In the judgment of the committee, the services unnecessarily complicated those relationships with “meticulous supervision” exercised through restrictive procedures that badly needed simplifying. In addition to slowing aircraft acquisition, the “tediousness” of this supervision “destroys the producer’s ability and initiative to create advanced and more effective systems.”
… In support of this recommendation, the report cited one company’s estimate that 31,000 of the 40,000 engineers employed throughout the aircraft industry were involved in interpreting, analyzing, or complying with military specifications. Although conceding that delays caused by requiring detailed specifications could not be measured precisely, it noted that one company, using its own funds and specifications, built an aircraft prototype in 10½ months, as compared with the 3 to 5 years usually required to construct one according to military specifications.
That was from a discussion of the 1950s-era Robertson Committee report in Elliot Converse’s excellent Acquisition History Volume I. It’s interesting thing here is that the Committee saw the Air Force’s “ownership” of the technical baseline using modular open systems architectures as the problem. In order to conform to standard components and subsystems, there were too many military specs that tied to hands of contractors. Three-quarters of technical folks focused on compliance with military specs is a large fraction.
The Committee recommended the prime contractor model we have today, presuming that when the prime can choose its own subcontractor team and specifications it can move much faster (10 months compared to 3-5 years). Well, that’s the model the DoD uses today, and timelines are neither 10 months nor 3-5 years, but more like 8 or more years. That’s probably because contractors aren’t developing aircraft very often on their own dime — and when the DoD gets involved it can be even more bureaucratic.
In any case, it’s interesting that what Roper is trying to do with NGAD is go back to a model that the DoD wittingly abandoned by the end of the 1950s. Here’s another interesting part:
The Air Materiel Command reviewed approximately 1,200 engineering change proposals every month; each took an average of 4 months to be approved. Only a small number were submitted to Air Force headquarters, but obtaining Air Staff approval for them sometimes required 9 to 12 months. Noting that about 95 percent of all engineering change proposals were ultimately approved…
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