The final section of "Skunk Works" touches on the bureaucratic morasses.
Although the 30 months quote is really misleading: the surface analysis prefiguring the Have Blue concept were started in 1974, XST phase one was started in 1975, the Have Blue demonstrator first flew in 1977.
31 months (not 30) is the time between the full-scale development decision and the first test model, decision to operational capability took 5 years (minus a month, November 1978 to October 1983) and almost 8 if you add the Have Blue studies.
I'm now home so I can both reply and complete my previous comment.
> Doesn't Kelly Johnson give Ben Rich the advice to never work with the navy?
It's more than that, it's Kelly's unwritten 15th rule of management:
> Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy.
It's in the early page (#2) of the chapter on Sea Shadow.
The bureaucratic morass was from the Air Force and mentioned in the penultimate chapter about the B2:
> When we began testing out stealth fighter, the combined Lockheed and Air Force personnel involved totaled 240 persons. There are more than two thousand Air Force auditors, engineers, and official kibitzers crawling all over that trouble B-2 assembly building in Palmdale. What are they doing? Compiling one million sheets of paper every day — reports and data that no one in the bureaucracy has either the time or the interest to read.
> The Air Force now has too many commissioned officers with no real mission to perform, so they stand around production lines with clipboards in hand, second-guessing and interfering every step of the way. The Drug Enforcement Agency has 1,200 enforcement agents out in the field [nb: the book was published in 1994, the DEA has learned since…] fighting the drug trafficking problem. The DOD employs 27,000 auditors. That kind of discrepancy shows how skewed the impulse for oversight has become both at the Pentagon and in the halls of Congress.
He also presciently notes that the way the B2 was done (involving multiple manufacturers in a huge project) would spread and infect all future projects as the number of projects would diminish and the DOD would spread projects around to avoid any contractor dying.
Although the 30 months quote is really misleading: the surface analysis prefiguring the Have Blue concept were started in 1974, XST phase one was started in 1975, the Have Blue demonstrator first flew in 1977.
31 months (not 30) is the time between the full-scale development decision and the first test model, decision to operational capability took 5 years (minus a month, November 1978 to October 1983) and almost 8 if you add the Have Blue studies.