Three reasons military programs shouldn’t start with requirements

Here’s a slice from Ron Westrum’s excellent book, Sidewinder: Missile Development at China Lake, citing Bill McLean’s arguments against the “requirements” process. As you read, remember that McLean developed and operationalized the Sidewinder missile when: (1) Most people thought infrared seekers were decades away; (2) Other missiles had requirements, but not Sidewinder; (3) Sidewinder had to be worked on almost in secret; and (4) Sidewinder went through user experimentation that uncovered real requirements and allowed it to beat out competitor missiles:

McLean rejected the idea that the creative process could be planned. The worst aspect of such planning, he thought, was the creation of premature operational requirements for weapons systems. In discussing the differences between Falcon and Sidewinder, for instance, McLean emphasized that Falcon had a formal military requirement, while Sidewinder lacked one. Thus the Sidewinder project could create the best solution for the users in terms of what the laboratory was actually able to to.

 

In the abstract, the premise behind the operational requirement process made sense. If the services knew exactly what they wanted, their request should be as specific as possible. In reality, however, a requirement implied that those requesting knew what they could get — but in fact they couldn’t know because no one knew what was possible until research had explored the possibilities…. Several problems followed from starting with a requirement:

 

A requirement might ask for something beyond the state of the art. The result might well be a highly compromised system, impossible to abandon because of the bureaucratic system, but useless in warfare.

 

A requirement might fail to ask for something that was valuable and possible and could turn out to be a better answer to the operating unit’s problems. As with the Sidewinder, requirements might actually interfere with research on emerging solutions.

 

Valuable ideas might emerge from the laboratories and be refused because no one had requested them. This is what happened originally with the AR-15 rifle.