What a disappointing conclusion to an interesting historial blurb. American shot down lots of Russians because we had fly by wire planes. So Pair programming and stand up meetings are the obvious conclusion.
I had the same reaction. It felt like a sneaky publicity for Agile. On the other hand, the writer found one hell of a nice hook to get people to read the article.
It was a good story, but I stopped when it got to: "Speed through the loop beats quality and this is something we can apply to all aspects of the software development process." The jump from piloting a plane to "its therefore obviously true for software" without a shred of evidence was a little too much for me.