A one star is too great of a rating for this book. It is all wrong. Events and dates are not correct and the author's conclusions are based on things that never happened. As history, this book should be pulled from the shelves and placed in the fiction section. I write from first hand experience because I was there and helped make it happen. I was only able to read the first 32 pages because it made me sick - and I am robust. The publisher should never make a second printing.

Two glaring errors are made by the author. First, he tells of the hand-carried sketches of the F3H-G/H being presented to the Navy on 19 September 1953. The true date was in September 1954. A letter of intent was received within weeks of this meeting and not a whole year as the author indicates. This error makes a great difference in the time it took to define the mission for the AH-1/F4H airplane. The second error was the authorship of the specifications for the airplane. The author gives credit to the Navy when, in reality, the specification was written by McDonnell with concurrence by the Navy who then controlled (but did not make) changes to the specification. This would seem to be elementary for someone writing about management systems.

There are many other, but lesser, errors in those first 32 pages which indicates the writer did not interview the two individuals who were so critical to those early days of the F4H, namely David S. Lewis and Herman Barkey. Simply stated: he did not do his homework.

This short text opened my eyes to the design and marketing of weapon systems. The technical system engineering obstacles described with the F-4 were interesting, but took a back seat to the details of the original design engineering and marketing foresight MD used to produce an international, money-making weapon system with a multi-decade lifespan. Before I read this book, I was impressed with the F-16 and its "surprising" adaptability-but now I'm astounded because there is no surprise. General Dynamics had forseen it all, long before the first one rolled off the assembly line.