How is the Reagan administrations Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) affecting the need for conversion?
Melman: The SDI project, if it continues, is going to suck in a large number of engineers and scientists, concentrate them in a relatively few laboratories, and create quite a conversion problem. Monitor: The U.S. defense industry has developed a certain amount of inefficiency. Will that complicate the task of economic conversion? Melman: The military industry operates by a code of rules laid down by the Department of Defense. Normal operation and compliance with those rules has the effect of generating sustained escalation of cost. Second, it has the effect of pressing the various contractors to push for refinement and technical capability. Third, the contractors are pressed to skip over and abbreviate the ordinary procedures for making a new product. In civilian product development the normal sequence would be: the concept, a preliminary design, a model, a prototype, testing the prototype, redesigning the prototype to eliminate defects, retesting, redesigning of the prototype, retest
