Abstract

"Managing Military Work: Time and Motion Study in the Cold War U.S. Army"

AJ Murphy, Columbia University (ajm2221@columbia.edu)

In 1951, The U.S. Army launched the Work Simplification Program, a management training initiative that taught labor control methods like time-motion study and office layout optimization to supervisors employed by the military. Over the next two decades, the Army would teach modern business methods to tens of thousands of its employees, including the local nationals who made up the vast majority of their overseas civilian workforce in what has come to be called America’s “empire of bases.”

This paper contextualizes the resurgence of time and motion study in the military in the 1950s. After almost forty years, Congress lifted a ban on the use of time study methods in the military. With the help of consultants, management staff in the military made sure that time study methods were used broadly across the military’s activities. I argue that comptroller enthusiasm about early twentieth-century management engineering methods can be explained in part as a reaction to the changing labor force of the Cold War military.

The historical significance of labor control practices in the military derives in part from its status as the biggest employer in the world. As an employer of between two million and six million people at any given moment throughout the Cold War period, the military’s labor policy and practices had implications for the work experience of a large population. While the military is often thought of as a separate world of weapons and boot camp, studying it with the tools of business history is important to understand the real extent of the influence it had on ostensibly civilian economic and political phenomena.