"Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter was developed in a breakneck 30 months by a close-knit team of 50 engineers led by an experienced fighter designer named Alan Brown and overseen by seven government employees."
vs.
"The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight."
The final section of "Skunk Works" touches on the bureaucratic morasses.
Although the 30 months quote is really misleading: the surface analysis prefiguring the Have Blue concept were started in 1974, XST phase one was started in 1975, the Have Blue demonstrator first flew in 1977.
31 months (not 30) is the time between the full-scale development decision and the first test model, decision to operational capability took 5 years (minus a month, November 1978 to October 1983) and almost 8 if you add the Have Blue studies.
I'm now home so I can both reply and complete my previous comment.
> Doesn't Kelly Johnson give Ben Rich the advice to never work with the navy?
It's more than that, it's Kelly's unwritten 15th rule of management:
> Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.
It's in the early page (#2) of the chapter on Sea Shadow.
The bureaucratic morass was from the Air Force and mentioned in the penultimate chapter about the B2:
> When we began testing out stealth fighter, the combined Lockheed and Air Force personnel involved totaled 240 persons. There are more than two thousand Air Force auditors, engineers, and official kibitzers crawling all over that trouble B-2 assembly building in Palmdale. What are they doing? Compiling one million sheets of paper every day — reports and data that no one in the bureaucracy has either the time or the interest to read.
> The Air Force now has too many commissioned officers with no real mission to perform, so they stand around production lines with clipboards in hand, second-guessing and interfering every step of the way. The Drug Enforcement Agency has 1,200 enforcement agents out in the field [nb: the book was published in 1994, the DEA has learned since…] fighting the drug trafficking problem. The DOD employs 27,000 auditors. That kind of discrepancy shows how skewed the impulse for oversight has become both at the Pentagon and in the halls of Congress.
He also presciently notes that the way the B2 was done (involving multiple manufacturers in a huge project) would spread and infect all future projects as the number of projects would diminish and the DOD would spread projects around to avoid any contractor dying.
To their credit, the F-117 also wasn't a multirole fighter, was built in low quantities, wasn't planned for export uses, and was relatively quickly retired. It's a one-trick pony designed to sneak in, drop a precision bomb, and get out.
> the F-117 also wasn't a multirole fighter, was built in low quantities [...] It's a one-trick pony designed to sneak in, drop a precision bomb, and get out.
These are all good things, though. It's a focused airframe absolutely excellent at what it does. Much like the A10 really.
> and was relatively quickly retired
Beg pardon? The F-117 reached operational capability in 1983 and was retired in 2008 (the original plan was 2011, it was retired earlier to free money to buy F22s). And they've flown as recently as 2010 around Nellis.
The focused airframe idea is not without a bunch of tradeoffs. The mission and target capabilities of the F-117 were extremely limited, which meant that the USAF had to have other aircraft around to pick up the rest of the missions.
Further, having a variety of specialized aircraft that do not share an airframe is a maintenance nightmare on the ground, as training and parts are necessary for each different kind of aircraft flown. Operating out of a major air base this is less of an issue, but with FOBs and aircraft carriers this is nigh impossible. Indeed, this was one of the motivating factors that drove the Navy to replace the A-6, F-14, EA-6B, and S-3B with aircraft derived from the F/A-18E/F line.
Yes, the F/A-18E will never have the unique capability of the F-14D, but apparently those planes were a massive pain to maintain. Similarly with the F-117 -> F-35. Beautiful beasts.
The Predator will probably make it to 25, but most models of the other drones that will dominate the wars of the future will have far shorter periods of military service.
vs.
"The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight."