For the record, I fully support Government investment in the development and technology and maintaining a manufacturing base to support a strong defense.
There is plenty to fault in military R&D but I don;t agree that "much" of it is "nothing more than a jobs program." For example, as someone who works primarily in tactical aerospace technology, most (but not all) of the criticism of the F-35 program is uninformed garbage.
MOST of the projects I've worked on over the years have been worthy, at least IMHO. Where they fail is usually in poor managment, quite often to the Government deferring too much to the contractors who often place company profit ahead of what's best for the Country. I mean, companies need to make money... I get that. But IMHO, the Government needs to cultivate and maintain technical expertise in order to hold the contractor's feet to the fire.
I'm kind of appalled at how oftern in the past (this is less common now, but it does still happen) the Government allows Contractors to retain the rights to data associated with defense systems. Quite often, they own the data interfaces. The Government does this because it does not have the technical expertise to meaningfully own the docs and data, but it means that the Contractor retains an iron grip on anything to do with the system in question. This leads to "vendor lock" and (you guessed it) bloated costs.
There is a signficant effort underway in DoD to reduce this vendor lock. As you might imagine, many of the Big Boy vendors are less than enthusiastic about it, but some are starting to see the benefits of collaboration. We'll see.
In THIS case, the idea behind the ship was a decent one, but it is an example of where the Navy simply gave too much leeway to the contractor. They allowed the program to pass milestones it had no business passing. The program should have failed much earlier than it did.
The thing is failure happens in R&D. It's part of the process. But we must be willing to declare failures when we see them.
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