Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is the stealth bomber. Yeah. By all means, that should have gone to Lockheed Martin. They have the expertise from the F-117A, Nighthawk. This is the Lockheed side of the story, but they beat the B-2 in a lot of early competitions, but the government still gave the award to Northrop Grumman because there was some particular plane that the government said Northrop could manufacture a bunch of it, then sell internationally, and then change their mind, so then Northrop was left holding the bag, with the Department of Defense being like, all right, you can win this competition. Who knows if any of these things are true. That's Lockheed side of the story. Anyway, Ben writes, “Under the current manufacturing arrangements for the B-2, Boeing makes the wings, Northrop makes the cockpit, LTV makes the bomb bays, and the back end of the B-2 airplane in addition to 4000 subcontractors working on bits and pieces of everything else because of the tremendous costs involved. This is probably a blueprint for how big expensive airplanes will be built in the future. For better or for worse, this piecemeal manufacturing approach, rather than the Skunk Works way, will characterize large aerospace projects from now on. With many fewer projects, the government will have to spread the work around across an even broader horizon. What will happen to the efficiency, the quality, and the decision making? At a time of maximum belt tightening in aerospace, those are not just words, but may well represent the keys to a company's ability to survive.” I think that 1992 Ben Rich publishing the Skunk Works book, then the Last Supper, it basically marks the end of Skunk Works. Skunk works is still a term that is used to describe a part of Lockheed Martin, but is it the skunk works of the 50s, 60s, 70s? No, not at all. It's a completely different thing. Airplanes are just not built by small teams in this auteur way, the way that they were in Kelly's era. Let's talk about some of these huge programs that these large fleets of planes that the US government has bought in recent years. We'll start with the F-22. This gives you a sense of how freaking long these timeframes take. In 1981, the Air Force identified a requirement for an Advanced Tactical Fighter to replace the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. That kicks off this, we're-going-to-need-some-future thing. In 1985, the initial order, and I don't know if it's technically an order or how it changes over time, but the initial pseudo commitment is for the US government to buy 750 planes of what becomes the F-22 Raptor for $44 billion in the total program cost. That gets revised down. Again, an airplane has not flown yet. Just before 1997 to 339 planes—that's going from 750 to 339—for $62 billion in total program cost, that cost went up, even though the number of planes dramatically went down to half. I was wondering, I was like, did Ben misspeak there?…

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