Public Policy: Missiles & Mismanagement

Never in its history has the U.S. tried to do anything so intricate in so short a time as its missile program. The nation has achieved notable feats in an undertaking that calls for crash construction of the most complicated equipment ever devised. Failures are inevitable in exploring the unknown. Batting averages are not the full test of success in the missile league, but misses do cost millions—and of 193 attempted launchings of U.S. satellites and Atlas and Titan missiles since 1957, only 118 have been completely successful. The original goal of the Mercury astronaut program was to put a man in orbit by late 1960 at a cost of $200 million; now the target date is late 1961 and the anticipated cost $500 million. All in all, the U.S. missile effort is something less than it should be.

Who is to blame? In recent weeks. much of the guilt has been assigned to labor unions, whose bickering and strikes have cost 162,872 man-days on missile-site construction alone. So undeniable is labor's share in the failure that last week President Kennedy set up an eleven-man mediation board to settle without strikes labor disputes involving missile and space programs. But in the endless, echoing corridors of the Pentagon—and even within industry itself—there is a growing feeling that a large share of the blame for what is wrong must go to the U.S. missile manufacturer.

Same Old Mistakes. "Failure is a management problem." says Leslie Ball, outspoken director of Boeing Co.'s rigid quality-control program. The U.S. missile effort, he insists, is suffering from "the same management mistakes made over and over again."

The biggest management mistakes result from the bad habits incidental to the technique that made U.S. industry great: mass production. Geared to building products that could always be fixed up with a spare part—or, at worst, replaced—management has found it hard to adjust to building custom products that must work perfectly the first time. Building a missile or a satellite, says Boeing's Ball, "is like building a television set that will operate four hours a day for 500 years without an adjustment.'' For such a job, asserts the Harvard Business School's Pro fessor J. Sterling Livingston, "the control techniques industry has used are hopelessly inadequate." Proof of Livingston's contention is that the overwhelming majority of missile failures have been caused by faulty parts rather than faulty design.

Too many U.S. companies do not accept the fact that if a missile is to work 75% of the time, the components made by each subcontractor must function perfectly 99% of the time. Building this kind of reliability into a product drives costs up: quality-conscious Minneapolis-Honeywell figures that its control systems add 20% to the cost of the items it makes for inertial-guidance systems. Worse yet in the eyes of manufacturers rushing to meet over-optimistic production schedules, uncompromising quality control is a time-consuming process.