Advanced prototyping, a last minute deal for the F-16

Today's quote is from the 1971 Senate hearings on Advanced Prototyping. Here is Air Force General K. R. Chapman:

"... we think three- to five-man teams on each project working closely with the contractor, strongly supported by our inhouse laboratories and systems division, would compare very favorably with 50- to 250-man program offices that are in our full scale production efforts.

“Some of the principles that we have looked at, which we think are useful here, are to reduce the requirement for special reporting by the use of the contractor formatted data; to waive or set aside several hundred procedural policy regulations, manuals and directives that normally govern our full development, procedure; also to, in other cases, selectively apply but not contractually invoke some of these existing directives. Reporting of the program managers would be kept as simple and direct as possible and in terms of the split test program we are talking about the services and the contractor jointly performing this with the contractor retaining the right through his designers to make changes during that program...

"We believe that our solicitation can be reduced to a Request for Proposal of about 25 pages compared to what we are doing today. We think the contractor response can be held to about 60 pages compared to what we have received today.”

General Chapman was one of the service representatives accompanying Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard. They came to the Senate on September 9, 1971 to plead for additional prototype funding in the FY1972 budget, which officially began on October 1, 1971. Further, Packard said "We believe this should be an authorization rather than a reprograming or tradeoff action."

In other words, increase the DoD top line with three weeks left to the start of budget execution. Rather unorthodox, one might suppose. The amount came to $63.7 million. I wonder if some of that money went directly to the YF-16 and YF-17 flyoff:

"In January 1972, proposals were sought for a fighter with excellent acceleration, turn rate and range in the 20,000-pound weight class… In February 1972, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop and LingTemco-Vought (LTV, later Vought) submitted proposals… The Air Force selected General Dynamics and Northrop in April 1972 to design and build two prototypes each"

Notice how they took no time at all, requesting proposals from industry just four months after begging for the money and receiving four bids just a month after that; it only took another two months to select the winners. Both were truly winners, as General Dynamics would go on to build the F-16 after winning the Air Force competition and Northrop the F-18, which evolved out of the YF-17 that lost the competition. Both are mainstays.

I'll frame this as a questionable last minute budget deal, purposefully put out in front of the public, that had unquestionable good results. However favorable prototyping is, and it is favorable, the situation feels like short-termism that allowed the DoD not to internalize the reform it asked for. Packard himself resigned two months after the Sepember 1971 hearings.

That second quote was from “Quest to Build a Better Fighter” by Michael Sanibel.