Putting the military back into the history of the military-industrial complex: the management of technological innovation in the U.S. Army, 1945-1960.

In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower, the Army Chief of Staff, established the Research and Development (R&D) Division on the War Department General Staff to expedite major technological breakthroughs in weapons technology. This goal, based on the separation of the management of R&D from procurement, captured the Army's preference for qualitative rather than quantitative superiority on the battlefield, but it threatened to upend entrenched methods of incremental product improvement under way in the Army's supply organizations, collectively called the technical services. The division's brief existence (it ceased operations in 1947) contrasted sharply with the longevity of the Ordnance Department's in-house manufacturing arsenals; for more than a century they had exploited synergies between R&D and production to turn out new weapons mass-produced in industry.

Government science in postwar America: Henry A. Wallace, Edward U. Condon, and the transformation of the National Bureau of Standards, 1945-1951.

In the fall of 1945, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace handpicked Edward Condon, a respected theoretical physicist, to become director of the National Bureau of Standards. Already regarded by many academic and industrial scientists as a second-rate research institution, the Bureau had deteriorated further during the Great Depression. An ardent New Dealer who favored government action to prevent anticompetitive behavior in the marketplace, Wallace claimed that giant corporations leveraged their extensive patent holdings and research capabilities to manipulate markets and restrict competition at the expense of smaller firms without similar resources.