Dahlgren in Perspective 1 79 



I've given considerable thought to this question, and I'm afraid the answer is 

 "No." The Soviets build very simple, functional equipment. I remember, par- 

 ticularly in my day, going down to Dahlgren to look at a captured 50-caliber 

 machine gun package which was then part of the Soviet aircraft armament. 

 This thing looked so simple that it was almost impossible to imagine it would 

 work, but it did. It was put together with such clearances that any child could 

 assemble it. Instead of clearances in the thousandths, the clearances were in 

 quarter inches or something of that sort. When the plane came back from a mis- 

 sion, the whole assembly, the quadruple machine gun assembly, was dropped 

 down to the ground and a new one hoisted up by the same simple method. 

 As a matter of information, the Russian MiG fighter which was recently landed 

 by a defector in Japan was not nearly the beautiful, magnificent, gleaming, 

 expensive aircraft we expected to see. The material of which it was made looked 

 like old scrap iron. The only thing really fine about it was the engines. It 

 obviously cost half or less what one of our fighter planes would cost, and I'm 

 afraid of our position relative to the Soviets because we overwrite specifications 

 and have done so foryears.They obviously strive for simplicity in every sort of a 

 weapon system or ship or airplane or submarine that we know of. 



While on the Advisory Board, I asked the Technical Director at NOL how 

 they could justify the prospective $1,000,000 expense of a torpedo. He said, 

 "The target for the submarine costs $100,000,000." I didn't think this was a 

 very good answer, and I still don't think so. The other day, I listened to General 

 Brown, the present Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is not too 

 optimistic about our position relative to the Soviets and thinks we're falling 

 behind. I'm sure we are in the arms race. I asked him if any serious work was 

 being done to reduce the costs of everything we have in the military — ships, 

 tanks, missiles, airplanes, rockets. He said, "Oh, they are so expensive, but we 

 just have to have them and have to pay the bill." But if the Russian fighter is 

 available, such as the one we recently saw in Japan, in numbers two or three 

 times the numbers we can afford, who is going to win the war? The answer, in 

 my opinion, is fairly certain. We are not. I'm sorry to end on such a pessimistic 

 note, but I would hope that the laboratories, specifically the Naval Surface 

 Weapons Center, would fight constantly to simplify specifications, to use stan- 

 dard materials, and to reduce the frightening costs of our weapons. I also hope 

 that it will be possible for them to develop the new lightweight 8-inch gun and 

 produce it at a cost we can afford. 



The last action I performed for the Navy Department after retirement was to 

 head a large group that studied the missile system now called AEGIS. 



