11 ms·

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the

• Jtsummers 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised. It has happened with a lot of different acquisition programs. That was actually one of my first thoughts on reading the article, as I know people who've had to do this kind of reverse engineering for other aircraft due to a lack of tech data in the initial contract and refusal of USAF to purchase it later.
• b-mmxx 6y ago
  This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were cut up for scrap and sold off at seven cents a pound. Not only didn’t the government want to pay storage costs on the tooling, but it wanted to ensure that the Blackbird never would be built again. I thought at the time that this cost-cutting decision would be deeply regretted over the years by those responsible for the national security. That decision stopped production on the whole series of Mach 3 aircraft for the remainder of this century. It was just plain dumb.” Ben R Rich and Leo Janos. “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed”.
  • alliao 6y ago
    China didn't steal a copy did they? Ah got the dates wrong.
    • booi 6y ago
      That would be great because then you could just order the parts on Alibaba
      • anigbrowl 6y ago
        Pls
    • slim 6y ago
      s/China/URSS/
      • stratosgear 6y ago
        s/URSS/USSR/
        • cpach 6y ago
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/URSS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/URSS
          • HPsquared 6y ago
            Ah, the famous opponent of OTAN...
        • richrichardsson 6y ago
          s/USSR/CCCP I think this is why people like to refer to the Communinist Party of China (CPC [1]) as the CCP, because it evokes memories of the Soviet Union. [1] cpc.people.com.cn
          • 6y ago
• dpierce9 6y ago
  Definitely a real live possibility. It could also just be lost. Probably physical copies, tons of turnover over many years and sites. This seems less likely but there is a perverse incentive not to admit it is lost unless required by law.
• h0l0cube 6y ago
  > The government program manager (PM) is under a lot of pressure to "get it cheaper" And let me guess, the 'pressure' comes from government decision makers that live in a perpetual revolving door with industry? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
  • kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Mostly the CEOs who want to get their third home.
  • dwheeler 6y ago
    While the revolving door is always a potential issue, and I'm sure it happens, I don't think that's a key problem for the DoD. When government officials leave office they're required to not do work, for a period of time, on things they controlled, and the penalties can be steep. That reduces incentives for the worst of abuses. Also: a US government employee who retires after 20+ years has a guaranteed pension; it's nice to get more on top, but not by risking it. No, I think the pressure primarily comes from the DoD procurement process itself. First, you have to develop the requirements. The Air Force wants a plane, the Navy wants a plane, the Army wants a plane. If you say "yes" to one & "no" the others you get a political battle. A bright person says, "I know, we'll make a plane for everyone, and the volume purchase will make it cheaper!" "Great!" everyone says. They each bring in their laundry lists of what they want the plane to do... if you say "no", then they probably won't fund it, so you have this HUGE list of requirements. Now the plane (or whatever) has to do everything. Then it goes out for bid. Only the lowest bid will win, so contractors will do their best to make it a low price for a massive number of requirements. They're under great pressure to underbid the real costs, and when you do new things it's usually more expensive than you imagine. Yet those costs will still look eye-wateringly big (because it's trying to do everything). Contractors will then say "don't require that 'bunch of useless technical data and those technical data rights... it'll be cheaper!". In addition, every time you learn something, you'll need to make a change, and that will result in a change request with a remarkably high price tag. That's partly because the contractors are motivated by profit, but to be fair, they were often pressured into unrealistically low starting costs by the process. Many of the DoD's problems aren't from "evil government officials" or "evil contractors". Many really are trying to do good things. Sometimes the problem is that the DoD procurement process has some perverse incentives that sometimes results in very strange outcomes.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ReedJessen 6y ago
  I very much suspect this is the case in this instance.
• suifbwish 6y ago
  Why is it legal to do this? I don’t pay taxes so a bunch of morons can waste it on a consulting company trick
  • oconnor663 6y ago
    There are lots of different types of projects. Sometimes you're asking people to invent things for you, and you're the only conceivable customer for that thing, and (like here) it would be weird and perverse not to require all the data/specs/whatever for that thing. Other times you're buying something that's already been invented, with many existing customers, and the data/specs/whatever for that product line are worth much more than the units you actually want to buy, and it wouldn't make any sense to have to buy out that entire product line just to use the product. It might be hard to make simple rules that distinguish between these cases, and all the gray areas in between.
    • ric2b 6y ago
      It would at least make sense for it to be mandatory for any vehicles or weapons used by the DoD, no?
      • 1MachineElf 6y ago
        I wonder if doing so would create a barrier to entry for the annual billions of $ of defense equipment the US sells to Saudi Arabia. For example, what if Saudi Arabia considers it a risk if another government has the technical plans? If that were the case, I expect defense contractors would be adverse to divulging those details.
        • suifbwish 6y ago
          And if the contractor were located in Australia or China the government could legally mandate the defense contractors give them access to the code
  • dublin 6y ago
    Keeping things is NOT free, especially for physical things like tooling/fixtures/equipment. It actually costs a surprising amount of money.
• fbelzile 6y ago
  Here in Canada, our air force takes out airworthy parts from planes, like emergency locator transmitter (ELT) batteries, before they're sent to museums. They have a stash of plane parts in a hangar somewhere for cases just like this.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    During the Falklands war the RAF had to raid museum's planes for parts for their Vulcan bombers.
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  It's also possible the government did get all the technical data and then lost it. It has to be somebody's job to archive and catalog that stuff, and the cost of archiving comes out of somebody's budget. The pressure to just toss old dusty paper files to cut costs can be enormous. It might have happened because "Joe Smith was the archivist and he retired 10 years ago and we needed the space." If the data was classified (very likely) it costs a lot more to store it and audit it, and the pressure to "just burn it" is that much greater.
  • angry_octet 6y ago
    This is extremely implausible. Files (the non descript name for official records) are extremely hard to destroy even if you want to. Everything about the B2 is in a special TS compartment and will likely be retained until long after we are dust.
  • vertis 6y ago
    Slightly off-topic: A few years ago I wanted to renovate an apartment. I dutifully applied for the plans from the local council. Only to be told they no longer existed. I had this, "Well then, it was always like that" moment. Didn't end up knocking out the wall, for other reasons, but if the plans no longer existed who was to argue that it wasn't always like that.
  • dublin 6y ago
    Configuration management, especially for black projects, is the one thing you can count on from the DoD and its contractors just as surely as taxes and waste.
• 8note 6y ago
  How is that not a national security threat?
• hef19898 6y ago
  Yeah, very well might be. Usually so, these contracts include decades worth of spares. Things usually turn ugly when this period runs out, yet 25 years after delivery seems a bit short. Nice tid bit for the B-52. These old birds, old in the sense of designed pre CAD, are quite hard to understand for modern manufacturing. Even manufacturers rely on retires sometimes to understand these old drawings for their own planes. Then again, the B-2 shouldn't fall in that category. I suspect that people in the armed forces, at least some, understand maintenance but have no idea of manufacturing. A couple of years ago I had spontaneous "workshop" session where we discussed how we could leverage BoMs and data collected during production and assembly from the manufacturer for version and build tracking of military hardware. I used to work for that manufacturer in question, so I knew what data they collected during production. The only we would have had to figure out was which BoM to use. That was immediately shot down by middle management, because it would cost 10s of millions to get the rights for that data. Nevermind that it was there from day one, even in SAP so our client wouldn't even had issues with compatibility. And none of the people I had these discussions with had any idea how BoMs and such are used. In these environments it is quite easy for crucial knowledge, especially of highly specialised parts and processes, to be lost.
  • dublin 6y ago
    You entire comment is monstrous bigotry of the modern. The B-2 was in fact the first large, complex product ever built entirely from a CAD database - a factor in its huge cost. As a CIM Manager for a major B-2 subcontractor, I can assure you they knew what they were doing. Yes, even 30-35 years ago. Yes, they knew as much or more then than we know today about BOMs, manufacturing, CAD, digital records and archiving, documentation and configuration management, and everything else. (BOMs weren't in SAP, but they were in mainframe DBs, ERP systems, and CAD systems, some of which are still sold and used today.) I have literally never worked on any other program in my entire career that was as well-run and orchestrated overall as the B-2 program. (We called it ADP-101 at the time, and for the first few years, we didn't even know what we were working on!)
• low_key 6y ago
  There's a similar problem to the "we'll create it cheaper if" issue in a lot of government software acquisition. Contractors, especially big companies, often want a lot more money to hand over source code for software. Often the government takes the short-term discount, but then ends up paying massively over time by having no ability to maintain or upgrade the system without involvement from the same contractor.