Harvey Sapolsky is Professor of Public Policy and Organization and recently retired from teaching political science and directing the MIT Security Studies Program. In one of the e-mail conversations I had with Harvey I asked how did he get the job from the Navy to analyze the Fleet Ballistic Missile program (Polaris) to understand why it worked so well. Harvey interviewed a huge set of people and understanding how he got the job helps get a perspective on how he conducted the research.
Over four hundred interviews were con- ducted ranging in length from a minimum of one hour to repeat sessions that total over forty hours with one individual. Among those interviewed were persons in other naval organizations, contractor organizations, the Army, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Congress, the General Accounting Office, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Ceneral Intelligence Agency, and the British Admiralty.
Harvey’s PhD thesis advisor was James Q. Wilson whose achievements are in this Britannica article which include a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003 and James’s first PhD student was Harvey Sapolsky and James helped launch his career by suggesting Harvey as a person who could do the research on FBM for the navy.
One of the papers Harvey published on the missile program is here. What was fascinating is to read that the Navy tricked the Air Force into approving resources for the Polaris missile in exchange for the Navy withdrawing from the Army’s Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile program. The Air Force was much more concerned about the Army having nuclear launch capability than the Navy. The Navy realized that the Army’s liquid fuel missile was not a good fit for launching missile's from a submarine and solid rocket fuel was much better. It is like driving in your car with a 5 gal can of gasoline versus a 50 lb bag of charcoal in the back. And the Army’s missile design was much too big to fit in a submarine.
So the Navy made a deal to withdraw from the Army’s nuclear missile efforts if the Air Force would support their own solid rocket fuel efforts. the Air Force agreed and that was the start of the Polaris missile program.
The obstacles for the Navy to develop submarine launched ballistic missile were huge.
By any measure SLBMs were a significant innovation, affecting in important ways several dimensions of U.S. strategic policy. They helped kill as unneeded a vast bomber force (our own), helped save the Navy from being marginalized in the assignment of the nation’s most vital security mission, and helped win the Cold War by making it impossible for the United States to lose. They also were largely unwanted both within and without the Navy. Civilians did not want the Navy to develop its own ballistic missile. The Air Force criticized the effort. The Army had to be pushed out of the way. And much of the Navy dreaded SLBMs.
To overcome the organizations who wanted the Polaris program to fail it was decided protecting the development team from outside attacks was critical. There needed to be a way to defend the project and its resources. That is where the basis from PERT and professional project management came from. To create perception of a perfectly run project. Pretty charts and graphics. Alternatives are evaluated and optimized by computer. It looks like everything is inventoried and accounted for. The schedule was totally predictable.
Special Projects Office's reputation seems not only to have been beneficial, but also to have been in large part contrived.
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FBM proponents saw a competitive advantage in having the Special Projects Office perceived as possessing an extraordinarily ef- fective management system.
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men who recognized that management systems could have political as well as operational benefits.
One of the best example I found on how smart the project team was and how PERT was not the true representation of the project is the below Table which shows the multiple vendors used for each component. How do you put all those vendors with each of their different project events in one PERT diagram? Did you just list the generic areas and assume a vendor would do that work? if you did your schedule was not that accurate. Did you you list each vendor as alternative suppliers for a given amount of work?
This supplier strategy was part of Admiral Levering Smith’s design of the highly modularized component design with at least three suppliers available for any component.
