Page 213 - MY STORY

accomplished this feat, and in all honesty, I do not think

they wanted to know. By the way, if recall correctly I’m
guessing that we spent less than $200,000 to build this
capability. It was in use virtually 100% of available time.

ADVANCED CRUISE MISSILE (ACM)
Years earlier, General Dynamics Company (GDC) had

bid and won the Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM)
program. This missile was developed in secret, but once
in production, the outboard appearance was publicly

available. This was a pretty complicated machine to
produce, and GDC was having real problems meeting the

quality standards for the delivered missile. The DoD
forced the USAF to develop a competitive second-source
to build this weapon. MDMSC elected to bid.

Our LOT group spent a lot of effort reviewing GDC
drawings, specifications, and manufacturing methods so

we could “reverse engineer” the design and figure out
efficient manufacturing methods that we had developed
in order to be price competitive while convincing the

ACM program office that we knew what the hell we were
talking about. I briefed “production readiness” issues to
the ACM program office as part of the proposal process

and correctly identified the “hard stuff to do” along with