“The person is the program” has become common wisdom in discussions of what ails, and what can heal, a broken defense industrial base. We need rules that allow the best officers, Program Managers, and Program Executive Offices to stay with the programs they’ve built, until they are completed. That’s been the pattern with successful programs in the past, when the best had the best driving them across the finish line, whether we’re talking about Hyman Rickover and nuclear subs, Bernard Schriever and ICBMs, or John Boyd and the F-16.
Even more impressive, perhaps, are those rare figures who have managed to leave their personal stamp not just on a program or programs, but on an entire institution. In this country we can point to James Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense and John Lehman as Secretary of the Navy with his implementation of the 600 ship navy.
But the Royal Navy’s Admiral Jack Fisher may be the most impressive of all. As First Sea Lord (roughly the British equivalent of Chief of Naval Operations) in the decade before the First World War, Fisher will forever be linked to his most famous shipbuilding program, the HMS Dreadnought.
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