A post-World War II cartoon gets to a deep truth in defense acquisition. It shows American tanks on trial, supposedly for being outgunned and relatively less survivable than their German counterparts. Yet General George Patton testifies as an “expert witness” in defense of the American tanks:
“Your honor, the defendant got there fastest with the mostest… The indictment should be dismissed!”
While it might have taken three Sherman tanks to maneuver around and destroy a German Tiger, the US built 49,234 Shermans during the war. They were easily maintained and could quickly returned to the field. Less than 2,000 Tiger I and Tiger IIs were build, by contrast, and often broke down or lacked parts. Overall, US tank production was north of 100,000 in World War II compared to 46,000 for the Germans.
Somehow, DoD’s JCIDS and PPBE processes cannot generate the types of systems that value reliability and producibility over exquisite performance and survivability. I understand that’s a hard tradeoff, but one that needs thinking about.
It can be argued that producibility and sustainability add expense to the program development. But another view is that designing for exquisite performance and survivability creates a lot of complexity and purpose-built parts which create complex production and sustainment procedures, let alone fragile supply chains.
When Northrop self-funded the low-cost and maintainable F-20 and the Air Force told them to pound sand, I think industry got the message: Over-engineered, high cost, unscalable… That’s what gets into the defense budget. With hindsight, the F-20 would have been great for the Global War on Terror. It was actually the right requirement for the time.
It is definitely time to make industrial mobilization cool again! But we should always remember, the Germans didn’t beat the French because they had more tanks, but because they integrated radio and aircover along with them into a new operational concept. Technology matters, CONOPS matters, and production matters.
Leave a Reply