"move fast, break things" is not a viable approach to aircraft design. Lead times on hardware is years. That helmet - how long would it take you to make one? Y

"move fast, break things" is not a viable approach to aircraft design. Lead times on hardware is years. That helmet - how long would it take you to make one? You can't just tell that team don't sweat it, we are going to change requirement on you every two weeks. And you can't tell the jet team wait 3 years for this helmet, then start designing the system. Military development is so far outside the realm of agile that it make so sense to compare (source: I've done both). The things agile people struggle with I just scoff at. Building large, physical, state of the art systems require planning, requires schedules, requires rework, requires huge teams, requires reams of documentation, and so on. You can't agile your way through that stuff. Planning doesn't lead to unbounded schedules. It leads to compromise. We have 3 years, 85 million dollars. We need an architecture (assume, say, a flight system for a helicopter, something I have done and delivered). I'm sorry, but very early in you have to choose your processors, distributed network (you need to be fail safe, so multiple redundancies are needed), and more. Then you can buy that, or simulate that; either has costs, but your engineers something to work with. Many have very strict environmental concerns - limited weight, has to fit in this bay, needs radiation hardening, and so on. I can't wait until the last 3 months to make this decision, sorry. Somebody has to build these, deliver them. They need to design and build out the logistics chain - how do I retrofit the existing fleet? HOw do I do repairs? How quickly can I spin up my factory line if you need spares? Do we buy 3x the units you need now, or plan on JIT. This is just one tiny nit of a tiny detail that needs to be decided and tracked. Don't forget instruction manuals, plans to train the maintaince workers, training the workers, training the pilots, building a school for the next people coming through in two years. I have a meething. I could type for several hours. There is nothing agile about this problem.