Your discussion of Skunk Works is significantly wrong throughout. (I am not familiar with the other examples.)
For example, in 1943 the Skunk Works both designed and built America’s first fighter jet, the P80 Shooting Star, in just 5 months. Chief engineer Kelly Johnson worked with a scrappy team of, at its peak, 23 designers and 105 fabricators. Nonetheless, the resulting plane ended up being operationally used by the air force for 40 years.
The P80 was introduced in 1945; the US almost immediately decided to replace it with the F-86, introduced in 1949. The phrase “operationally used by the air force for 40 years” is only technically true because rather than scrap existing P80 production, they were modified slightly and used as training aircraft.
Our ship had a four-man crew — commander, helmsman, navigator and engineer. By contrast, a frigate doing a similar job had more than three hundred crewmen. … Our stealth ship might be able to blast out of the sky a sizable soviet attack force, but in terms of an officer’s future status and promotion prospects, it was about as glamorous as commanding a tugboat. At the highest levels, the Navy brass was equally unenthusiastic about the small number of stealth ships they would need to defend carrier task forces. Too few to do anyone’s career much good in terms of power or prestige.
This is wrong. Their stealth ship wasn’t able to “blast out of the sky a sizable soviet attack force”, or to do literally anything; it was just a testbed for exploring automation and stealth hulls, totally incapable of doing anything. Skunk Works didn’t actually successfully build anything here! (The stealth design was later used on the Zumwalt class of destroyers, which had unrelated issues.)
Not sure where he got the 300 crew figure from? Even beyond the fact that the Sea Shadow wasn’t actually designed to do anything (and so would need more specialized crew to do so), the Sea Shadow was only a tenth of a the size of the frigates it’s being compared with. (The Navy has since tried to use similar automation to reduce the crew of newer ships; the Gerald Ford class of aircraft carriers represent the realistically achievable reduction in crew via automation: 3,200 → 2,600 or so, so ~20%.) (Note that this also trivially falsifies the claim that the Navy rejects automation to reduce crew sizes?)
“The Navy rejected our ship design because it was totally too good, you just gotta believe me, even though we’ve never ever successfully produced ships” is an insane thing for you to accept with zero evidence.
Yet Lockheed could barely sell [the SR-71]. As described by a CIA engineer inside the Skunk Works:
> … But I never gave him much chance to sell a lot of those airplanes because they were so far ahead of anything else flying that few commanders would feel comfortable leading a Blackbird wing or squadron. I mean this was a twenty.-first-century performer delivered in the early 1960s. No one in the Pentagon would know what to do with it.
This is totally wrong. You are again putting forth the insane claim that people rejected Skunk Work’s technology because of how good it was, with zero actual evidence of why the SR-71 wasn’t mass produced.
The SR-71 (Mach 3.3, 85,000 feet) wasn’t significantly better than planned contemporary planes like the B-70 (Mach 3.1, 77,350 feet) or the F-108 (Mach 3, 80,100 feet). Both of those planes were cancelled, because the development of missiles meant that flying higher and faster was no longer a viable strategy; since then, military planes like the the F-18 (Mach 1.8, 50,000 feet), and the F-35 (Mach 1.6, 50,000 feet) have often been lower and slower. This is a deliberate choice: unmanned, one-way missiles can always go faster than a manned plane. Most of the SR-71′s advantages come not from it being inherently better than any possible missile, but from it being faster and higher than the planes early SAM’s were intended to target; mass production and usage in other roles would inherently make this go away.
(To be clear, Skunk Works was successful and build many things successfully; it’s specifically your claims and examples that are wrong. In particular, you left out most of their successful planes like the F-117.)
Well, I do think your comment quite overstates its case, but I’ve made some edits that should avoid the interpretations mentioned, and I do think those make the post better. So thanks for that! :)
On the P80:
It was built in 1943 and introduced in 1945. When I wrote “used operationally for 40 years” I didn’t have in mind that they sent it up to join forces with F-16s in the 1980s. Rather wanted to convey that “in spite of being built ridicolously quickly, it wasn’t a piece of junk that got scrapped immediately and never ended up serving a real function”.
Editing to say it was used operationally “as a trainer” for 40 years.
On the Sea Shadow
This is just a direct quote from Ben Rich who oversaw that program. It’s compatible with everything you mention. He’s just illustrating procurement incentives in the Navy. I think he might be speaking with some rhetorical flourish and saying even if it could blast a sizable attack force out of the sky, the ship still mightn’t be very prestigous.
It does seem like it could be clarified a bit, so editing to say “They also built this prototypeship that I’m including here because I really like how dope it seemed, even though it never became more than a prototype”.
On selling the SR-71:
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. But yeah, agreed this wasn’t the only reason the SR-71 didn’t sell more! (Two air-to-air refuelings per mission? JP-7 fuel? Any takers?) Editing post to say: “Yet some of these advances also made it harder for Lockheed to sell it (though there were also additional strategic reasons it wasn’t mass produced)”.
There’s also a more gnarly philosophical issue here, in terms of the “insane” belief you’re pointing to. I find it fairly plausible that individual commanders might have incentives that are different from those of the Navy, or the Air Force, as a whole, and that this might drive procurement decisions. Whether it’s insane or not depends on your priors. But this is less of a clear cut empirical question, so won’t belabor it more here.
On the F-117:
This already long post has to end somewhere :) I’d love to read someone else summarising lessons from building the F-117 though!
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.
SR-71 was not really flying above enemy territory: the high flight altitude made it possible to peek over the curvature of earth. It did not fly over the USSR like the U-2 did before the advent of anti-air missiles, but generally over allied/international borders, peeking into the forbidden territory. Interceptors were raised against it numerous times it but usually were unable to achieve a position where they could have attacked it successfully. I am not sure where the “fired at 4000 times” myth comes from, but it is nonsense. The S-200 (SA-5) systems introduced in the late 60s should have been able to shoot them down from relatively large distance, and it is recorded that Swedish JAS-37 jets were able to intercept and have a lock on it.
Turns out there’s a reddit thread on the exact question of the S-200 vs. the: SR-71. Copying in the top comments so people don’t have to click through:
Why the soviet union didnt use the S-200 aginst the SR-71 blackbirds?
Because the US discontinued overflights of the USSR after the shootdown of Gary Powers’ U-2 in 1960.
As to why other adversaries with SA-5s didn’t...well, Libya tried. The SR-71 isn’t as stealthily as a B-2, but they were stealthy enough to reduce the acquisition range considerably. Combined with a closure rate of Mach 3.3, the SA-5 crews had very little time to acquire, track, and fire. And when the target is somewhere smaller than the USSR, they can be in and out of enemy airspace in minutes. The SR-71 also had a robust ECM capability to jam the incoming missile.
And if that failed they could outmaneuver the missile. With the Blackbird traveling at a mile every couple of seconds, the missile is computing a lead of several miles at launch. While the SR-71 wasn’t aerobatic, missiles at Mach 6 are worse. Even if they couldn’t get out of the missile’s radar arc, they could get it to overshoot.
and
They may have. But the Blackbird still could have outsped the S-200. It wasn’t that the Blackbird was faster than the missile. It was that it could fly just fast enough that even a faster missile could not catch up. Try and imagine the whole scenario. A Blackbird is zooming in, high and fast. It gets detected. That detection gets evaluated, passed on, until the decision is reached to launch an S-200 missile. All of that might take minutes, and the plane travels at about 80 km every minute. Now, the launch site is stationary and at ground level. The missile has to ignite, accelerate, climb, and adjust course (presumably, the SR-71 would not fly just over the launch site). All while the missile is doing all of that, the plane is speeding away (and presumably accelerating as the pilot becomes aware of the missile). When the missile gets to altitude, it would be able to catch the plane eventually, but it probably will run out of fuel.
Your discussion of Skunk Works is significantly wrong throughout. (I am not familiar with the other examples.)
The P80 was introduced in 1945; the US almost immediately decided to replace it with the F-86, introduced in 1949. The phrase “operationally used by the air force for 40 years” is only technically true because rather than scrap existing P80 production, they were modified slightly and used as training aircraft.
This is wrong. Their stealth ship wasn’t able to “blast out of the sky a sizable soviet attack force”, or to do literally anything; it was just a testbed for exploring automation and stealth hulls, totally incapable of doing anything. Skunk Works didn’t actually successfully build anything here! (The stealth design was later used on the Zumwalt class of destroyers, which had unrelated issues.)
Not sure where he got the 300 crew figure from? Even beyond the fact that the Sea Shadow wasn’t actually designed to do anything (and so would need more specialized crew to do so), the Sea Shadow was only a tenth of a the size of the frigates it’s being compared with. (The Navy has since tried to use similar automation to reduce the crew of newer ships; the Gerald Ford class of aircraft carriers represent the realistically achievable reduction in crew via automation: 3,200 → 2,600 or so, so ~20%.) (Note that this also trivially falsifies the claim that the Navy rejects automation to reduce crew sizes?)
“The Navy rejected our ship design because it was totally too good, you just gotta believe me, even though we’ve never ever successfully produced ships” is an insane thing for you to accept with zero evidence.
This is totally wrong. You are again putting forth the insane claim that people rejected Skunk Work’s technology because of how good it was, with zero actual evidence of why the SR-71 wasn’t mass produced.
The SR-71 (Mach 3.3, 85,000 feet) wasn’t significantly better than planned contemporary planes like the B-70 (Mach 3.1, 77,350 feet) or the F-108 (Mach 3, 80,100 feet). Both of those planes were cancelled, because the development of missiles meant that flying higher and faster was no longer a viable strategy; since then, military planes like the the F-18 (Mach 1.8, 50,000 feet), and the F-35 (Mach 1.6, 50,000 feet) have often been lower and slower. This is a deliberate choice: unmanned, one-way missiles can always go faster than a manned plane. Most of the SR-71′s advantages come not from it being inherently better than any possible missile, but from it being faster and higher than the planes early SAM’s were intended to target; mass production and usage in other roles would inherently make this go away.
(To be clear, Skunk Works was successful and build many things successfully; it’s specifically your claims and examples that are wrong. In particular, you left out most of their successful planes like the F-117.)
Well, I do think your comment quite overstates its case, but I’ve made some edits that should avoid the interpretations mentioned, and I do think those make the post better. So thanks for that! :)
On the P80:
It was built in 1943 and introduced in 1945. When I wrote “used operationally for 40 years” I didn’t have in mind that they sent it up to join forces with F-16s in the 1980s. Rather wanted to convey that “in spite of being built ridicolously quickly, it wasn’t a piece of junk that got scrapped immediately and never ended up serving a real function”.
Editing to say it was used operationally “as a trainer” for 40 years.
On the Sea Shadow
This is just a direct quote from Ben Rich who oversaw that program. It’s compatible with everything you mention. He’s just illustrating procurement incentives in the Navy. I think he might be speaking with some rhetorical flourish and saying even if it could blast a sizable attack force out of the sky, the ship still mightn’t be very prestigous.
It does seem like it could be clarified a bit, so editing to say “They also built this prototype ship that I’m including here because I really like how dope it seemed, even though it never became more than a prototype”.
On selling the SR-71:
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. But yeah, agreed this wasn’t the only reason the SR-71 didn’t sell more! (Two air-to-air refuelings per mission? JP-7 fuel? Any takers?) Editing post to say: “Yet some of these advances also made it harder for Lockheed to sell it (though there were also additional strategic reasons it wasn’t mass produced)”.
There’s also a more gnarly philosophical issue here, in terms of the “insane” belief you’re pointing to. I find it fairly plausible that individual commanders might have incentives that are different from those of the Navy, or the Air Force, as a whole, and that this might drive procurement decisions. Whether it’s insane or not depends on your priors. But this is less of a clear cut empirical question, so won’t belabor it more here.
On the F-117:
This already long post has to end somewhere :) I’d love to read someone else summarising lessons from building the F-117 though!
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.
Thank you, I wanted to say the same.
Furthermore:
SR-71 was not really flying above enemy territory: the high flight altitude made it possible to peek over the curvature of earth. It did not fly over the USSR like the U-2 did before the advent of anti-air missiles, but generally over allied/international borders, peeking into the forbidden territory. Interceptors were raised against it numerous times it but usually were unable to achieve a position where they could have attacked it successfully. I am not sure where the “fired at 4000 times” myth comes from, but it is nonsense. The S-200 (SA-5) systems introduced in the late 60s should have been able to shoot them down from relatively large distance, and it is recorded that Swedish JAS-37 jets were able to intercept and have a lock on it.
Turns out there’s a reddit thread on the exact question of the S-200 vs. the: SR-71. Copying in the top comments so people don’t have to click through:
and
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/rb7stm/why_the_soviet_union_didnt_use_the_s200_aginst/
I did think it was odd that the none of the 4 listed crew was a gunner, yet it supposedly had the firepower to wipe out a Soviet force.