[alharith]

Then they can focus on just being a defense contractor. But there's nothing that requires them to bail out the commercial airline business, and it wouldn't be the first time a major aerospace and defense company made this pivot. When Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta, they stopped making commercial airliners.

[dialamac]

Boeing is the only American commercial transport jet manufacturer based in the US. The US politically would never allow the loss of this - whether it be “Boeing” or some new named thing that’s basically the same. For pro-global politicians it would be a major signal of failure of American industry, for “America first” isolationists it’s an obvious problem.

[7thaccount]

I think even from a national defense perspective it makes sense to retain a lot of the talent and manufacturing capability in some ways even if it's no longer WW2 and we can just launch a missile now. Maybe call it national strategy to have talent in a broad array of fields.

[rurban]

Which talent? There's only accounting talents from McDonald-Douglas left. The technical talent was replaced with cheap labor from overseas long time ago. And then there are thousands of bean counters to control overseas labor. You really need those domestic bean counters, that's their speciality.