A technical bureau needs stable processes, specialist knowledge, and confidence in its own test results to develop complex weapons. Those same strengths can make contrary operational evidence easier to discount. This is a general bureaucratic problem rather than a uniquely American failing. Institutional expertise needs a way for uncomfortable field reports to overturn a settled internal judgment.
Notable Point · 2:17:03-2:17:54
How institutional confidence can become procurement blindness
The US Bureau of Ordnance illustrates both the value and danger of an organization that trusts its own procedures and evidence above outside warnings.