[spamizbad]

There used to be a lot more defense contractors during the cold war. Also, more accountability. So there was competitive pressure to be seen as an organization that could reliably deliver projects. Over the years, many of the major companies merged, then shifted strategies to geographically dispersing their jobs to bolster congressional support.

Take the Joint Strike Fighter / F-35 for example: 4 bids. Lockheed won the contract but subcontracts major parts to another JSF bidder (Northrop) and Boeing/MD ending up merging. The whole thing is so incestuous.

[perl4ever]

What I find humorous is a few years ago I observed apparently the federal government wanted to outsource some legal services and document management, and they went with one of these airplane makers (I forget which one). Who do you think of when you think of paperwork? The aerospace industry!

[chii]

"Most of our paper work is already for dealing with these contracting firms! Might as well outsource the paper work completely to them!"

[jariel]

"There used to be a lot more defense contractors during the cold war. Also, more accountability. "

Gear today is far more complicated. Schedule and cost increase geometrically with complexity.

Many of the 'innovations' on early era fighters were quick iterations made by tiny teams.

But it's no longer the 100's of fighters that will win, it's the one squadron with the best gear, radar, comms backed up by the rest of it (AWACS etc.) that will dominate. Of course, it has to actually work (!) but there's something to be said for that.

The basis of the 'over-budget makes money' is still reality however, there's no doubting that.

So it's going to be a matter of how we apply operational integrity in this new era of sophistication.

[spamizbad]

We have powerful computer software today that lets a single CAD engineer replace a room full of draftsman. We can spin up 20 different virtual designs then test them in virtual wind tunnels before a single physical mockup is made. Material science advances also can make your job easier in areas like friction and keeping weight down.

So while I agree things are orders of magnitude more complex, our tools are also much more powerful.

JSF studies started in 1993, when the fastest computer was a 235.8 GFLOPS behemoth -- roughly the speed of a midrange gaming GPU today.

[ska]

It's worth drawing a distinction between increasing costs and schedule complexity, and increasing overruns in both.

Regardless of how complex or expensive a project it, if the people doing it aren't strongly incentivized (positively or negatively) to keep these things under control, the will not. That doesn't matter what era you are talking about.