Could it be the physics of large Pentagon budgets?
I think it was Henry Ford II who said, “small cars make small profits.” I spent 30 years in military contracting. Small vehicles make small profits. Further, if there is a bigger, absurdly expensive alternative, that is the one most likely to get funded. The bigger the project, the bigger the profits and award fees. Even when the actual customer is begging for something small and light, the system that procures it is biased to produce large, heavy and expensive. That means expensive to buy, maintain, repair and update.
The bias is so pervasive that it is impossible to overcome. The FCS combat vehicle was supposed to be light, cheap and all the things you’d want if you had to pay from your own pocket. But the contract was larded down with ridiculous agenda requirements from Green to Gay.
I was in charge of the FCS miniaturization integrated product team. If miniaturization was important it would have been handled at the very top. Instead, I was several subcontractors down the pyramid. Why? It was an impossible job. Every contract already stated the allocated height, width, length and weight for every box. There was zero incentive to give up an inch or an ounce. These allocations were made years before the vehicle was designed and were insurance for the companies involved that they’d be able to build their box with their existing technology with no risky innovation required. When I suggested we surface redoing the incentive fees by which corporate CEO’s got their million dollar checks to incentivize size and weight instead of spending to plan, I was told I’d be fired if I even mentioned it.
Amazing insight. The general in charge of the program insisted the companies involved set up a suggestion program to solicit size and weight reduction ideas from the employees. I was in the cafeteria when my boss and a rep from Boeing came in and proceeded to introduce the plan. Not a single employee in that cafeteria other than me was even on the program. They all worked for a sister division with no FCS contract. Further, you needed something called an ACE (Advanced Collaborative Environment) account to put in your suggestion. These were parceled out like gold. I was the only one in that room with an ACE account. When I asked my boss what he was doing, giving this pitch to people who could not possibly help, he said, “following orders.” He was the best man I’ve ever seen at the bureaucratic slow-roll. Well, I had an ACE account and I had lots of suggestions. So, I logged on and…found it impossible to use the mechanism. I called the administrator and he said he could use it just fine. I sent them to him and he said it wasn’t his job to enter them. Nobody else could use it either. We concluded they really, really, didn’t want the ideas.
Ships are slightly different in that the bigger and more impressive, the higher the status for everybody involved, from Senators to CEO’s to admirals. That’s why we have mega-aircraft carriers in an age of cheap Mach 3 missiles. I presume once we’ve lost all of them and are financially too strapped to build more that we’ll slim the Navy down to survivable sized ships and spread them over a larger distance.