"Paul F Austin" wrote...

OTOH, the willingness of the procurement agencies to adhere to those
specifications and criteria is often politically motivated and VERY
nebulous.

I think you mean "realistic". Many programs have killed themselves by
pursuing the best as an enemy of good enough.

Having been part of that procurement process in the past, I have to disagree.

The same program managers who publish the tech specs in the first place are the
ones who later push for relief from them when the chosen vendor can't come
through with his promises to deliver the product based on those specs. If the
specs were "pie in the sky" in the first place, they should never have been
published. All they do is provide false hope that current hardware can be
pushed along 'just a little longer' until the bigger/better/faster replacement
comes out.


It's not as if the F-22 is the first bird to have a shortfall in mission
radius: think F-18x or for that matter, F-111A.

EXACTLY! We should have learned from those mistakes! Instead, we repeat them,
resulting in the SNAFUs represented by ASPJ, F-22, and, probably, JSF (Will it
meet price and performance? Only your hairdresser knows for sure!).