[Rhinobird]

>In addition to that, there are strong political incentives for ‘distributing’ contracts widely,

Government/Defense contractors can track their suppliers and tell Congress exactly how many jobs are in which districts per project.

[dmix]

Yes making the actual product is very very secondary to successfully appeasing Congress, produce 'jobs', and follow the litany of rules in place about now the money is used and paperwork after to check boxes.

These aren't businesses operating in a competitive market with pressure to produce the best things quickly. Their goal is simply to be the best gov lapdog vs the only 1 or 2 other gov lapdogs.

Being extremely late and extremely over budget is standard practice in that world and worst case is usually the project gets cancelled for budget reasons then restarted 5yrs later doing the same thing.

This is the environment the gov fostered, they made Boeing etc critical to national security and industry while having a total aversion to risk, and zero forethought into long term investment in legitimate competition. All we get is the same growing monster that becomes the living embodiment of The Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

[xivzgrev]

Sure the government can create some inefficiencies but trying to blame them removes culpability off Boeing. If it was truly our government then many more government contractors would be delivering broken crap and that doesn’t seem to be the case. Example NOC stock seems to be doing just fine over past 5 years while Boeing..,has not.