Those in favor of prototyping argue that the military at, times overstate the urgency of programs; urgency in weapons development, they assert, is one of the leading causes of cost overruns. This invites what is known as concurrency, or production simultaneous with development.
Concurrency, it is said, seeks to anticipate technological accomplishment; that is, to predict chance outcomes. Production in advance may either “freeze” a premature design or create inventories of superseded parts. Substantial concurrency is acceptable only in the face of dire emergency.
Urgency also invites “telescoping” or the paralleling of planning events best done in sequence. Telescoping may result, in skipping over, or shortcutting, events such as component reliability tests, environmental tests, and other qualifying steps.
It is further contended that time may be saved through prototyping because hardware proven should boost confidence in design.
Proposers of parallel undocumented development assert that sustaining the competition provides valuable insurance. By this method, if one of the design approaches must. be discarded late in development, an alternative is available at approximately the same stage.
Comptroller General Elmer Staats Testifying in the Joint Economic Committee Hearings “Competition in Defense Procurement,” 1969.
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| Comptroller General Elmer Staats with Ronald Reagan, more than a decade after his 1969 testimony to the Congress. |
I think that the insurance point is underappreciated. It is not only that you have two design teams that offer competing designs. Information flows back and forth between them, one correcting another’s errors in an iterative process mediated in some places by the Government.
Today, however, we often invite concurrency and telescoping. Parallel developments sometimes occur, like the JLTV drive-off. But these are never brought all the way through RDT&E, just prototyping, so really little insurance was achieved.
The F-35 had a flyoff, back in 2000! Boeing’s prototype competitor offered no real insurance through the remainder of the 18+ year RDT&E cycle.
Parallel undocumented developments are even more rare. These programs, JLTV, F-35, and others, often had a great amount of documentation.
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