In article ,
Charles Gray writes:
had actually put a U.S. style R&D system in place during WWII, and
instead of coming up with (however pretty they look on paper) dozens
of designs that never made it beyond wind tunnal designs and focused
on say two or three fighter designs.
For example, if they'd pushed through the first jet fighter design
in 1940 (I forget what it was called), and focused on incremental
improvmeents instead of always running to the next design.

Would this have had a major impact on WWII, or just drawn it out by
a few months?

They may have ended up with fewer prototypes - but it wouldn't have
made much difference.
From about 1936 on, teh German arms buildup was curtailed by a lack of
raw meteriels. The Luftwaffe decision to concentrate on Medium
Bombers and Short-range fighters was much more heavily influenced by a
lack of Aluminum, Rubber, and Steel than a cocentration on Tactical
vs. Strategic airpower. The Kreigsmaraine was never able to get
U-Boat production up to the levels that they knew they needed for the
same reason. (Well, that, and their foolishness of fiddling around
with a Surface Navy that would never be more than a small Task Force,
adn which made no materiel contribution to the war effort.)
The Heer wasn't able to build the tanks it really needed, and went to
war with the Panzer Divisions equipped not with the preferred Pz IIIs,
woth a useful level of armor and firepower, but with light tanks
barely suitable for use in training.

Germany produced either none, of very little, of the raw materiels
needed for large-scale production. They needed to be able to import
materiel from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

This situation didn't get any better in 1939. When the war broke
out, the Royal Navy interdicted all sea traffic going into Germany.
This was fairly easy - The German seaports are fairly easily
bottlenecked, and they didn't have much of a merchant fleet to begin
with. So, really, the question's an interesting one, but, in the long
run, irrelevant. They wouldn't have been able to do much with a
U.S. style R&D effort, since they couldn't back it up with a U.S
style production effort.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster