Challenges Faced by Ben Rich at Lockheed

A specific leadership position usually has different incumbents. In many cases, these incumbents get praised for their achievements and good deeds of leadership, yet they will always have mistakes and downfalls which are prone to being overlooked. In the book “Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of my Years at Lockheed,” the author writes about Ben Rich, who takes over the leadership at the Lockheed in succession of Clarence Kelly. The goal of this essay is to look into the challenges which Ben Rich faced when he assumed the leadership at the Lockheed after Clarence Kelly.

Ben Rich took over leadership of the Lockheed from Clarence Kelly and occupied this position for close to two decades. However, those decades were not an easy highway to accomplish task. Instead, it was riddled with challenges which Rich managed to handle in the most effective way he could. Among the challenges which Rich had to overcome included beating the difficulty of declassifying programs (Janos & Rich, 1996). Rich made a complain that it was extremely difficult to convert a classified program into declassification. This meant that top secret missions were highly confidential to the extent that Rich became bothered about this and he recommended the taking up of the “sunset laws on security.”

Furthermore, Rich encountered the challenges of the confrontations of the Cold War and the air combat in the Gulf War. All these challenges piled on the urge to maintain a secret fighter plane program, known as the “Skunk Works.” Rich had to get in terms with his admission in some of his conversations that he believed in the reality and existence of extraterrestrial species and the Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO). Concerning the idea of UFOs, Rich wrote in letters to a friend confirming his knowledge about two kinds of UFOs; i) the kind made by human beings, and: ii) the kind made by extraterrestrials.

Reference

Janos, L., & Rich, B. (1996). Skunk Works : A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed.