Defense Focus: Spy sat lessons -- Part 3

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- Why is the U.S. defense industry sector having such difficulty with producing so many ambitious programs like the Littoral Combat Ship, the Space-Based Infrared System, and the Future Image Architecture program on budget and within reasonable time, compared with its triumphs of a generation ago? One major reason is that early triumphant programs were created by an earlier generation.

For U.S. policymakers, and even many, especially younger, top tier executives in major U.S. defense contractors, do not realize the degree to which technological expertise and experience needs to be passed on firsthand. The complexity of any advanced industrial system or technology means that there will be an enormous amount of experience necessary to be able to assess how metals, electronic systems, fuels react under an infinite variety of stresses and conditions.

Missiles, aircraft, warships and main battle tanks still have to be built in large numbers. But the experts need to cut metal, operate machine tools, design and maintain engines no longer sexy in the American industrial market place. For the past quarter-century, information technology has been the cutting-edge frontier where the most ambitious and -- supposedly -- most talented technical minds go to advance their careers.

However, this means that the needs of the old "hard" industrial sector have been increasingly less remembered or understood even by the top executives of the companies that still operate in these fields. And among politicians, their advisers, Washington think tank analysts and media pundits, the old, unfashionable verities of the "hard" industries, maintained by the experts who the great English poet Rudyard Kipling a century ago called "the sons of Martha" -- the people who keep power lines, sewers and other basic engineering systems running, but never get appreciated for it.

New York Times reporter Philip Taubman in his Nov. 11 major article in his newspaper analyzing the reasons for the collapse of the ambitious Future Imaging Architecture program at a cost of at least $4 billion, concluded that the "multiple failures that led to the program's demise reveal weaknesses in the government's ability to manage complex contracts."

The FIA program, as Taubman noted, was plagued by damning problems at its highest and most elementary levels. At the visionary "high" end of the program, policymakers and armed forces chiefs all clamored to have far too many systems and functions put on each satellite. In other words, as Taubman put it, "the lofty technological goals" were not "attainable given the tight budget and schedule."

But at the most humble and basic levels of the project, it was plagued by defective parts and shoddy workmanship. Quality control in places was appalling. As Taubman wrote, "A torrent of defective parts, like gyroscopes and electric cables, repeatedly stalled work."

Clearly, the project did not merely fail because its goals were too ambitious and its budget too limited -- after all $4 billion was spent -- and lost. Key basic principles of management and work standards were neglected at fundamental levels.

What is most worrying, however, is that this phenomenon cannot be blamed on the prime contractor, Boeing, either unconditionally or alone. After all, Boeing continues to produce a stunning array of superlative cutting-edge technology systems from the Dreamliner airliner to vital construction work on the Israeli Arrow anti-ballistic missile interceptor that perform superbly. And the problems that the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office documented in the FIA fiasco have been replicated by many other U.S. defense contractors in other programs.

One major problem almost never directly addressed is a process that has now been observed in the aerospace field for at least 35 years -- the loss of experienced veterans on a huge scale before they could pass on most of their experience and expertise to qualified successors. The shrinkage of the U.S. aerospace workforce to one-seventh of what it was a quarter-century ago when President Ronald Reagan took office has been the main general factor in this process. But it has been intensified and made far worse by the bias toward having academic qualifications for senior management in the industrial workplace and by the accompanying bias against having older managers in their 40s and 50s, or even in their 60s.

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(Next: What experience teaches)