156 Dahlgren 



understanding what that process is and what the mistalce-making process is. 

 That's what it really is, and being able to identify the winners and reject the 

 losers, no matter how dear those babies are. Some of the ideas were no good. 

 They were clever and really represented a lot of intelligence, but they were 

 solving problems that didn't exist. 



You take it from there to some prototypes and on and on until you have a 

 model that you can describe for production that will work when it's produced as 

 described and which then can be given out to industry. Industry, of course, likes 

 to usurp all that. They say they can take the whole process themselves, but that 

 has always been a mistake. Whenever we have generated the models ourselves 

 to at least the first prototypes, the Navy has always been better off, always been 

 able to write better contracts, and the bidding was better. The bidding was more 

 honest. That's one of our functions, to always be educated far ahead of the rest 

 of the world, including the industries to which we give contracts. If they get the 

 education and we don't, we're at their mercy. That's the way it has always 

 worked out where that hasn't been guarded against. There are too many [in 

 civil service] who are willing to take the path of least resistance and not do this 

 work themselves and give it to contractors. Pretty soon they're trading with 

 contractors. The civil servant cannot monitor contracts if he doesn't know more 

 than the contractor. It's impossible. 



What type of funding problems did you encounter xi>ith the SYSCOMS in the 1960's, if 

 any'? 



Really not very many except in the one area of military construction. That's 

 where I failed. We didn't have any trouble getting the programs, but we were 

 short of housing. I don't mean private dwellings. I mean offices and buildings 

 for putting things together and making things. We were short of that — 

 laboratory space — and I think the former Director of Naval Laboratories felt 

 that as long as we were getting the programs, we weren't in trouble, and that it 

 was those labs who didn't have the programs that needed the military construc- 

 tion to create the facilities that would get the programs. Well, I've lived long 

 enough to know that it doesn't work that way. When you have the programs 

 financed, you can then justify the military construction money for providing 

 the plant for those programs. In fact, if I were sitting in the approval chain and 

 anybody came to me for new military construction money and didn't have the 

 programs, they wouldn't get a penny, but it didn't go that way. It's a good 

 example of how reason sometimes doesn't work and that there was something 

 else working, and I don't completely understand what it was. Now, the new 

 Technical Director has been more successful and maybe some of the 

 groundwork was done in my time. It might have helped. He's very kind. He 

 gives me credit for that groundwork. But during my time, there was very little 



