law, and W.P. Meyer, State Agricultural
Experiment Stations: A History of Research Policy and Procedure, USDA Miscellaneous
Publication no. 94 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, May 1962).
Author Biography
Gerald Berk (gberk@uoregon.edu) is professor of political science at the University of Oregon.
He is the author of Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1877–
1914 (Johns Hopkins University Press; recipient of the 1994 APSA Greenstone Award for Best
Book in History and Politics) and Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition,
1900–1932 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and coeditor of Political Creativity:
Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
