By John Valceanu
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON – A new military book published by the
Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense describes changes in military
weapons systems acquisition during the 15 years following World War II.
“Rearming for the Cold War 1945-1960” by
retired Air Force Col. Elliott V. Converse III is the first in a five-volume
series of books focusing on the history of the acquisition of major weapons
systems by the Defense Department. The book’s 766 pages contain a detailed
examination of military acquisitions during the early years of the Cold War,
and they are full of case studies, personality profiles, charts and
photographs.
During a recent joint interview with
AFPS and The Pentagon Channel, Converse said the book and its companion volumes
were not written for historians. Rather the effort is “primarily aimed at the
acquisition workforce, the people who do acquisition day-to-day and perform
acquisition for their careers.”
It’s anticipated that defense policy
decision makers would also gain something from the books, he added.
Converse earned a doctorate in history
from Princeton University and served as the lead historian on the Defense
Acquisition History Project team. During the joint interview, Converse said he
was attracted to studying this “very dramatic” period of time.
“This was the beginning of the Cold War
with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, Americans
realized we might be vulnerable if they can put a satellite up there,” Converse
said. “There was great concern that our weapons systems counter a threat like
that. There was a lot of drama in the 1950s and 1940s.”
Following World War II, U.S. defense
policy makers were convinced that the United States’ ability to maintain
military supremacy rested on having superior technology, Converse said.
“One important thread that runs through
the volume is the consensus that American leaders had at the end of World War
II that the United States would seek security in the future by maintaining an
advantage in the most technologically advanced weapons systems over any possible
opponents,” he said. “They realized that the U.S. could not have an army as big
as the Soviets or the Chinese or probably deploy as many systems as they could.
So, the theory was that by having the most advanced systems, we’d be able to
offset that advantage in terms numbers and equipment.”
That idea of the necessity of
maintaining technological superiority to ensure national security affected how
weapons systems were developed, produced and deployed, Converse said. It also
determined how the Defense Department and the military services organized their
acquisition efforts and led to changes in the acquisition workforce.
The book, he said, offers a prime
example of how the United States’ perceived need to maintain an edge over its
adversaries in advanced weapons technology affected the process of acquisition
by its discussion of the acquisition strategy called “concurrency.” Using this
approach, production activities would begin before the weapons system was fully
developed and tested.
The strategy of concurrency “was in
contrast to the way systems were developed before World War II,” Converse said,
noting the pre-war system “was a sequential, deliberate system. You would
design the weapon, you would develop the prototype, you would test it, you
would produce it. All that would be done in series.
“By this new acquisition strategy,” he
continued, “production activities began before development was completed.
Sometimes, production contracts were let even before … an aircraft had ever
flown its first flight. Prototypes, in terms of aircraft, were not generally
developed. A new system was selected on the basis of a paper design
competition.”
Concurrency was used on a limited basis
during World War II, Converse said, and the Navy and Air Force tried to use the
strategy after that war ended and before the Korean War started, attempting to
speed up production by overlapping development and production. Once the Korean
War began, he said, all the services adopted concurrency as an acquisition strategy.
“Its record was not very good during the
Korean War,” Converse said. “A lot of the technologies needed for the advanced
systems had not yet been developed, and some that had been developed were not
proven sufficiently. Another problem was that the people defining requirements
for new weapons systems often set requirements that were beyond the state of
the art.”
In practice, he said, testing was often
inadequate because of the haste to rush weapons systems out to the field, and
they often discovered problems with the systems when they were fielded. Those
problems frequently required that the systems had to be modified and changed,
he added, which drove up cost and which meant that forces in the field still
didn’t have systems that operated properly.
The problems associated with the
strategy of concurrence were forgotten after the Korean War, Converse said, as
the U.S. entered into an arms race with the Soviet Union to develop ballistic
missile systems that could deliver nuclear warheads from continent to
continent. Each of the services used concurrency in their acquisition programs
to develop ballistic missiles, he said, and they encountered the same problems
with concurrency that had been encountered during the Korean War. But the
situation was now different.
“The difference was that these programs
had the highest national priority, which meant that the program managers … all
had generous budgets to get their jobs done,” Converse said. “They also had
special authorities that exempted them from going through the different layers
of bureaucratic approval necessary to get things done when they were developing
their weapons systems. And these programs were great successes.”
Some of the systems were developed and
deployed within four to five years which, according to Converse, was “an
amazing amount of time for such advanced systems.” In the 1960s, he said,
decision makers tended to overlook the problems associated with concurrency and
it became the preferred acquisition method.
“Few people recognized that the reason
the ballistic missile system program worked was that they had nearly unlimited
funding and special authorities in those programs. Other programs did not have
those, and that’s where problems with concurrency surfaced,” Converse said.
In response to those problems, by the
1970s the Defense Department went back to a more deliberate acquisitions
strategy, Converse said.
“You didn’t go on the basis of paper
designs. You would require two contractors, each to develop a prototype of the
system. Then, those prototypes would be tested and, in theory, better decisions
[would be] made,” he said.
Converse said understanding concurrency
as an acquisition strategy during the Cold War is important because it
addresses a central problem that still confronts the Defense Department.
“If your national strategy is to get
security through having the most advanced technology, you have to deploy that
technology rapidly and have it in the field so as always to maintain that edge
over the opponent,” he said. “If that’s your strategy, then you have to find a
way to insert advanced technology rapidly enough but at the same time to have
it cost reasonably and overcome those problems I talked about before. That’s
been a central dilemma.”
Since the 1950s, the United States has
tried to find ways to maintain military technological superiority while dealing
with the difficulty of rapidly fielding systems that might not yet be
sufficiently developed or proven, Converse said, noting that’s “a problem that
people working in the field today still face.”
Despite facing the same conundrum,
Converse warned against trying to create exact analogies between current
situations and those of the past.
“People have said that history does not
repeat itself -- it rhymes,” Converse said. “You can’t draw exact lessons from
the past because the situations are not the same. … The value of history is
that by taking a look at the past you can see how your predecessors in this
field addressed problems. … History tends to broaden your perspective.”
Converse presented his book May 10 to an
audience in the Pentagon during the second installment of the DOD History
Speaker Series.
He was joined for a panel discussion by
several other authorities. Benjamin F. Cooling, a professor at the Industrial
College of the Armed Forces, set the book in the overall historical context of
defense acquisition. Jacques S. Gansler, a former undersecretary of defense for
acquisition, technology and logistics, offered his perspective on the book
based on his experience managing DOD acquisition. Roy L. Wood, dean of the
Defense Systems Management College, moderated the panel.
By Karen Parrish
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