Customer Reviews

Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake

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The development of the successful Sidewinder (AIM-9) heat-seeking missile deserves a book. This one is almost it. The author discusses not only technical problems and their solutions but also the managerial side of weapons development. Unfortunately, there is too much chronological back-and-forth to allow one to get an idea of how the technical solutions worked off preceding developments; a graphic timeline would have allowed the reader to know what happened when. Westrum doesn't discuss the what the China Lake center was doing, and how it was doing it before the scientists and engineers responsible for Sidewinder showed up. While there is some discussion of the social activities of the Sidewinder personnel, this review er never got a feel for the whole China Lake setting. Westrum relies too heavily on "telling" and not "showing" ; in some places he says that certain defense contractors had problems managing their programs, but provides little evidence of what he would base that on.(Not to say that private industry contractors haven't had problems; this reviewers knowledge of McDonnell Douglas problems makes him sympathetic to any story of How The Navy Could Do It Better.) The author wants to use China Lake and the Sidewinder project as a possible model of how to correctly manage a weapons project, but his story comes off more as a paean to certain personnel. If the secret of success is the right manager or designer or technician, this book might give us some guidance on selecting those people (flexible, open-minded, creative, informal, dedicated, technically competent) but there must also be some managerial methods and organizational that get lost in an emphasis on personality. Still, recommended for anyone interested in modern air combat, aerospace technology, or defense management.

As a professional engineer I find the book disappointing because there are too little technical details to justify why sidewinder is unique and why its development worth a book. Not that I am looking for classified information. The author has in fact reproduced some drawings from the engineers hand note and patent submission, but seems unable to explain how it works. The emphasis is on 'group dynamics', and 'management for creativity', etc. On that aspect the author clearly pointed out how a creative China Lake Lab was built. If the author is less vague about how the other lab/industry failed, or why China Lake lost its battle to bureaucrats, the picture will be more complete.

The book is not a technical manual on China Lake products-which are impressive-but describes the unique military-civilian scientist relationship which provided the environment for those outstanding products, and it does it well. As a former China Lake physicist for 33 years who lived and worked in that environment, the book pleased me.