For 100 years, success in aerial combat came from the ability to point the nose of the aircraft and shoot the sucker. To do that in modern aircraft, you needed tailored aero design on the fighter side, and vectored thrust because you couldn’t do it with aerodynamics alone. Vectored thrust is an amazing capability resident in the joint strike fighter, resident in the F-22, but it is very expensive — and by the way it is hot back there, so there’s an attendant lifecycle cost.
So we said, how else can we do this? We had been following the AIM-9X program, which was a giant leap forward for Sidewinder, and can we produce a missile that can turn the corner for you. A missile that can be launched off axis, and attack an aircraft. It reduced the vectored thrust requirement for the F-18. But how do you target? Well, another nascent program at NAVAIR was helmet mounted sight. So the combination of helmet mounted sight and off axis missile gave you design slack and cost reduction to do as a system, that which in the old days would have been done with the airframe alone. Similar story in the EW and other areas.
That was Vice Admiral Joseph Dyer on the Preble Hall podcast discussing the development of the F/A-18E/F, The Birth of the Strike Fighter.
I think that story illustrates nicely the problems of today’s acquisition, which presumes all of those tradeoffs Dyer was talking about would be resolved by temporary staff involved in requirements, analysis of alternatives, and other acquisition documentation. Then the program operates within those bounds.
It is obviously better to (1) not lock down too many technical trades in advance of full scale development; and (2) put technical trade decisions in the hands of the people responsible for actually building the test articles. Sounds obvious, but that’s not how DoD’s formal process works. On that second point, here’s more from Dyer:
At China Lake California, we had 400 people together, including the flight test team at Pax River. We had an integrated team of government and industry people, working as a team. To the extent that you could walk into the weapon system support activity at China Lake, when you were talking to an individual, you had to turn their badge over to see who they worked for. It was a team. Bold, caps, underlined.
And here’s what it did for the F/A-18E/F — here’s what is absolutely necessary for a successful strike fighter — that is a willingness to make trades across front end and back end, across sensor and weapon. When you can bring together a team that can do that, you can rip the door off its hinges. It’s very difficult to do in today’s world where there is a reticence to talk across the team… I will not speak evil of contracting officers or lawyers, but I will tell you that they’ve been a large impediment in making this more difficult today.
Luckily, there’s often a crisis that drives leadership to provide top-cover that allows for these irregular programs to creep up — if you can call a crisis lucky. In the F/A-18E/F case, the crisis was the cancellation of the A-12 stealth fighter. The E/F program got underway in 1992, first flew in 1995, and entered LRIP in 1997. This rapid development and fielding cycle was made possible by the acquisition strategy, where they ran it as an ECP:
Dwyer: It took F/A-18E/F, which was by and large a new airplane — 25% larger, significantly heavier, longer range, all those things — kept the name and actually developed the airplane as an ECP, to the chagrin of some folks.
Interviewer: What’s an ECP?
Dwyer: Engineering change proposal. Something ordinarily applied when you change a piece of equipment or the shape of a control surface. Only we were building an airplane.
Interviewer: Sounds like a sleight of hand.
Dwyer: Uh… those of us that were there would like to call it expeditious innovation.
I love that phrase expeditious innovation. VADM Dyer repeated throughout the podcast that a lot of what he had done is largely not possible today. I think the China/Russia crisis today is driving some of that expeditious innovation into pockets of programs, but again it requires the direct action of top leadership. That attention isn’t limitless, and is why we need to bring these practices Dyer and others talk about into the larger acquisition system.
Here’s a final bit from Dyer on how the leadership support, and the resulting faster cycle time, allowed him to really take responsibility for the program in an integrated way.
There was never an occasion where the outcome was in doubt in my mind. I had another unique opportunity. I was there with the first design visualization of this program. I took over as the program manager right at the PDR, preliminary design review, stayed through design, build, first, flight, carrier landing, and the production decision. It’s very rare that an individual gets to do that. Got to do it because it was a response to crisis. Response to acquisition approach to the airplane. In response, this is a foot stomper, to leadership’s support because of the crisis we could move fast. Ordinarily, we I just described wouldn’t fit into any program manager’s responsibility.
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