I’m not disputing that specific people at Skunk Works believed that their tech was disliked for being good; but that’s a totally insane belief that you should reject immediately, it’s obviously self-serving, none of those people present any evidence for it, and the DoD did try to acquire similar technology in all these cases.
Again, this is a direct quote on procurement incentives from a guy who was involved on both the buy and sell side of the SR-71 back in the day.
This is quote from, per you, somebody from the CIA. The CIA and Air Force are different organizations; he was presumably not involved in the Air Force’s decision not to acquire the F-12B. We have definitive proof that the Air Force’s procurement decisions weren’t necessarily opposed to high performing planes, since they had planned on acquiring different, but similarly capable, planes.
I am very confident that the book-length sequence you linked to doesn’t contain a justification for the claim that “individual Air Force commanders hate fast planes”. But if it does, please provide the actual justification instead of linking to a ~150 page book (“go read the sequences”).
ETA: I may have misunderstood your point; if you instead meant literally just to justify the sentence you wrote, that principal-agent problems are possible, then I don’t disagree; that does absolutely nothing to justify the specific claimed principal-agent problem.
I’m not disputing that specific people at Skunk Works believed that their tech was disliked for being good; but that’s a totally insane belief that you should reject immediately, it’s obviously self-serving, none of those people present any evidence for it, and the DoD did try to acquire similar technology in all these cases.
This is quote from, per you, somebody from the CIA. The CIA and Air Force are different organizations; he was presumably not involved in the Air Force’s decision not to acquire the F-12B. We have definitive proof that the Air Force’s procurement decisions weren’t necessarily opposed to high performing planes, since they had planned on acquiring different, but similarly capable, planes.
I am very confident that the book-length sequence you linked to doesn’t contain a justification for the claim that “individual Air Force commanders hate fast planes”. But if it does, please provide the actual justification instead of linking to a ~150 page book (“go read the sequences”).
ETA: I may have misunderstood your point; if you instead meant literally just to justify the sentence you wrote, that principal-agent problems are possible, then I don’t disagree; that does absolutely nothing to justify the specific claimed principal-agent problem.