Originally Posted by
Easy Street
It all comes down to industrial strategy, which some see as verging on communism but proves its worth when you suddenly need to design and quickly ramp up production of something critical to national security, perhaps a vaccine for an emerging disease or perhaps a combat aircraft. Vaccine designers get to practice on the flu every year, and aircraft designers get to do weapons integration and occasional upgrade work, but the opportunity to work from a clean sheet comes around perhaps once in a career. The decision facing national security policy makers (ie broader than just Defence departments) is whether to keep the associated skills and experience alive: paying designers' salaries is precisely the point. This comes around every 30 years or so for the UK and France with their single companies but more often in the US given its intent to maintain domestic competition. To that extent the decision is a strategic one, almost unrelated to the tactical requirements of the day, and above the pay grade of generals or even Defence secretaries.
This.
When your "national capability" contracts to (literally) a handful of people who know the "why" behind a design decision / configuration (as opposed to the "how" or "what") you're in trouble. The "why" is very different to the "what" and the "how" - and changes over time. Why you did something a certain way twenty years ago, may very well not be relevant now or in the future. Which is why copycatting leads eventually to atrophy and loss.