We are literally suffocating from excess manning and excessive management

Giant-size administrative overheads in military industry seem to be an American specialty. The French designed and built the Mirage III with a total engineering staff of fifty design draftsmen. The Air Force’s F-15 Program Office alone has a staff of over 240, just to monitor the people doing the work.

 

Cost maximizing in administration was criticized on May 25, 1972, by Lieutenant General Otto J. Glasser, Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development of the US Air Force. He said:

 

“Let’s look at another major difference between US and European organizations. The European approach is characterized by very small, tightly integrated design teams manned by ‘top of their graduating class’ engineers. Every man is an expert with considerable latitude for decision and very streamlined and abbreviated supervisory and management channels. Paperwork of all types is brief, concise, and limited in distribution. Contracts, directives and reports run to tens of pages rather than tens of volumes.

 

“But what of the US counterpart? We are literally suffocating from excess manning and excessive management — and I find it hard to separate cause from effect. An additional management procedure requires additional people to carry it out. In turn, this expanded team of managers comes up with proposed new economies and new efficiencies which require more directives, more controls, more reports, and in turn, more people — ad nauseam. I don’t mean to discredit all managers and all management, but when you have more monitors than doers, the time has come to reverse the trend.”

That was from Seymour Melman’s classic “The Permanent War Economy.” More than 50 years later, the situation did not reverse, but in fact has gotten worse. In that discussion of French aerospace in the 1950s and 1960s, I think it was apparent that they were running some form of what would today be called agile development and continuous deployment of new capability. The Mirage platform evolved into dozens of versions that included as wide array of profiles as vertical rise and long-range bomber.