The mythography of military R&D
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The term mythography applies to the situation in which unreal representation of events and their causation becomes widely acceptable and is eventually transcribed into a procedural ritual. In military R&D, it is not uncommon for casual observations to be transformed into assumptions, which in time become doctrine and ultimately rules of procedure. One example is the assumption that careful preplanning and tight scheduling of complete system developments and the early integration of subsystems result in the earliest availability of fully capable equipment. Another is that an intensively managed concurrent development can markedly accelerate the availability of fully developed systems. The paper argues that prescriptional doctrine and procedure are suspect and that each program should be considered on its own merits and in terms of its own environment.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation Paper series. The paper was a product of the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 2003 that captured speeches, memorials, and derivative research, usually prepared on authors' own time and meant to be the scholarly or scientific contribution of individual authors to their professional fields. Papers were less formal than reports and did not require rigorous peer review.
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