Comment by djoldman
3 months ago
My understanding is that one of the huge barriers to a lot of DoD projects is seemingly unending feature creep:
1. let's make the "next-gen airplane"
2. (work 5 years)
3. ok now we want it to have better radar cloaking
4. (work 5 years)
5. ok now we want it to be faster
6. (work 5 years)
7. ok now we want it to lift off vertically
Eventually every vehicle has all capabilities as opposed to focusing on some limited number.
We saw the same thing with the new USPS vehicle.
Yep. No matter what industry, you cannot make a miracle product that accounts for every use case and is amazing at everything. You can burn trillions trying and still come up short.
The better way is focused products/specialization. Make something that fills a specific niche very well at a good price.
You'll might need more products to get complete (or close to complete) coverage, but you'll end up paying FAR less in the long run on R&D, maintenance, delays, etc.
Well. Feature creep happens because the project is not modular enough that any addition has to be a feature instead of an external addon. But modularity would not be compatible with locking in the government.
Trying to make a product that is both modular and at the absolute cutting edge of technology in multiple fields is nearly impossible.