David Packard pitches prototyping

There are two practices which have consistently led to excessive costs and unsatisfactory results in the development and procurement of weapons systems. One is the excessive reliance on paper studies and paper analysis. This difficulty has been evident in all stages of past programs, advanced development, full development, and production. The other problem is the concurrency between development and production–simply that development has not been sufficiently complete before production is started.

 

We believe that adopting the prototype approach on new programs will help to minimize these two difficulties. The underlying objective of our prototype recommendation is to place more reliance on the performance of hardware and less reliance on paper analysis. We want to evaluate both the feasibility and utility of a new weapon to the extent possible with the hardware demonstrations in advance of production, and, in fact, in advance of full-scale development in many cases.

 

We want to find out, Mr. Chairman, if things work-not just if they look good on paper.

 

I want to distinguish between the several kinds of prototypes. The first is the advanced development prototype, where a proposed new weapon would be designed, built, and tested to confirm that the technology is feasible and that the design does indeed have utility against a requirement. In our approach, an advanced development prototype would be completed and evaluated before a commitment is made to full-scale development, and, of course, to production.

 

The second kind is a production, or an engineering prototype. This type of prototype is intended both to assure that we have the engineering problems solved and also to permit thorough testing and evaluation of a system.

 

This type of prototype would be very desirable in every program before a substantial commitment to production is made. And, finally, there are prototypes of components and subsystems in advance of, or sometimes concurrent with, engineering development of the main system.

One of the approved prototype competitions from this pitch was the Lightweight Fighter, which created the YF-16 and YF-17 (later, F-18).

The discussion shows that when we use the word “prototype,” we may mean very different things.