Thoughts on Skunk Works
March 2024
The story of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs (aka “Skunk Works”) is a legend of the American Century. Among all elite US hardware programs, Skunk Works deserves a place not far off the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, and Bell Labs. Under the leadership of Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson and his successor Ben Rich, a relentless band of engineers took the US Air Force from single-propeller aircraft to a world of Mach 3+ spy planes and stealth fighters in a matter of a few decades.
Their famous aircraft produced include:
The SR-71 Blackbird: a reconnaissance aircraft that travelled at altitudes of 85,000 ft and at speeds of Mach 3.3 (3500km/h); to this day the fastest a manned aircraft has ever flown. The Blackbird was so quick that missiles launched from the ground to shoot it down simply never reached the plane. It took just 20 months to build, and the first model flew in 1962.
The U-2: the spy plane that flew at 70,000 ft altitude taking high-resolution photographs of the earth’s surface. It earned infamy for being shot-down with US pilot Gary Powers in 1960.
The F-117 Nighthawk: the first ever stealth aircraft. In the First Gulf War these planes flew 1% of USAF sorties but accounted for 40% of all damaged targets attacked. Not a single one was shot down.
The P-80 Shooting Star: SW’s first aircraft and America’s first ever jet fighter. Building from inside a circus tent, a young Johnson ensured SW’s first aircraft was completed in 143 days, under budget and ahead of schedule. It proved itself in the Korean war, winning history’s first ever all-jet dogfight.
In the process of their spectacular aeronautical engineering, SW oversaw some impressive developments:
In an era before GPS, the Blackbird was guided by a system tracking the location of 50 key stars that functioned even at ground level during the middle of the day.
The group experimented with metallurgy required for Mach 3+ speeds. They were global pioneers in the creation and industrial application of titanium alloys. To obtain the metal, the CIA set up a series of shell companies to secretly import from the world’s major supplier, and the US’s archrival, the USSR.
Before the availability of digital simulations, they had to conduct 250,000 manual pressure tests on an SR-71 model to test its hydraulic actuator.
Quality control processes that tracked the origins and robustness of 10 million separate components.
Having no more than around 75 engineers to design the Blackbird (vs the Boeing 747 having 10,000 engineers).
At the heart of SW was Kelly Johnson’s 14 Rules for Management (paraphrased by me):
Extreme delegation to each manager on all matters technical, financial, scheduling, and operational.
Strong but small project offices for both the consumer and the contractor.
Use 10-25% of the manpower required for normal systems. Restrictions on people connected to any project is to be reduced ‘viciously’.
Simple drawings and drawing release system to allow flexibility for changes.
Minimal reporting except for the most important work.
Monthly cost review of what has been spent and also estimates of what will be spent.
Let the contractor run its own subcontracts. Commercial bid procedures are better than military ones.
Make the subcontractors and vendors do the necessary inspections. Good design and operations ultimately assure quality, not constant inspections.
Prototyping is key: the contractor must have right to test product in-flight, especially in the initial stages.
Specifications for hardware must be agreed in advance of contracting.
Timely and accurate funding to avoid the political hassle of having to obtain funding mid-project.
Mutual trust between customer and contractor to achieve same goal. Communication must be as day-to-day as possible to iterate faster and to cut-down on misunderstandings and bureaucratic means of correspondence.
Security measures must strictly limit outsiders’ access.
Pay should be proportional to good performance, not proportional to the number of personal supervised.
For all their wisdom the 14 Rules do not explain the full picture of what made SW so unique. There were other common traits that I highlight in no particular order:
Having a king as leader: SW would simply have never rose to the prominence it did without Kelly Johnson’s omnipotence and omniscience. He was an all-in-one combination of world-leading competence, stubbornness, and relentless energy. It is rare for any person to be excellent at systems management or aeronautical engineering, let alone both. His 14 Rules clearly take pride in the fact that SW is not like a ‘normal’ organisation, and therefore requires leadership totally out of the normal. He had the engineering intuition to inspire any of his employees. ‘He was so sharp and instinctive he took my breath away. I’d say to him, “Kelly, the shock wave coming off this spike will hit the tail.” He would nod. “Yeah, the temperature there will be six hundred degrees. I’d go back to my desk and spend two hours with a calculator and come up with a figure of 614 degrees. Truly amazing.’ Johnson would be at ease involving himself in the minutia of aeronautical engineering before immediately heading to Washington to harangue the top brass of the Pentagon for more funding. As Rich wrote in his account, ‘All of us at the Skunk Works knew the two basic rules for getting along with Kelly Johnson: all the airplanes we built were Kelly’s airplanes. Whatever pride we secretly took, we kept to ourselves.’ This was a man who knew SW was his fiefdom and acted accordingly. As a young joiner Rich described his first impressions of Johnson as someone who ‘had the reputation of an ogre who ate young, tender engineers for between-meal snacks. We peons viewed him with the knee-knocking dread and awe of the almighty best described in the Old Testament.’
Avoidance of the sunk cost fallacy. As an R&D institute, Johnson was keen to cut SW's losses if a project was hitting a dead-end either for engineering or political reasons. In 1959, Eisenhower had pushed for a successor to the U-2. US intelligence fed concerns that the Soviets were developing hydrogen-propelled interceptors that would be able to shoot-down the U-2. Under Project Suntan, Johnson negotiated a $96m package with the government to build a hydrogen-fuelled plane that would fly at 100,000 feet and at Mach 2.5. Neither the 3,500km range they aimed for, nor the anticipated 5x fuel efficiency gains vs kerosene, ended up being achievable in practice. This was compounded by a fundamental issue of hydrogen fuel logistics to U-2 bases around the world. After six months Johnson phoned the secretary of the USAF to say, “Mr Secretary, I’m afraid I’m building you a dog”. Having spent just $6m in development costs he returned $90m to the government. This speaks of key dynamics within SW. Firstly, an alignment of incentives with Washington; Johnson would not fritter the government's resources and time if for nothing else other than loss of trust. Secondly, the sacred one and only object of ‘getting a good plane built on time’ was imperilled by vanity projects with unfeasible technologies or cost control like Suntan. That meant ruthlessly abandoning projects regardless of sunk costs and reallocating remaining resources towards new, more practical ideas. Johnson’s cutting of Project Suntan proved wise. It eventually transpired that the Soviets were developing hydrogen technology not for any U-2 interceptor but instead for launching Sputnik 1 to orbit.
Decision making by the individual, not committees. SW operated in knowledge that the more individuals you poll for a given decision, the more you tend towards the norm. And as stated, this is not an organisation looking for the normal. In an interview with CBS News in 1983, Johnson stated ‘We’re into the era where a committee designs the airplane. You never do anything totally stupid; you never do anything totally bright. You get an average wrong answer. And very expensive.’ Individuals have the additional benefit of being far more accountable than groups, where the burden of work and responsibility can be shifted. Despite his astonishing intuition, ‘the damned Swede [who] can see air’ had the intellectual openness to accept contributions or corrections from his subordinates. Rich proposed painting the SR-71 in black to help radiate excess heat and therefore allow the use of a softer, lighter titanium alloy. Johnson initially shut it down but came back in the next day after some late-night research to tell Rich frankly, ‘on the black paint, you were right about the advantages and I was wrong.’ SW’s success was in balancing the decisive brilliance of the individual engineer inside a system that facilitated a fiercely rational exchange of ideas. Only when a problem became critical were special task teams created to focus manpower on solving it. They would be dissolved immediately afterwards.
Camaraderie. Johnson was infamous for his highly lean teams (Rule 3: 10-15% of manpower normally used). This has the explicit benefit of making responsibility clearer and improving communications, which in turn drive high productivity. The other advantage which becomes increasingly apparent as one dives into the anecdotes and diaries from SW’s employees is the sense of fraternity. Being in small teams that worked such hours demanded a strong sense of team spirit in the interests of morale and trust. Crude nicknames and silly bets were commonplace at SW and served as a fine contrast to the complex engineering and political stakes they were dealing with. It is not entirely a coincidence that, unlike a corporate organisation, SW was somewhere where you could directly challenge those above you as well as partake in foolish practical jokes. It operated on a mutual combination of social and intellectual openness that is forbidden in conventional organisations. This was combined with the unusual practice (for the 1950s at least) of dressing informally. ‘We don’t dress up for each other,’ Johnson’s secretary Dick Boehme would say. All these apparent trivialities were in fact a reflection of the organisation’s deep seriousness and sense of patriotic duty.
Extreme work hours. It is an unremarkable point to make that to build cutting-edge products in record speed requires a tremendous work ethic. An unavoidable aspect of SW was that its employees work rigorous hours. That would mean periods of 14-hour shifts, seven days per week for up to months on end. There was the additional stress of workers not even being able to discuss their work with their families due to its highly sensitive nature. As the U-2 was being primed for its inaugural test flights, Johnson’s logbook noted on July 15, 1955, ‘Airplane essentially completed. Terrifically long hours. Everybody almost dead.’ Long hours are a bare necessity for ambitions of SW’s kind, but far from sufficient unless efficiently directed.
Minimalism in design and obsessive cost control. Johnson allegedly coined the engineering concept of KISS: ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’. This involved minimising part counts, rivets, touch labour, and holes across all stages of design and construction. Consequently, parts had to be off-the-shelf where possible (either from suppliers or internal inventory), and interoperable between right and left. Besides the obvious cost benefits, this approach cut down procurement times and reduced the scrap rate. Only in the most necessary instances were special parts allowed to be ordered, as was often the case for the SR-71. Enforcing these principles went right down to the assemblers. Even the most junior worker had the right to refuse any part they feel did not meet the standards. The notion of Rule 8 was that simplified engineering from first-principles would produce robust enough planes to withstand further inspections and lessen the need for maintenance down the line. Ironically, the SR-71 was somewhat of an exception to this with a highly demanding operation schedule due to the large amount of custom parts used in its design. Nonetheless, SW did not have the capacity in their programmes to engineer solutions to three-sigma events exhaustively. They would only do so on a cost-benefit basis, not by virtue of a problem having the potential to arise.
To read more about this extraordinary story, I highly recommend Ben Rich’s superb book Skunk Works (1994) from which all of the above extracts have been taken unless otherwise stated. Palladium Magazine’s article from April 2023 is also an inspiring read.