4 - Building Polaris

Summary

Our religion was to build Polaris.

Admiral Raborn.

By the beginning of 1957 a combination of technological advances (or predictions of advances) and astute political manoeuvring had created the Polaris programme. Navy opinion remained sceptical, however. At a briefing of senior flag officers following the approval of Polaris, not one was enthusiastic about the Navy taking on Polaris: ‘Most of them felt that it would be a waste of money, a tremendous drain on the Navy's budget, and that it would not be successful’.

As director of SPO, Admiral Raborn continued to see his role as managing ‘the outside world’. The choice of Washington for SPO's headquarters reflected his judgement of where the success of the programme would be decided. It was the politics, both of the government and of the Navy, which had to be engineered first and foremost. ‘Get the money, and keep other people off our program managers’ backs', was how Raborn saw his job. In his classic study, Harvey Sapolsky notes four strategies which contributed to SPO's bureaucratic success in doing this: differentiation of a special role, which was represented as of crucial national importance; co-optation of potential critics and disruptive elements; moderation of short-term goals in order to maximize long-term support; and managerial innovation in order to create an aura of efficiency.