A Career in Test and Evaluation Reflections and Observations: From an Oral History Interview of Charles E. "Pete" Adolph
U. S. Air Force; Office of Air Force History
Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
2015
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Charles E. "Pete" Adolph retired as Director of Test and Evaluation in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition and Technology) on 31January1994. This completed more than 30years of federal service-almost all of it within the challenging field of test and evaluation (T&E). Pete-as he was widely known throughout the Department of Defense testing community-enjoyeda remarkable career. It began in the late 1950s, as the heroic era of flight test in the first decade of the jet age was drawing to a close. Pete then played an increasingly prominent role in the transformation of flight testing into a systematic discipline using the latest in information technology to evaluate sophisticated weapon systems. His government career culminated as a senior director at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). There, in the Pentagon, hebrought his many years of engineering and management experience in the field to bear upon the formulation of policies for the acquisitionand testing of weapon systems in the post-cold-war era. The text that follows began as a series of five oral history interviews conductedin the Office of the Air Force Historian between 29 July 1993 and 15 April 1994. Ms. Pauline Tubbs of the United States Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base (AFB), Alabama, expertly transcribed these interviews from approximately eight hours of audio tape. Mr. Lawrence R. Benson. the Air Force Historian's Assistant for Field Programs (and previously theDirector of Research Services at the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center). organized, revised, and edited the transcript-adding explanatory material in brackets or footnotes as appropriate. Mr. Adolph was accompanied at most of the interviews by Mr.Douglas Nation of the 46th Test Wing at Eglin AFB, Florida, who was on a special assignment to the OSD T&E Directorate. Dr. James O. Young, Historian of the Air Force Flight Test Center (AFITC), and his staff at Edwards AFB, California, helped with details on flight test and provided most of the photographs. Although Mr. Adolph'sresponsibilities within the OSD encompassed testing of all types of systems throughout the four armed services, our interview focuses most sharply on Air Force flight testing at Edwards. This is where Pete spent the majority of his career, and where I first met him in 1980 after becoming the AFITC Historian.
