From a review from Amazon.com
The Pentagon Paradox, subtitled The Development of the F-18 Hornet, goes beyond that, describing how our military wastes money on equipment paradoxically overpriced and underperforming. Not the most expensive or least efficient of America's warplanes, the F-18 stands out because it was intended to reverse the trend towards expensive and complicated planes, but ultimately became that kind of plane.
James Stevenson's book is almost immediately partisan - he's got strong opinions about the shared Air Force and Navy addiction for aircraft needlessly sophisticated and too expensive to procure in reasonable number. Paradox begins in during the Viet Nam war, when we learned the bitter lesson of technology's limits. Despite the poor performance of the F-4- easily the world's most sophisticated fighter- both services commit millions to develop even more sophisticated successors. Instead of the USAF F-15 or the Navy's Tomcat, a cadre of officers known as "The Lightweight Fighter Mafia" press for a small low-cost fighter that can be built and maintained in large numbers while still preserving our technological edge. By 1977, ACEVAL/AIMEVAL exercises firmly demonstrate weaknesses in America's new warplanes. Knowing that they will never be rid of these expensive new jets, the Light-Mafia push for a light-weight fighter to "compliment" them.
The eventual result is the "lightweight fighter competition" between the GD YF-16 and the Northrop YF-17, designed to select the LWF for the USAF and the Navy with the apparent intention of selecting the same plane for both services. In hindsight, given bitter inter-service rivalry, a smarter course would have been to have both services evaluate each aircraft in parallel. Instead, the USAF gets the first pick, leaving the Navy with the unenviable choice or either a "navalized" version of a rival service's choice or the loser of the competition. While the Navy's dilemma may sound more unpalatable than impenetrable (what's so bad about shipping out with carrier-ready F-16's? The USAF accepted versions of the Navy's Phantom and managed to do quite nicely), the title "Paradox" says it all. The Navy went out of its way to choose the loser and has been trying to hide the fact of its cost ever since. Stevenson shows how the Navy bent its own rules to make the F-18 carrier-ready - using double standards in such areas as landing speed, range, weight and "spotting factor" (which measures how much space an airplane will occupy while on a carrier deck) which should have given the F-16 the edge. The Hornet is so unsuitable that, according to a study cited by Stevenson, it would have cost us more to select it for both services than both selecting the F-16 for the USAF and developing a new plane for the Navy.
The story doesn't end with the Hornet. Instead, the Navy will then spend billions in the early 1990's on a new Hornet, the F-18E. In some ways, the F-18E is simply a radical modification of older Hornets - visually similar, 90% common avionics, with marginal improvements in weight, range and maneuverability. In terms of actual structural differences (a redesigned wing and other control surfaces and new engine) but mostly because of the billions spent developing it, the "Super Hornet" is an entirely new airplane. Unsurprisingly, the Navy and the Defense Department prefer to characterize the F-18E as a modification because this will allow the program to bypass many procedural hurdles de rigueur for a totally new airplane, even though it will cost more to "modify" the Hornet than it did to create it.
"Pentagon Paradox" is ambitious - the F-18 is only part of that story in which our military stridently campaigns for weapons it doesn't need, paid for with money it can't spare. Besides the Hornet, Stevenson also tells of the airplane it was meant to "compliment" - the too-expensive F-14, an airplane that also benefited from selective bending of rules. (The Navy acquired the F-14 after rejecting a navalized version of the F-111 deemed unsuitable for carrier aviation. Stevenson shows how the Navy F-111 exceeded its parameters no more egregiously than the Tomcat.) The USAF doesn't get off lightly either - they choose the F-16, but can't make too strong a case for the small fighter lest it endanger the F-15. Eventually, the F-16 also succumbs to the "Pentagon Paradox", becoming an overweight, high-priced warplane with more sophisticated weaponry than needed. Stevenson also attacks the logic of stand-off missiles like the Sparrow, the reason-de-etre of sophisticated fighters like the F-15 and the Hornet. Sparrows were notorious heartbreakers in Viet Nam. Eventually tweaked to reliability, the Sparrow will never make beyond-visual-range intercept a reality, and all successful kills are made within the same range as shorter-ranged Sidewinder. Sparrow is a big player in the Hornet's story, because the Navy's insistence on Sparrow capability for the F-18 belies its role as a practical and economical aircraft.
But Stevenson goes beyond the Hornet - he also covers the many undisclosed technical blunders of Desert Storm, and reveals the hollow promise of exclusive airpower in other past wars. In his painful deconstruction of airpower, Stevenson harks to names like Pierre Spey, air combat visionary John "forty-second" Boyd and defense analyst Chuck Spinney, all attacking the military's single-minded obsession with big and heavy warplanes from different angles. Stevenson also covers the almost mind-numbing bureaucratic and political maneuvering that shaped our current generation of tactical fighters (and also shaped a number of paper projects that never survived the planning stages). At times, Stevenson nearly succumbs to the Paradox himself, and there are stretches that are nigh unreadable as he navigates the bureaucratic and political morass of defense acquisitions. Stevenson also tends to inject more cynicism than necessary. (As an aviation analyst, was he really that shocked to learn how unrealistic the F-15's stated specs are?) That said, Stevenson's work is heavily footnoted (perhaps excessively so - but at least he's got research to back him up, and we never doubt that he stands by what he says). "Paradox" may be inaccurate, but it is incendiary, compulsively readable and it deserves an answer.