As is well known, the Fighter Mafia of the 1960s advocated simple aircraft designs based on Capt. John C. Boyd's energy manuverability (EM) theory. This resulted in the F-15 aircraft that dug the Air Force out of a bad pickle with the poor performing F-111 aircraft.
However, as the F-15 weight and cost grew, the Air Force starting looking at a lightweight fighter. In keeping with Deputy Secretary of Defense's prototyping methodology, the Air Force funded a fly-off between the General Dynamics YF-16 and Northrop's YF-17. Only a last minute deal made this happen.
As is well known, the YF-16 won the Air Force fly-off.
The Congress intended the Navy to develop a derivative from the YF-16 to increase commonality and reduce overall costs. However, when the Navy did a paper design competition, it found the YF-16 derivatives (1600, 1601, and 1602) were inadequate. The Navy selected a derivative from the Air Force loser, the YF-17. It became called the F/A-18.
The Navy award to Northrop, potentially a mending process aftger Northrop became persona non grata with the DoD due to the F-14 failures, in direct defiance of the Congressional conference report. Naturally, a contract protest was filed to stop the contract award that defied the purpose of the funds disbursed.
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| YF-16 (near) and YF-17 (far) |
"So, Mr. Chairman, we may have missed the purpose of the whole exercise which, I htought, was the development of a single effective fighter aircraft for both services that could be afaforded in the numbers required and with the corresponding high degree of commonality, life cycle costs would be reduced significantly. This may only be an impossible dream that some of us have, bbut I believe our services must figure out some way to get together on many of these aircraft systems because we cannot continue forever to pay for these separate air forces with their completely different inventories."The Navy pointed out that making the YF-16 carrier suitable required extensive modifications. For example, The YF-16 had an empty weight of 13.6K lbs, whereas its carrier derivative increased to 18.6K lbs. Wing span increased from 28 to 33 feet, and the horizontal tail area increased from 42 to 75 squared-feet. By contrast, the F/A-18 increased the empty weight of the YF-17 from 17K lbs to 20.6K lbs. It also had an improved General Electric F-404 engine with 5-15% more trust.
It wasn't until the GAO report of October 10, 1975, that minds started changing. The GAO found that the Navy award to Northrop did not contradict the law, because the Congressional conference report on the allocation of funds was not legally binding. But the GAO remained neutral on the selection.
The funding for the F/A-18 almost didn't make it through the House, but as Kelly Orr found in his history "Hornet," an "odd coalition" of pro defense conservative and liberals from the states like California, Massachusetts, which was home to companies like Northrop and General Electric, voted it through. The vote made it despite opposition from Chairman Mahon of the appropriations commmittee, who was from Texas, home to General Dynamics and LTV.
LTV actually paired with General Dynamics because it was convinced winning the Air Force competition would assure its victory in the Navy compete. LTV even turned away a superior deal from Northrop.
While the House vote nearly assured the F/A-18's approval, Senators remained displeased. Goldwater, to some extent, reversed his opinion. He realized that the economies-of-scale provided by a common Air Force/Navy program would not materialize because of the vast difference in mission requirements. So he stated that:
"... I don't believe, in my years in the Congress, I have ever opposed a weapon system. I want to make it clear that I don't oppose the F-18 weapon system. I oppose the way that they have gone about obtaining it."It would appear that Goldwater's earlier statements, where he opposed the program on principle that it was not cost-effective, miraculously changed. It was just that the Navy didn't make a good cost-effectiveness case.
Had the GAO ruled against the Navy, I could not see the F/A-18 having ever been developed. It would probably have been either a derivative of the F-14, as pushed earlier, or a derivative of the F-16.
Without highly improbable confluence of John C. Boyd's genius (see Osinga, "Science, Strategy, and War") and David Packard's prototyping reform initiatives, there probably would never have been a F/A-18, nor would there have been an F-16.
Any and all sound attempts to promote diversification in DoD acquisitions are inherently fragile due to the misguided ideals of zero redundancy inherent to the PPBS way of thinking. It forces a static cost-effectiveness mentality that muddies the issues and subtlely injects biases. This is the hoolahoop all programs must go through to get at funding in the PPBS -- a convincing cost-effectiveness analysis.
At the time, prototyping competitions cost in the order of tens of millions of dollars, while full procurement (not including operating/support) went into the billions, if not tens of billions. Prototypes -- and full-scale development -- are learning processes. One cannot fully justify the end-goal of a prototype, it is to learn what is possible and what you might want.
Certainly the DoD can afford more prototypes, and even more full-scale developments. Certainly the F-16 and F/A-18, despite their apparent duplication, broke the trend of exponentially increasing costs and limited performance gains (though, with the F-35 we are back on that trend). And certainly, the Navy should have gone through its own fly-off before buying -- but who can blame them given the precariousness of their funding position with the Congress.
