US Defense Industry Consolidation: Moulton Questions Trump Official on Preventing Over-Consolidation

Lessons from the F-35 Program

• 💡 The F-35 program is highlighted as a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, with drones and unpiloted aircraft poised to take over warfare.
• 🔑 A key lesson learned is the importance of a government reference architecture to maintain insights and competition throughout a program's lifecycle.
• ⚠️ The risk of concurrency and incorporating immature technologies into weapon systems can lead to delays, emphasizing the need for rigorous evaluation.
• 📌 A contributing factor to the F-35's challenges was the effort to include parts from every state, creating political pressure to maintain business.

Strategies for the F-47 Program and Beyond

• 🎯 The F-47 program aims to adopt a new approach where the government maintains understanding of the system's architecture and supplier performance.
• ⚙️ Utilizing an open architecture allows for alternatives if one supplier is not performing and helps maintain a base of potential suppliers, avoiding lock-in.
• 📈 The goal is to foster competition and avoid surrendering the entire acquisition strategy to a single contractor.

Addressing Defense Industry Over-Consolidation

• 📉 The defense industrial base has seen a significant drop from 51 to five prime contractors in the last 30 years.
• ⚖️ The question is raised whether previous administrations should have pursued antitrust litigation to prevent this over-consolidation.
• 🚀 The focus moving forward is on acquisition decisions that maintain diversity within a single platform and allow for future competition.
• 🤝 While traditional vendors are necessary for complex systems, an open approach to subsystems allows the government to actively diversify the industrial base by participating in selecting subsystem suppliers.
• 🌟 The collaborative combat aircraft program is cited as an example where new entrants and smaller companies are being brought in to build complete systems, diversifying the traditional defense contractor landscape.