Aegis had a long gestation, partly because development money was so tight during the Vietnam War. In the early 1970s, as it first became possible to build the system, there was another problem: what sort of ship should carry the new premier anti-air system. Aegis fell victim to the struggle between proponents of sophisticated nuclear warships, led by Adm. Hyman Rickover, and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo Zumwalt Jr., who was determined to build up numbers by building simpler, smaller ships.

Rickover’s supporters convinced Congress to pass a law requiring the Navy to use nuclear power in major surface warships, defined as those displacing more than 8,000 tons (exceptions required a presidential waiver). Zumwalt’s ship designers found it impossible to shoehorn the system into a smaller ship. Once Zumwalt left office, the nuclear solution seemed unaffordable.

What saved the day was the realization that the largest non-nuclear surface warships, the new Spruance-class destroyers, were barely large enough to accommodate Aegis.

An Aegis version of the Spruance was proposed as part of a program combining nuclear and non-nuclear Aegis ships, the nuclear part being dropped. This ship became the Ticonderoga-class cruiser.

Within a few years it was obvious not only that Aegis worked, but that it made earlier systems obsolete. The U.S. Navy could not afford to buy as many Aegis cruisers as it might have wanted, so a less expensive Aegis destroyer, which became the current Arleigh Burke class, was designed. Critics argued that the Navy should have built destroyers carrying the simpler Tartar system; the Navy already had four such ships (the Kidd class) built on the same Spruance-class hull as the Aegis cruiser. It turned out that the Aegis ship was somewhat less expensive – and far more effective.

Aegis was fortunate in that its program manager, then-Capt. (later Rear Adm.) Wayne E. Meyer Jr., had managed an important part of the program to overcome the problems of the earlier U.S. naval missiles. They had been conceived as integrated systems – everything was new, so it was difficult to guess where the problems were. Meyer found that such complex systems demanded very rigid procedures, from factory to fleet. In fact everything varied just enough at each stage to wreck system reliability. Meyer translated his experience in fixing the earlier systems into the central motto of Aegis: “Build a little, test a little, learn a lot.” Meyer also understood that Aegis was one of the earliest military systems heavily dependent on digital computers and complex software. He had to bring in the software on time and within a reasonable cost – which is still a very rare thing. Meyer’s approach was to structure the software he wanted in such a way that it could be written and tested in small manageable parts. Aegis was also the first U.S. missile system for which an elaborate land-based test site (the “Aegis ship in a cornfield”) was built so that the entire system could be tested together before it went to sea.

Meyer also understood that Aegis could not possibly be an all-Navy program. He had to build a Navy-civilian partnership. The Navy partner had to have enough engineering depth to understand the issues and to evaluate proposed solutions. The civilian partner had to gain enough experience to solve problems without having to reinvent what already existed. Meyer came out of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, which had used such partnerships in the past with companies such as Arma and Ford Instrument. In Meyer’s time, and since, the trend has been very different. Competition between potential builders is used in hopes of controlling cost. The larger hope is that competitors will achieve outstanding performance – breakthrough performance – in hopes of winning big contracts – and that they should be given all possible freedom to do so. In this sense the current littoral combat ship is the precise opposite of Meyer’s long-term Aegis program. The competitors were given the freedom to choose not only the hull but also the power plant, the weapons, and the command and control system. One result is that anyone who becomes expert on one version of the ship has no idea of how the other works. Two types of ships demand two totally different logistical paths.

The current breakthrough approach places most of the technical burden on prospective contractors, not on the Navy, which becomes much more a monitor of contract performance. The idea of a favored commercial partner is largely anathema within the Defense Department; the alternative seems to promise both better performance and lower prices. In practice that has not always worked, partly because inexperienced partners and buyers often think they will get more, quickly, than they can.