Or maybe just a description of development, procurement, and life cycle support costs of a weapons system for the Pentagon ……… but I repeat myself.

The problem here is that each one of these steps represents a place where some private contractor can sit astride the process and extract a toll.

This why it takes 25 years and billions of dollars to develop the next fighter aircraft, when the P-80 was delivered just 180 days after the go ahead was given.

If this is what the past 50 years of developments in systems engineering have given us, perhaps, just maybe, there are some deep flaws in the underlying assumptions of that profession.

The source for the link is the Defense Acquisition University, and yes Virginia, there is a Defense Acquisition University, and they have a handy, dandy interactive flash version available on site.