Skunk Works

IN MY FORTY YEARS at Lockheed I worked on twenty-seven different airplanes. Today’s young engineer will be lucky to build even one. The life cycle of a military airplane is far different from the development and manufacturing of anything else. Obsolescence is guaranteed because outside of a secret, high-priority project environment like the Skunk Works, it usually takes eight to ten years to get an airplane from the drawing board into production and operational. Every combat airplane that flew in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 was at least ten to fifteen years old by the time it actually proved its worth on the battlefield, and we are now entering an era in which there may be a twenty- to thirty-year lapse between generations of military aircraft.

Whether we as a nation will develop intelligent military planning and spending policies in the post–cold war era, I will leave to futurists and politicians to argue about. My interest is the future survival of the Skunk Works as a widely adopted concept, and understanding the key reasons for its unsurpassed success. Will its future be anywhere as bright as its past? Will the concept itself finally receive broad acceptance across the industrial landscape at a time when development dollars are as sparse as raindrops on the Sahara?

To my mind, the leaner and meaner Washington becomes in doling out funding for defense, the more pressing the need for Skunk Works–style operations. Any company whose fortune depends on developing new technologies should have a Skunk Works in operation; in all, there are fifty-five or so scattered around various industries, which isn’t very many. But if Lockheed’s Skunk Works has been a tremendously successful model, why haven’t hundreds of other companies tried to emulate it? One reason, I think, is that most other companies don’t really understand the concept or its scope and limitations, while many others are loath to grant the freedom and independence from management control that really are necessary ingredients for running a successful Skunk Works enterprise.

Unfortunately, the trend nowadays is toward more supervision and bureaucracy, not less. General Larry Welch, the former Air Force chief of staff, reminded me recently that it took only two Air Force brass, three Pentagon officials, and four key players on the Hill to get the Blackbird project rolling. “If I wanted an airplane and the secretary of the Air Force agreed,” the general observed, “we had four key congressional committee chairmen to deal with and that was that. The same was true of the stealth fighter project—except we had eight people to deal with on the Hill instead of four. But by the time we were dealing with the B-2 project, we had to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops at the Pentagon and on the Hill. So it is harder and harder to have a Skunk Works.”

To buck smothering bureaucratic controls inside or outside government takes unusual pluck and courage. Smallness, modest budgets, and limiting objectives to modest numbers of prototypes are not very rewarding goals in an era of huge multinational conglomerates with billion-dollar cash flows. There are very few strong-willed individualists in the top echelons of big business—executives willing or able to decree the start of a new product line by sheer force of personal conviction, or willing to risk investment in unproven technologies. As salaries climb into the realm of eight-figure annual paychecks for CEOs, and company presidents enjoy stock options worth tens of millions, there is simply too much at stake for any executive turtle to stick his neck out of the shell. Very, very few in aerospace or any other industry are concerned about the future beyond the next quarterly stockholders’ report.

Yet if times stay tough and the New World Order evolves without any new big-power confrontations, the need for innovative, rapidly developed, and relatively inexpensive systems that are best supplied by a Skunk Works will be greater than ever. Which is the main reason why I remain optimistic about the future viability of the Skunk Works. By its very definition as a low-overhead, advanced development operation for crash production of hot items—prototypes representing cutting-edge technologies that the customer eagerly needs or wants to exploit—the Skunk Works is needed more than ever. The beauty of a prototype is that it can be evaluated and its uses clarified before costly investments for large numbers are made.