Wayne Allard: “Our committee has worked and put in hours of effort and testimony on this issue of spiral development, or whether we…”

“Our committee has worked and put in hours of effort and testimony on this issue of spiral development, or whether we have an inflexible program, which I think the Reed amendment leads us, to where you have specific timelines for specific parts of the system. What happens if you run into a problem in one particular part of the system? It delays the whole development. With the spiral concept, it gives the developers of the system, the Missile Defense Agency, the opportunity to move forward in other aspects of development. It is a multifaceted system. It has to do with communications for a number of different systems and parts. In my view, one of the problems we have had in the past, with cost overruns and whatnot, is where you have had inflexibility in the system and you find one real problem area and then all of a sudden it ties up moving forward. That is the whole concept between spiral development. We have had hours upon hours of this concept of spiral development. We have General Kadish and many of the individuals who are 'in the know' testify about how important it is that we take this new approach so we can move forward with some of the more difficult and more technologically advanced programs, such as missile defense.”