Here are some good quotes about how defense firms marketed programs to the DOD in the 1960s:
For, as one representative remarked, “… the day of the back-slapping, cigar-smoking, cocktail-sipping, glossy-brochure-selling syndrome is gone. The marketing process is highly technical and sophisticated.”
Bernard Nossiter quoted the president of North American Rockwell’s Aerospace and Systems Group as saying, “A new system usually starts with a couple of military and industry people getting together to discuss common problems… They are interacting continuously at the engineering level.”
As Murray Weidenbaum put the question at a Senate subcommittee hearing, “To what extent is the major competition for military business at the wrong end? At the present time, typically, the key competition is for the relatively small development contract, and the winner of that virtually automatically gets large, so-called follow-on, procurement contracts.” And the competition among firms to win the development contracts, to have their ideas heard and considered, is, of course, intense.
“… firms are frequently compelled to make overly optimistic technical promises, to divert top technical talent from research and development work to selling activities, to hoard scarce technical talent, and to diversify at government expense into fields often served more effectively by existing specialists.”
As an executive assistant for one of General Dynamics’ vice-presidents stated it, “You have to get in on the ground floor or forget it.”
For instance, one Washington sales representative for a large defense firm told us, “If you wait around until the RFP [Request for Proposal] comes out, you’re dead.” And an official at North American stated, “… any company which would go by all the rules would have no ideas about what the government wants and would be developing things which would be completely out of line.”
One representative for North American, commenting on the briefings that precede an RFP, said, “The words used in your presentation at a briefing hopefully end up in a request. This depends on how well your liaison with the other guys is and whether they owe you a favor. Your ultimate goal is actually to write the RFP, and this happens more often than you might think.”
“You know that we know more than you about the feasibility of this project. Our engineers have been working on this for months. You have to listen to us.”
A member of Pratt & Whitney’s marketing office boasted, “We have the technical superiority and are on the offensive. We spoon-feed them. We ultimately try to load them with our own ideas and designs, but in such a way that, when they walk away from the conference table, they are convinced it was their idea all along.”
Most of that sounds like it still applies today, right? It’s just that you wouldn’t expect people to say some of these things so plainly to a graduate student trying to learn how the defense industry worked. He chose a good title from that last quote:
David E. Sims, “Spoon-Feeding the Military—How New Weapons Come to be.”
Rodberg, Leonard S. and Shearer, Derek (Eds.). (1970). The Pentagon Watchers: Students Report on the National Security State. Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company.
Here’s a related quote from Agatha Christie that is quite nice:
The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself — and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.
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