It may well startle one of the 439 Lockheed engineers, say, who worked on the P3A Orion modification of the Electra, to learn that in Holland the very successful Fokker Friendship airliner was developed from scratch by a team of 50 engineers, supported by 200 draftsmen, technicians and craftsmen. Or that the French Mirage 3 fighter required 53 engineers, 50 draftsmen and 95 craftsmen to get from contract award to first flight In 13 months. It’s doubtful if today any U.S. company could prepare a proposal for such a plane without a staff larger than that.
With the typical French or German project team varying from 5 to 50 engineers on an aircraft project and from 3 to 10 on an electronic project, development costs in these countries naturally are considerably lower than in the U.S. Typical European lead times also are somewhat shorter than ours 1-1½ years as against 2½ – 3½ years….
Unlike ours, the French or Soviet project leader is first and foremost a designer and spends by far most of his time doing actual design work. Success or failure is attributed to him by his management and by the general technical public.
Shapero, Alert. “Life Styles of Engineering.” Space Aeronautics Magazine, March, 1969.
Emphasis added.
All true. But we have some perfectly good examples of austere development ourselves: famously, Rickover took less than three years (IIRC) to get from Eisenhower's "let's build a nuclear-powered sub" to putting the /Nautilus/ to sea. And before that, General Groves managed to get the Manhattan Project to fruition in two years.
I also read a story in /Program Management/ magazine back in the early 1980s, when I had just come on at NAVAIR, about how in WW1, some admiral had called up one of the senior officers at Sperry to see what he could do about these naval mines that were coming into play. The Sperry folks worked all weekend and built three prototypes, which the senior officer packed into a well-padded case and personally delivered to the admiral in Washington, taking them down on the Pennsylvania Railroad. As one of my colleagues observed, "So much for the DSARC process!"
But all the good examples come from before the McNamara era. The P-3A was begun pre-McNamara with, according to Wikipedia, first flight occurring in 1959. Then it goes on to note that production did not begin until two years later (1961). This appears to have been driven in part by a design defect in the original L-188 design which caused three civilian versions to crash: it would be interesting to find out how many of those 439 engineers were working that issue in concert with their civilian-side colleagues.
But the larger point is that over the years–Mac only started this, it's been happening ever since–more and more engineers have become needed for the ever-growing documentation requirements the government imposes…to say nothing of all the engineers in the specialty disciplines ("the -ilities") that didn't even exist a hundred years ago as separate disciplines: reliability, maintainability, producibility, of course safety, and on and on.
I also think it's disingenuous to make international comparisons when the countries involved have very different politics and cultures. We and the French started building commercial nuclear power plants at about the same time, in the 1950s and 1960s. We stopped building them in the late 1970s–I was living in New Hampshire when the Clamshell Alliance shut down construction on Seabrook Two. The French built on. As a result we get about 20 percent of our grid power from nukes: they get 80 percent. But the French, having decided to press on, weren't going to let a bunch of hippy-dippy "No Nukes!" types slow them down: that's because they have a much more authoritarian style of government than we do, and don't give their people the liberties the Constitution guarantees us in this country. We couldn't do what they did without radically changing our way of life, which would be tough to pull off even in a universally-recognized worthy cause.
So it would be perhaps more helpful to ask, hm, what are the cultural, political, and other environmental factors that enable these differences, rather than just saying, hey, look at these guys, they're doing it smarter than we are.
Part of the overhead for US DoD acquisitions are the level of requirements and regulations imposed by the 5000 series acquisition regulations. And each new acquisition has unique requirements that discourage the use of Non-Developmental Items (NDI). I worked on a pursuit a few year ago teaming with a European aircraft firm and their engineers was astonished by the rigidity of DoD requirements. Even small changes to NDI make them "non-NDI" and can ratchet up cost over the life of a program.
"But all the good examples come from before the McNamara era." That's certainly how it feels. There have been successes, like the Predator and JDAM. I think you're right that the documentation is a large part of where those extra people go.
You also make a very good point about international comparisons. Culture makes a big difference, which is why I highlighted the fact that these foreign nations tended, at that time, to have PMs that were designers first and foremost, and took personal responsibility for success or failure. That kind of organizational design I think is beneficial.
As to the nuclear power plant part, I think its pretty well documented that 3-mile island created significant regulations that increased costs in the US. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106#f0005
Low cost can come by steamrolling people, particularly in urban construction, but for defense acquisition that cannot be a major impediment. Its hard to prove, but I believe that cutting edge developments, large and small, benefit from free institutions.
Yes, good point. Mark Mandeles has a good review of the 5000 series below. The set up seems to go counter to Perrow's principles for high reliability organizations. https://www.academia.edu/9592932/System_Design_and_Project_Management_Principles_to_Meet_the_Needs_of_Operational_Forces