Sal Mercogliano recounts conversations with shipyard executives who said intermittent work had made permanent naval architects difficult to retain. The yards consequently hired external designers for individual contracts. At the same time, resident NAVSEA teams supervised construction, and he argues that their repeated interventions produced design churn. Each alteration still had to be checked against the ship's integrated systems. His Constellation alternative was an initial run of about ten minimally altered FREMMs, with a more extensively Americanized second flight designed in parallel. The Pentagon Wars comparison is explicitly described as an apocryphal movie analogy, carrying a recognizable criticism of requirements growth without establishing the Bradley's actual development history.
Chapter · 50:21-53:03
Outsourced design and resident NAVSEA oversight
Mercogliano's shipyard-executive account links temporary naval architects and frequent change orders to a loss of continuous design responsibility.