The Science of Defence: Security, Research, and the North in Cold War Canada

This dissertation examines the development and implementation of federally funded scientific defence research in Canada during the earliest decades of the Cold War. With a particular focus on the creation and subsequent activities of the Defence Research Board (DRB), Canada’s first peacetime military science organization, the history covered here crosses political, social, and environmental themes pertinent to a detailed analysis of defence-related government activity in the Canadian North. Three contextual chapters on the history of federal defence research in Canada provide the foundation for a close study of defence research projects pursued and supported by the Canadian government. The dissertation focuses on northern Canada to explore and explain key developments in the history of tripartite defence relations between Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom while also providing new perspectives on the impact of the Cold War in Canada. To meet the impending challenges of the early postwar period, senior officials in the Canadian defence establishment decided to create the Defence Research Board and involve select scientists in discussions about policy for science and defence in North. The decision to include scientists in the policymaking process was a deliberate and functional approach that helped the Canadian government secure and strengthen its security partnership with the United Kingdom and the United States during the early Cold War. When senior officials championed science as a means to bolster Canada’s commitment to Western security, the Defence Research Board became the primary vehicle to achieve this policy aim. Select scientists obtained the political power to design, implement, and administer policies for the distribution and use of federal funds made available for scientific defence research. This was a calculated move by senior Canadian officials who wanted to further bilateral defence relations with the United States while maintaining close ties to the United Kingdom. Including scientists in government allowed the Canadian defence establishment to focus its limited resources on specific fields of research in which Canada could leverage geography and “expertise” to fulfill its political agenda for postwar security and defence in the North

Creating the capacity for innovation : U.S. Army 1945-1960

This dissertation argues that in the years immediately following the Second World War, the United States Army created a set of intellectual, organizational, and ultimately institutional processes, which are essential to military innovation. Prior to the Second World War, innovation in the army had remained isolated, ad hoc, and difficult to harness towards a common goal. That changed substantively in the period after the war. Unlike most studies of military innovation, this work does not follow the efforts of a single genius but rather three interrelated activities that when fully developed provide the institutional foundations for an ability to change. First, the army adopted the field of operations research as an essential element of military analysis and decision-making. Second, the army created a set of activities known collectively as 'combat developments', where new ideas moved through a deliberate process of deliberation, analyses, testing, and prototyping in order to deliver a new military capability to the field. Finally, this dissertation describes the modernization of officer education and the change in doctrine development from a focus on near-term doctrine for a mobilizing force to forward-looking doctrine appropriate to a standing force in a time of technological change. Most historians have judged the army of early Cold War to be an innovative failure with a readiness crisis at the beginning of the Korean War, a spectacular failure with its Pentomic concept, and its supposed inability to anticipate and prepare for large-scale counterinsurgencies in the 1960s. However, as this dissertation demonstrates, it was during this same period that more fundamental changes occurred that set the pattern for how the institution would change over the course of the remainder of the century