James P. Stevenson

While the author has done an impressive job of outlining the statutory ineptitude, the service narcissism, and technological naievete that made the A-12 Avenger such a spectacular failure, there are a number of elements that temper my enthusiasm.

Granted that Stevenson has a fairly narrow goal, being to illustrate the evils of creative statutory interpretation and the abuse of off-the-books secret programs, I have to agree with a reviewer at Amazon that a better job could have been done to put the Avenger II in context. To a large degree this program was just another product of the "blue sky" days of procurement in the early Reagan administration, and even early in the game it was obvious that some of these were going to fall by the wayside.

Also, it turns out that Stevenson is not totally forthright about some of his own prejudices, such as being dismissive about the potential of stealth technology, and I would have liked to have heard his critique of such up front.

Mostly though, I'm left wanting more of an explanation of how a lot of very smart people managed to convince themselves that such a half-baked project could work. Even if all the "cool kids" were looking to get a piece of stealth technology at the time, one would have expected a little more common sense. Why there was not is actually the more interesting question, though since so many of the guilty parties appear to have covered their tracks we're not likely to find out more.

Also, and this is not an issue that I'd really expect the author to address, this strikes me as being another case study in the lack of respect for governance and procedure that has taken root in American society. I also believe that Secretary of the Navy John Lehman gets off a bit light in this book, as he certainly brought an attitude of seeking fast results with a certain indifference to the consequences to his service.… (más)