WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- The problems afflicting the U.S. space reconnaissance program are not only or primarily Boeing's fault: They go to the heart of the way Congress and the U.S. government do business and the lack of an adequate hard engineering base in American high-tech industry.
On Sunday, New York Times reporter Philip Taubman published an important article detailing the long road of overestimations, mistakes and failures that led to the canceling of a $4 billion project helmed by Boeing to create a new generation of smaller global reconnaissance satellites. Taubman's article, however, has a far wider relevance than the specific program whose travails he describes: It deserves to become a much-referred-to classic text on the perils of future U.S. administrations and congresses trusting too blindly and naively in the prospects for building new high-tech military programs -- on Earth as well as in space, without learning in advance far more carefully what is involved, and what the constraints on development are.
The first lesson U.S. policymakers need to learn is to pick horses for courses. It would be easy to caricature Boeing from a superficial reading of Taubman's article as disastrously inept, but that is certainly not the case. Boeing remains the world's pre-eminent manufacturer of civilian airlines and continues to produce a stunning range of the world's most advanced combat aircraft, high-tech naval and military weapons systems and outstanding anti-ballistic missile work. But it had no experience in producing reconnaissance satellites whereas Lockheed Martin had specialized in producing the best in the world for more than 30 years.
Other ways of expressing this lesson in terms that even Pentagon policymakers and Capitol Hill legislators can understand is: "Keep backing winners" and "Don't tamper with success." Boeing and Lockheed Martin both continue to produce a remarkable diversity of outstanding high-tech military and space systems.
When they, or any other major U.S. company, has an established record in any field of producing such systems within set timeframes and under budget -- or not too far over budget and schedule, and the systems then work admirably, Washington policymakers should not be seduced by promises of sweeping savings from companies that, however well established they are in other fields, are boldly venturing into new ones where they have little, if any, development and production experience.
Second, when reading attractive proposals, watching the inevitable -- and by its nature, invariably superficial -- PowerPoint presentation or being shown some slick promotional video, policymakers, almost none of whom ever received the slightest training or professional experience in science, technology or working in "hard' industry, need to burn into their brains Kelvin's Second Law of Thermodynamics -- all energy and therefore effort has a natural tenancy to slip into disorder and chaos. Or, as the great U.S. Army mythical philosopher Murphy put it, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
There are two kinds of projects where Kelvin and Murphy's laws apply squared, or even cubed: That is, when a company is doing something ambitious it has never done before, or has only done on a far smaller scale, and when the project is high tech, the more cutting edge and revolutionary a program is, and the more complicated its parts are, the more chance there is that something will go wrong.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top lieutenants forgot Kelvin and Murphy's warnings big time, with disastrous consequences, early in their fateful six-year tenure at the Pentagon when they decried that the Ground-based Mid-course Interceptors being built to protect the United States against intercontinental ballistic missiles fired by so-called rogue states had to be rushed into deployment and production as quickly a possible without having their component parts individually tested first, though this contravened well-established and highly successful Pentagon engineering protocol for the testing and production of missiles going back to 1961. They were hammered out from the experience of the great Gens. Bernard Schriever and Otto J. Glasser developing the Minuteman and Atlas ICBM programs under budget and in record time in the late 1950s.
The result could have been foreseen. A Government Accountability Office report released in March 2006 warned that the reliability of none of the GBIs that had been rushed into deployment by that point could be taken for granted. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency and its contractors had to carry out a long, costly but ultimately successful program of careful evaluation and testing to rectify the damage.
That problem, however, was not caused by U.S. defense contractors or the U.S. armed forces, but by the arrogant, overconfident and hard-driving utter ignorance of basic engineering experience and principles of the policymakers who drove the program.
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(Next: Software dreams and hard engineering realities)
