Policy is not made once and for all; it is made and re-made endlessly
Policy is not made once and for all; it is made and re-made endlessly. Policy-making is a process of successive approximation to some desired objectives […]
History
How the US won World War II with economic policy
It is hard for us to imagine today how such an entrepreneurial spirit could co-exist with war mobilization, but one did. One reason, of course, […]
Vannevar Bush argued for a wholly top-down approach to military R&D
Traditionally, the advanced military thinking on the improvement of weapons and on new methods of combat has been left to the lower echelons. The theory […]
Yes, America’s military budget process is terrible
Central planning did not work any better in the Pentagon than it did in the Soviet bloc. Not that we were not warned. The problem […]
The Manhattan Project did not follow so-called “best practices” for management
This characterization of the roots of PM [project management] represents a certain irony: the Manhattan Project did not even remotely correspond to the “standard practice” […]
Defense R&D remains constrained to specific requirements
The prospect of technological advances still persuades planners and decisionmakers to seek increased performance, greater precision, added function capability, and thus more complexity, all of […]
The problem of metrics in defense programs
The development of accurate and meaningful metrics was challenging. It was often difficult to connect goals with statistics that were easily collected and calculated, especially […]
The Functionalist Takeover and the problem of organizational design in the DoD
[Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy] told the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the present assistant secretary could not “give orders.” McElroy proposed a civilian […]
DoD can’t do rapid prototyping like it used to
The Albacore lessons tell us exactly how to develop new technology: theorize, research, test, develop, refine, test some more and when you have a solid concept, […]
Role of competition in the economy and in government
In the private economy other competing firms can duplicate or take different points of view about the nature of desirable products. But there are not […]
How long are lead times to surge military materiel?
New manufacturing facilities are certainly one of the keys to increasing production. Today, it takes a company 3 to 5 years to build a new […]
Aircraft production during WWII — US output far greater than combined enemy production
From 1941 onward aircraft production in the United States exceeded the combined output of both its major enemies by a generous margin. The implications of […]
The birth of the F-18 and how the Navy defied of Congress
In some ways, the institutional challenges faced by the F-16 pale in comparison to those faced by the F-18. The program faced cancellation by Congress […]
David Packard on the benefits of prototyping
The continuation of prototyping programs will clearly be helpful in preserving and strengthening industrial design teams which I am convinced can develop a great deal […]
Difference between operations research and systems analysis — one is much harder!
Since operations research deals with optimization problems in which criteria, alternatives, and other parameters are given, in a sense, the solution to the problem lies […]