Re: HIGH TECH WONDER INDIVIDUAL WEAPON

On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 01:16:05PM -0800, John Atkinson wrote:
>Yeah, but if you don't have nay-saying curmudgeons who
>keep saying "Sure it looks good in a laboratory, but
>will it work in the Real World??" then you end up with
>a bunch of weapons programs that start to resemble
>Nazi Germany's approach to standardization and
>simplification in weaponry.

Heh. A friend of mine's former Civil Service (UK) and a keen amateur
historian; he reckons that one of the major advantages the Allies had
during WW2 was the committee system. If Hitler saw a flashy demo, he
could say "this project has Utmost Top Priority" - and often did, so
lots of projects had it. If someone in the UK saw a flashy demo, he
still had to get it past the rest of the committee, each member of which
had his own pet projects; so something would only get funded if it were
really and obviously worth having.

I don't entirely agree with him, but it's an interesting concept.