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To attract top men for research. General Dynamics has set out to build what Vice President Johnson calls "a monopoly on brains,'' now employs about 22,000 engineering and scientific personnel, pays them top salaries, e.g., $25,000 to $27,000. As a further inducement, General Dynamics lets its scientists delve into the most abstruse and uncharted fields with freedom, aware that in an age of rapidly changing technology the most basic research may prove valuable—perhaps even indispensable—for some new project. But Pace realizes that profits cannot be put off forever. Says he: "When our scientists begin to see a light, the planning people must show them how that idea can be put to use in the corporation. You must always tie research and planning together."
General Dynamics' widespread diversification eases the task of finding uses for its scientists' new ideas. When Convair evolved the idea for the Charactron tube, which can read 1,200,000 characters a minute. Stromberg-Carlson got the job of producing and distributing it. and Electric Boat set to work adapting it into a "synthetic porthole" to give a commander all the complex information picked up by a submarine's scouting equipment.
In the low-profit, high-volume defense business. General Dynamics' earnings—about 3% of sales—are not overimpres-sive. To get the company into more profitable fields. Pace would like to increase General Dynamics' nonmilitary business to 50%. Convair is turning out jet-powered 880 airliners (though sales have so far been disappointing). Stromberg-Carlson is bending its efforts toward new and better electronic computers that could open up vast new commercial markets for General Dynamics. And last fall the corporation worked out a merger through an exchange of stock with Liquid Carbonic, an international producer of industrial and medical gases.
The Wizard. But General Dynamics' competence in weaponry stacks the cards heavily against rapid growth of the corporation's civilian lines. Vital defense projects are bound to grow rather than shrink in the next few years. Convair and RCA have already submitted to the Defense Department plans for an anti-missile missile, the Wizard II, which could search out an incoming enemy ICBM and explode it high in the atmosphere. The Wizard could conceivably be put into production by 1965 (at a cost of up to $5 billion) if the Defense Department gives an immediate go-ahead for a crash program.