This idea of neverending public-private partnerships, where Congress dumps money into the same tiny group of companies for decades and gov agencies just sit around finding new things for these same companies to build (over budget and way too late), was always going to get to a breaking point of dysfunction. Whether it's military or infrastructure or whatever.
The gov created this environment and the private companies protect it because it's big money and grease it so it's the only option (like selling the bullshit idea "no one else can do what [Boeing] does cuz we huge staff counts and billions").
They both enable each other
And people are too scared to have a system that encourages new smaller companies take part because they don't have fancy sales pitches or fail early prototypes or take longer to get to Step A. And everyone criticizes them to death. So the only option is to get bought by Boeing or Lockheed, who then do really good at Step A just to fail a Step C and D and E.
I fully agree. There has to be some disruption to allow a healthy competition to exist. This will allow at least the possibility for better companies to thrive. At present the behemoth contractors are propped up by the fact that people will always say the small upstarts can't scale enough to meet the needs of the massive purchaser. Companies like SpaceX on the space side and Anduril on defence are showing that innovation is possible in these industries, and that small companies have something to offer. In both cases they probably got more of an audience in government than the average startup because of high-profile connections (Musk and Thiel respectively). It would be great if the playing field were set up such that others could also innovate and disrupt without having that leg up.
The gov created this environment and the private companies protect it because it's big money and grease it so it's the only option (like selling the bullshit idea "no one else can do what [Boeing] does cuz we huge staff counts and billions").
They both enable each other
And people are too scared to have a system that encourages new smaller companies take part because they don't have fancy sales pitches or fail early prototypes or take longer to get to Step A. And everyone criticizes them to death. So the only option is to get bought by Boeing or Lockheed, who then do really good at Step A just to fail a Step C and D and E.