« Reply #4 on: January 23, 2024, 04:35:41 pm »
You don't suppose excessive governmental intrusion and taxation have anything to do with it, do you? 
Unions, taxation, environmental regulation, short-sighted penny pinching, forced industry consolidation, and too much political interference in procurement.
And it all goes back to THIS moment in time:
'The last supper': How a 1993 Pentagon dinner reshaped the defense industryhttps://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industryAnd that was quite an awakening, they heard from the Defense Department on how small an industry would be afforded. And I should add to that that in serious war time, the defense industrial base is really the national industrial base. And it too had manufacturing was severely declining at the same time. And in 1980, 18% of the workforce in the nation was in the manufacturing world. Shortly after the Last Supper it was 7%. So the commercial industrial base was declining and the defense industrial was going to decline. Big worry for any future need for large scale military equipment....
(snip)
But nevertheless, the effects of the Last Supper were lasting. Because there had been a real, complete transformation of the defense sector. I mean, in fact, a Department of Defense report last year found that right now the number of prime contractors in the United States has dropped by 90%, down from 51 in the 90s to just five today. Now, those companies are often referred to as the big five, Lockheed Martin, that Norman Augustine used to be the head of Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman....
(snip)
And when I go back to the government in 1993, as we've talked about, I made a decision. We had too many companies in the defense world, which I happen to not disagree with what they did under the circumstances. But ... 30 years later, all of a sudden say, oh, my goodness, we don't have as many companies as we need in the defense world. And I think the big worry I have is so much of the equipment our military has today is so old. Technically, for example, the Air Force's largest number of fighters by far were developed 51 years ago when it entered engineering development 51 years ago.
The Army's tank, main tank went into development 50 years ago. And you can go down the list, the strategic bomber, the main strategic bomber ... think how much the technology has changed, how all those systems have been upgraded as they should have been. It's just very hard to turn a 1975 Buick into a modern car. And I just think that what we need to do is look at the problems we face today, which I think are immense, particularly with the evolution of China and aggression against Russia. And we may have to restructure the industry. I really don't know. But I think it's just wrong to point that the industry is behaving in the fashion that was just portrayed....
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