It was 1995, a typically steamy late-August day at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base. Terry Little, Air Force program manager for Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM, pronounced JAY-dam), grinned as he hung up the telephone. The two companies competing for the contract to produce JDAM , a strap-on guidance tail kit for standard bombs, were nearing the end of an 18-month competitive proposal process. In April 1994, the Joint System Program Office selected McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis and Lockheed Martin in Orlando from five original competitors to design the tail kits and to submit proposals to win the development and follow-on production contracts worth about $2 billion. Both companies had a lot at stake. Because JDAM was a high-profile Defense Acquisition Pilot Project (DAPP), there was also a lot on the line for Terry Little and the Department of Defense. Little soon realized that there were no formal rules to define how a pilot program should proceed. The FASA mandate, however, was clear: Do business more like commercial business. What Little needed to know was how. To get answers, Little sent out a team to learn the best practices from industry. His team visited Boeing Commercial Aviation, Motorola pagers, Apple Computers and Florida Power and Light, among others. The team came back with clear differences between the DoD way and commercial industry. Little used the commercial benchmarks as JDAM project goals.
