Here’s a letter from Bill McClean, chief at Navy’s China Lake and led the Sidewinder development, to the deputy chief of Naval Operations:
We find that, from the level of your office, problems are considered from a breadth of viewpoint and overall responsibility which is not again established until the work reaches the laboratories where it must be accomplished. In between, the job is broken down into a tremendous number of parts for financial management and then must be re-collected and re-coordinated before it is capable of technical accomplishment.
To me, this breakdown and subsequent re-combination represents the basic difficulty in our system. It appears to me to serve only the function of providing jobs for a large number of people in Washington.
That was from Ron Westrum’s excellent book, Sidewinder: Missile Development at China Lake. This problem is perhaps worse today than it was in the 1950s. There is no single integrating mind to pull together the various aspects of a development. Instead, hordes of functionals with little experience in the particular project and no responsibility for execution create a laundry list of requirements. The problem is that, without the integrating mind, the requirements are likely to conflict with each other. Reliability, speed, damage, accuracy, cost, etc., these things have tradeoffs amongst each other that are ill-defined and do not become apparent until contractor proposals come in a few years later.
Here’s another good part from the author:
More serious than the growth of administrative rules and regulations, however, was the attempt of the bureaucrat to plan the creative process. McLean thought this was certain to damage creativity. In 1960, he published an article in which he lampooned bureaucratic practices concerning R&D. He argued that bureaucracy had caused creative scientists to be an endangered species; therefore, they should be studied before they disappeared.
Rather than a one-way path from “Combat experience, planning” to “formulate requirement” to “carry out R&D” to “production,” Bill McCleans preference was for a dialogue between user interviews, R&D, and testing, and when R&D is complete then formulate the requirement, and finally produce in quantity.
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