Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
informative
relaxing
slow-paced
McNamara's historical legacy is the Vietnam War, but people forget that he was brought into the Pentagon to reform military procurement and planning. In some cases, he succeeded admirably, creating the Single Integrated Operations Plan, which was an actual plan for fighting World War 3, as opposed to the fratricidal disaster that came before. Some of his other areas did not go as smoothly, the Tactical Fighter Experimental program among them. In the late 50s, the Air Force sought a new deep interdiction bomber, while the Navy was looking for a fleet air defense fighter. The designs for both planes were roughly similar-a large swing-wing plan with impressive performance and cutting edge electronics. In a fit of efficiency mania, McNamara decreed that a joint program would fulfill the needs of both services.
What followed can only be described as an engineering fiasco. It took four rounds of competition to align the drastically different visions of the service, at the end of which the Air Force and Navy agreed on Boeing's design. McNamara overruled both services in a unprecedented bureaucratic maneuver, choosing the General Dynamics-Grumman design, which lead to Congressional inquiries about potential corruption in the DoD (which went nowhere.) This book goes into immense detail in looking at the cost-efficiency process by which McNamara imposed his vision of defense planning on the military, and the ultimately subjective and incommensurate problems of choosing between complex alternatives. While the Boeing design had slightly (~1%) superior performance according to the evaluation criteria, McNamara determined that Boeing's cost estimates for R&D and production were impossibly optimistic, and went with what became the F-111 Aardvark.
With the benefits of hindsight, we can see that the TFX program was a disappointment from start to finish. The Navy dropped out in 1968, making the multiservice aspect unnecessary. The F-111 proved a success at deep interdiction, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare, with far fewer losses than the F-105 Thunderchief it replaced, but the huge plane would never make a decent fighter, as proved by the Energy-Maneuverability theories of John Boyd. In the end, the lesson of the TFX is that multirole and joint service is a false economy, and that good-enough-today is a better than cutting-edge-tomorrow. Of course, we're spending $1 trillion on F-35s, which is a cheap bomb truck encumbered by stealth, STOVL, virtual reality cockpits, and a (theoretical) laser cannon.
Defense procurement, defense procurement never changes...
What followed can only be described as an engineering fiasco. It took four rounds of competition to align the drastically different visions of the service, at the end of which the Air Force and Navy agreed on Boeing's design. McNamara overruled both services in a unprecedented bureaucratic maneuver, choosing the General Dynamics-Grumman design, which lead to Congressional inquiries about potential corruption in the DoD (which went nowhere.) This book goes into immense detail in looking at the cost-efficiency process by which McNamara imposed his vision of defense planning on the military, and the ultimately subjective and incommensurate problems of choosing between complex alternatives. While the Boeing design had slightly (~1%) superior performance according to the evaluation criteria, McNamara determined that Boeing's cost estimates for R&D and production were impossibly optimistic, and went with what became the F-111 Aardvark.
With the benefits of hindsight, we can see that the TFX program was a disappointment from start to finish. The Navy dropped out in 1968, making the multiservice aspect unnecessary. The F-111 proved a success at deep interdiction, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare, with far fewer losses than the F-105 Thunderchief it replaced, but the huge plane would never make a decent fighter, as proved by the Energy-Maneuverability theories of John Boyd. In the end, the lesson of the TFX is that multirole and joint service is a false economy, and that good-enough-today is a better than cutting-edge-tomorrow. Of course, we're spending $1 trillion on F-35s, which is a cheap bomb truck encumbered by stealth, STOVL, virtual reality cockpits, and a (theoretical) laser cannon.
Defense procurement, defense procurement never changes...