America’s military procurement program could use a dose of the innovative, entrepreneurial spirit that has made this country’s economy a perpetual engine of increasing efficiency and lower prices.
Consider New Hampshire businessman Greg Sancoff, CEO of Juliet Marine Systems, who recently received some well-deserved publicity for his attempt to sell the U.S. Navy a fast, futuristic boat his company has been developing at its own expense.
Dubbed the “Ghost,” the vessel rides atop two underwater torpedo-shaped tubes connected to the deck by wing-like struts and powered by 2,000 horsepower gas turbines. The design makes innovative use of “supercavitation” technology to encapsulate the tubes in gas bubbles, thus reducing the fluid friction they create as they plow through the water.
Resembling an aquatic Batmobile, the prototype of the Ghost was produced for just $15 million — chump change in the world of weapons procurement. With a potential speed of up to 60 miles per hour and stability even in rough waters, the vessel, according to Sancoff, would be ideal as a patrol boat for protecting larger warships, as a weapons platform and as a transport vessel for Navy SEALs.
To date, the Navy has been skeptical about the project.
Since the Cold War, most weapons contracts have been based on military requirements defined by, and requests for proposals put out by, the Pentagon. The biggest contracts go to a handful of mammoth defense contractors — like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon, Boeing and General Dynamics (which collectively earned over $28 billion in military revenues in fiscal 2013) — and typically require Uncle Sam to foot the entire bill for research and development.
The system invites influence-peddling, high price tags and cost overruns, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 stealth fighter jet being a prime example. Nor does it necessarily yield the most effective weapons.
It hasn’t always been this way. In the past, private enterprise has shown that it can originate ideas to improve armaments and lower their cost.
A noteworthy example dates back to the Civil War.
At the outbreak of war, the Union Army was equipped with muzzle-loading Springfield rifle-muskets (produced at the government-owned Springfield Armory in Springfield, Mass.). Similar muzzle-loaders had been in use for over 100 years.
The Springfield was a single-shot weapon, whose balls and powder were stuffed into the end of the barrel. It was not only slow (even a well-trained, experienced infantryman couldn’t re-load, aim and fire more than three times per minute), but it required a soldier to stay upright while reloading, thus exposing him to enemy fire.
President Abraham Lincoln, who was fascinated with gadgets and kept abreast of developments in ordnance, was aware of the recent invention of breech-loaders (long guns loaded from the stock end).
He knew a fierce debate was raging between the advocates of breech-loaders and muzzle-loaders. Wishing to see for himself, Lincoln and his secretary took two breech-loaders to the south lawn of the White House for target practice in the summer of 1861. Two years later, Christopher Spencer, inventor of the breech-loading Spencer repeating rifle, wangled an invitation to the White House to explain and demonstrate his innovative weapon. Lincoln, who test fired the Spencer, was impressed by how easy it was to load and its rate of fire (seven rounds in less than half a minute).
As a result of this demonstration, Lincoln cashiered the Army’s stodgy head of ordnance, a staunch opponent of breech-loaders, and federal procurement of breech-loading carbines quickened.
About 100,000 were purchased for the Union army by the end of the Civil War and were highly prized by soldiers in the field (though they still represented only a fraction of the 1.5 million Springfields manufactured during the war).
Automaker Henry Ford, whose passion for industrial efficiency gave this country assembly-line mass production and the Model-T automobile, performed a manufacturing miracle during World War II as part of the government’s crash re-armament program.
Applying automobile mass-production methods to far more complex aircraft, Ford’s Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., rolled a B-24 Liberator long-range bomber off the assembly line every 63 minutes. When Ford pioneered the assembly line for Model T’s in 1913, it reduced production time per car to 93 minutes. However, the average Ford car contained only about 15,000 parts, while the Liberator, by comparison, had 1,550,000 — a hundred times as many.
In the 1960s, Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and founder of Fairchild Semiconductor (and later Intel), rejected military funding for the development of microchips for guided missile systems, because he believed that government controls tied to funding would stifle innovation.
Instead, Fairchild financed research and development itself and produced such high-quality, reasonably priced chips that the military purchased them in large quantities.
Instead of ignoring innovative, entrepreneurial ideas for new weapons and methods of production, the Pentagon should be doing everything possible to solicit them and give them careful consideration, especially when the pitch comes from a company that has invested its own funds in research and development.
With procurement currently costing about $100 billion a year and the Pentagon chafing at the fiscal constraints imposed by sequestration, the U.S. military has nothing to lose and everything to gain by borrowing a page from the private sector’s playbook.
Elliott L. Epstein, a local attorney, is the founder of Museum L-A and author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be reached at epsteinel@yahoo.com.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
