Through the end of the 1940s, the Air Materiel Command had assigned two “project officers”—one for development and one for production—to monitor each system’s acquisition. Since the Air Materiel Command was organized functionally—essentially by subsystem specialty (e.g., propulsion, armament, and communications) and not by weapon system—the project officer responsible for a system during its development phase coordinated with specialists within the command who monitored the status of each subsystem. In contrast, project officers for the production phase were assigned to a contractor, not to a particular system, and were usually responsible for overseeing work on several different systems being manufactured by that company.
That was from Eliot Converse III’s excellent Acquisition History Volume I: Rearming for the Cold War.
The Space Force has in some ways returned to a functional organization for acquisition with the SMC 2.0 reorg. There are Program Executive Officers for Development, Production, Enterprise, Space (mostly classified), and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. That means responsibility for space systems is either shared or transitioned between organizations. Here’s my swag at mapping Space Force programs budgets from the old to new acquisition organization:
There are differences between then and now. Remember after WWII, subsystems were developed independently and then integrated rather than packaged from the start. Project officers oversaw propulsion, armament, communications, and so forth.
The main thrust of Space Force program offices seems like it will remain with the Program of Record, or a fully integrated system. Some innovation starts in the SpRCO and/or AFRL, is handed off to the Development Corps, which in turn is handed off to the Production Corps.
The Enterprise Corps represents a different kind of coordination — not linearly handing off a system but taking responsibility for interoperable subsystems. I think this is more representative of the Air Force in the 40s and early 50s. The major element there, space launch, doesn’t have that coordination feeling so much as responsibility for software like telemetry, tracking & control… and imagine if Enterprise Corps started taking over satellite bus!
I personally don’t favor the Space Force’s acquisition organization and have a fondness for the former directorates. But I think some enterprise capability was needed, perhaps a new directorate rather than a total reorg.
A last distinction I’ll mention: I doubt the Production Corps for the Space Force will have its program officers sit in contractor facilities. The DoD’s representatives in that respect are the DACO/CACO group in DCMA.
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