Tag: cluster bombs

Why think small?

By Joe Berk

Half a lifetime ago I was a yuppie, and the symbols of being a successful yuppie included an MBA and a Rolex.  The Rolex was easy (the only requirement was having more money than brains).  The MBA was more difficult.  It required going back to school, which I did.  Getting the MBA definitely gave me a boost.  My career at the munitions company was on fast forward; at one point I was the youngest vice president in the Aerojet corporation (then I got fired, but that’s a story for another time).  I loved being in the bomb business (business was booming, so to speak), and being a former Army guy, I was in my element.

That could have been me in the ’80s and ’90s. I wore a jacket and tie to work every day.  I had the big glasses, too.

Anyway, while I was going to night school for the MBA, one of my classes was titled Human Behavior or something like that.   The guy who taught it was a Ph.D in one of the soft sciences, and I knew pretty quickly that he leaned way left.  That’s okay; in my book you can lean however you want as long as you don’t expect me to agree with you on every issue.

The first night of class the prof had everyone tell the rest of their class their name and what they did.   We were all yuppies, we were all young, and we all had good jobs. It made for good entertainment, but I had a feel for how things were going from the first several yuppies who told us what they did and the prof’s reactions and questions.  Yep, the guy was a definite leftie.  I started to wonder what his reaction would be to me…a guy firmly entrenched in the military industrial complex working for a munitions company.

“So what do you do, Joe?” Dr. WhatsHisName asked.

“Uh, I’m an engineer,” I said, hoping he would leave it at that, but knowing he wouldn’t.

“What kind of an engineer are you, and who do you work for?”

“Uh, I’m a mechanical engineer,” I said.   No sense in oversharing, I figured.  Maybe he wouldn’t notice I didn’t name my company.

“Who do you work for?”

“I work for an aerospace company.”

“What company, and what do you engineer?”  This guy wasn’t going to give up.  I liked my job and I liked what I did, but I wasn’t about to tell Jerry Rubin here I supported the Vietnam War.

“I work for Aerojet, and we make a variety of products.”  It had become a contest, and I was losing.

“What are your products?”  He had me.   Time to ‘fess up.

“I do cluster bombs.”   There.  It was out.  I knew the guy was going to call whoever it is you call when you find someone violating the Geneva Convention.  The good doctor stared at me for several seconds.  The other 30 or so yuppies in the class were dead silent.  It was a pregnant pause if ever there was one and we were pretty close to the 9-month mark.  Somebody’s water was about to break.

“Does your family know what you do?” he softly asked, speaking almost in a whisper.

“My wife does,” I said, mirroring his subdued tone.

“And how does she feel about how you earn a living?”

At this point, I knew I had to come clean.  “Truth be told, Professor, she’s disappointed in me.”  I had hoped that would end the discussion, but the guy would not let up.  He was a dog and I was the bone.  Then I sensed a way out, anticipating what his next question would be.

“What does she say to you?” he asked.

“Well, Doc, like I said, she’s disappointed, and she’s made that known on several occasions.”  The good Professor was nodding knowingly.  He was hearing my confession.   I don’t recall specifically, but I’m pretty sure he was smiling.  I was on a roll and I continued. “You see, Professor, my wife works for TRW’s Ballistic Missiles Division.  They do nuclear intercontinental missiles and she’s always asking me why I’m wasting my time screwing around with conventional weapons.  If you’re going to go, she always says, go big.  Go nuclear.”

My yuppie classmates started laughing.  Me, I was scared.  I was running a perfect 4.00 grade point average in the MBA program up to that point, and I thought I had just blown any chance of aceing this course.  The professor nodded without expression, made a note on his pad, and went on to the next yuppie.  My being a wiseass had earned a good laugh, but that note he made couldn’t have been a good thing and I was afraid it would cost me.

So how did it turn out?  I busted my chops in that course and I got my A.  But I was sweating bullets for the rest of the term.  Little, non-nuclear bullets, but bullets nonetheless.   More importantly, the cluster bombs I helped engineer won the Gulf War a few years later in 1991.   Most of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard tanks were taken out with CBU-87/B cluster bombs and GAU-8/A 30mm ammo (and my company, Aerojet Ordnance, also made the ammo for those A-10 Gatlings).  Sometimes when studying human behavior, the guys who know (I mean, really know) reach the only conclusion and solution possible:  An adequate quantity of high explosives delivered on target.  I’m not at all embarrassed about having had a hand in that.  Fact is, I’m proud of it.

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The Wayback Machine: Later, Gator…

By Joe Berk

I had a tough time choosing a title for this blog.  I went with what you see above because it reminds me of one of my favorite Dad jokes…you know, the one about how you tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator.  If you don’t see it for a while, it’s a crocodile.  If you see it later, well, then it’s a gator.  The other choice might have been the old United Negro College Fund pitch:  A Mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste.  But if I went with that one I might be called a racist, which seems to be the default response these days anytime anyone disagrees with anyone else about anything.

Gresh likes hearing my war stories.  Not combat stories, but stories about the defense industry.  I never thought they were all that interesting, but Gresh is easily entertained and he’s a good traveling buddy, so I indulge him on occasion.  Real war stories…you know how you can tell them from fairy tales?  A fairy tale starts out with “once upon a time.”  A war story starts out with “this is no shit, you guys…”

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So, this is a “no shit” story.  It sounds incredible, but it’s all true.  I was an engineer at Aerojet Ordnance, and I made my bones analyzing cluster bomb failures.  They tell me I’m pretty good at it (I wrote a book about failure analysis, I still teach industry and gubmint guys how to analyze complex systems failures, and I sometimes work as an expert witness in this area).  It pays the rent and then some.

So this deal was on the Gator mine system, which was a real camel (you know, a horse designed by a committee).  The Gator mine system was a Tri-Service program (three services…the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force).  It was officially known as the CBU-89/B cluster munition (CBU stands for Cluster Bomb Unit).  The way it worked is instead of having to go out and place the mines manually, an airplane could fly in and drop a couple of these things, the bombs would open on the way down and dispense their mines (each cluster bomb contained 94 mines), the mines would arm, and voila, you had a minefield.  Just like that.

It sounds cool, but the Gator was a 20-year-old turkey that couldn’t pass the first article test (you had to build two complete systems and the Air Force would drop them…if the mines worked at a satisfactory level, you could start production).  The UNCF slogan notwithstanding, the folks who had tried to take this Tri-Service camel and build it to the government’s design wasted a lot of mines.  In 20 years, several defense contractors had taken Gator production contracts, and every one of them failed the first article flight test.  When my boss’s boss decided we would bid it at Aerojet, I knew two things:  We, too, would fail the first article flight test, and it would end up in my lap.  I was right on both counts.  We built the flight test units per the government design and just like every one else, we failed with a disappointing 50% mine function rate.  And I got the call to investigate why.

So, let’s back up a couple of centuries.  You know, we in the US get a lot of credit for pioneering mass production.   Rightly so, I think, but most folks are ignorant about what made it possible.  Nope, it wasn’t Henry Ford and his Model T assembly line.   It was something far more subtle, and that’s the concept of parts interchangeability.  Until parts interchangeability came along (which happened about a hundred years before old Henry did his thing), you couldn’t mass produce anything.  And to make parts interchangeable, you had to have two numbers for every part dimension:  The nominal dimension, and a tolerance around that dimension.  When we say we have a 19-inch wheel, for example, that’s the nominal dimension.  There’s also a ± tolerance (that’s read plus or minus) associated with that 19-inch dimension.  If the wheel diameter tolerance was ±0.005 inches, the wheel might be anywhere from 18.995 to 19.005 inches.  Some tolerances are a simple ± number, others are a + something and a – something if the tolerance band is not uniform (like you see in the drawing below).  But everything has a tolerance because you can’t always make parts exactly to the nominal dimension.

Where companies get sloppy is they do a lousy job assigning tolerances to nominal dimensions, and they do an even worse job analyzing the effects of the tolerances when parts are built at the tolerance extremes.  Analyzing these effects is called tolerance analysis.  Surprisingly, most engineering schools don’t teach it, and perhaps not so surprisingly, most companies don’t do it.  All this has been a very good thing for me, because I get to make a lot of money analyzing the failures this kind of engineering negligence causes.  In fact, the cover photo on my failure analysis book is an x-ray of an aircraft emergency egress system that failed because of negligent tolerancing (which killed two Navy pilots when their aircraft caught fire).

I don’t think people consciously think about this and decide they don’t need to do tolerance analysis.  I think they don’t do it because it is expensive and in many cases their engineers do not have the necessary skills.  At least, they don’t do it initially.  In production, when they have failures some companies are smart enough to return to the tolerancing issue.  That’s when they do the tolerance analysis they should have done during the design phase, and they find they have tolerance accumulations that can cause a problem.

Anyway, back to the Gator mine system.  The Gator system had a dispenser (a canister) designed by the Air Force, the mines were designed by the Army, and the system had an interface kit designed by the Navy.  Why they did it this way, I have no idea. It was about as dumb an approach for a development program as I have ever seen.  Your tax dollars at work, I guess.

The Navy’s Gator interface kit positioned the mines within the dispenser and sent an electronic pulse from the dispenser to the mines when it was time to start the mine arming sequence.  This signal went from coils in the interface kit to matching coils in each mine (there was no direct connection; the electric pulse passed from the interface kit coils to the mine coils).  You can see these coils in the photo below (they are the copper things).

In our first article flight test at Eglin Air Force Base, only about 50% of the mines worked.  That was weird, because when we tested the mines one at a time, they always worked.  I had a pretty good feeling that the mines weren’t getting the arming signal.   The Army liked that concept a lot (they had design responsibility for the mines), but the Air Force and the Navy were eyeing me the way a chicken might view Colonel Sanders.

I started asking questions about the tolerancing in the Navy’s part of the design, because I thought if the coils were not centered directly adjacent to the matching coils in each mine, the arming signal wouldn’t make it to the mine.  The Navy, you see, had the responsibility for the stuffing that held the mines in place and for the coils that brought the arming signal to the mines.

At a big meeting with the engineering high rollers from all three services, I floated this idea of coil misalignment due to tolerance accumulation.  The Navy guy basically went berserk and told me it could never happen.  His reaction was so extreme I knew I had to be on to something (in a Shakespearian methinks the lady doth protest too much sort of way).  At this point, both the Army and Air Force guys were smiling.  The Navy guy was staring daggers at me.  You could almost see smoke coming out his ears. He was a worm, I was the hook, and we were going fishing.  And we both knew it.

I asked the Navy engineer directly how much misalignment would prevent signal transmission, he kept telling me it couldn’t happen, and I kept pressing for a number:  How much coil misalignment would it take?  Finally, the Navy dude told me there would have to be at least a quarter of an inch misalignment between the Navy coils and those in the mine.  I don’t think he really knew, but he was throwing out a number to make it look like he did.  At that point, I was pretty sure I had him.  I looked at my engineering design manager and he left the room.  Why?  To do a tolerance analysis, of course.  Ten minutes later he was back with the numbers that showed the Navy’s interface kit tolerances could allow way more than a quarter inch of misalignment.

When I shared that with the guys in our Tri-Service camel committee, the Navy guy visibly deflated.  His 20-year secret was out.  The Army and the Air Force loved it (they both hated the Navy, and they really hated the Navy engineer).

We tightened the tolerances in our production and built two more cluster bombs.  I was at the load plant to oversee the load, assemble, and pack operation, and when we flight tested my two cluster bombs with live drops from an F-16 we had a 100% mine function rate (which had never been achieved before).  That allowed us to go into production and we made a ton of money on the Gator program.  I’m guessing that Navy weasel still hates me.

It’s hard to believe this kind of stuff goes on, but it does.  I’ve got lots of stories with similar tolerance-induced recurring failures, and maybe I’ll share another one or two here at some point.  Ask me about the Apache main rotor blade failures sometime…that’s another good one and I’ll post a blog about it in the next week or so.

Stay tuned, my friends.

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