> Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter was developed in a breakneck 30 months by a close-knit team of 50 engineers led by an experienced fighter designer named Alan Brown and overseen by seven government employees. Brown said he exercised strict control over the design effort, nixing any proposed feature of the plane that might add cost or delay or detract from its main mission.
> The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight. The sprawling JSF staff, partially a product of the design’s complexity, has also added to that complexity like a bureaucratic feedback loop, as every engineer or manager scrambles to add his or her specialty widget, subsystem or specification to the plane’s already complicated blueprints … and inexperienced leaders allow it.
For those interested in a deeper look at why the F-35 is so, well, F'd, this is a great read:
It basically comes down to stupid design considerations forced upon the program by the various branches(mainly the Marine Corps) and how easily blinded Congress was by the notion of a (supposedly cheaper) one-size-fits-all solution.
I'm guessing this is an outgrowth of modern management practices that explicitly do not value engineering experience and believe "process" will produce the desired result.
People are interchangeable, there is no institutional knowledge, and management can solve all technical issues.
> The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight. The sprawling JSF staff, partially a product of the design’s complexity, has also added to that complexity like a bureaucratic feedback loop, as every engineer or manager scrambles to add his or her specialty widget, subsystem or specification to the plane’s already complicated blueprints … and inexperienced leaders allow it.
For those interested in a deeper look at why the F-35 is so, well, F'd, this is a great read:
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-alli...
It basically comes down to stupid design considerations forced upon the program by the various branches(mainly the Marine Corps) and how easily blinded Congress was by the notion of a (supposedly cheaper) one-size-fits-all solution.