There was a recent question about aerospace companies being merged or closing and a basic flow of what was there in 1945 and how it got to be what's there now.
It would be interesting to do the same thing for projects. I have a friend who worked on the EF-111. After spending a lot of development money the AF cancelled the program to help fund the F-22, which is itself now may be cancelled since it and the F-35 are both in large overruns. And the F-35 itself is under fire.. I wonder how many long trail dead ends exist. Projects way ahead of their time also fall into this, System A was to be replaced by project B, it failed to produce hardware in a reasonable time so it was replaced by program C with a new name, it alo fell on hard times, so again the name was changed to protect the guilty and project D came into being. And along System A was being upgraded as it waited for a replacement.This is why we're still using B-52s.
Probably a few other variations on this I guess the Pork Barrel decision in particular. Any comments or other stories.
Val Kraut