According to Reuters, he said the words, but I wonder if he thought through what the words implied.
General James “Hoss” Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was discussing the need to make “hard choices” with respect to funding different weapons systems when he said:
“Would you buy, in tough economic times, something that does one thing well or something that does a hundred things well?”
(The article is here.)
My first reaction to that statement was, to use the vernacular, DUH. Then I thought about it some more and wondered why the economic situation would matter to that decision: the statement seems to imply that the costs of the two “something”s are the same, so of course any fool would buy the one that does 99 more (extra?) things well.
But General Cartwright should know that no complex system that does 100 things well is going to cost the same as something that does only 1 thing well. In truly austere times, it may be necessary to forego most of those 99 extra features in order to afford the 1 feature that matters.
But I’m surprised that he would even imply that it’s possible to build a system that can do a large number (100 was surely hyperbole) of things as well as specialized systems. Trade-offs have to be made, and some amount of performance has to be sacrificed, to add bells and whistles — let alone to add real capabilities. It’s more likely that we would give up the 1 thing done very well to get 10 things done moderately well. That may end up being a real bargain, and he’s right that deciding on the 10 things out of the 100 possible things will involve difficult choices, but the real issue is whether the end result will be adequate to accomplish the mission.
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