[weswilson]

There was an internal whitepaper written by a Boeing engineer back in 2001 that warns against the dangers of excessive outsourcing.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on-...

It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:

"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."

[nickff]

The trouble is that government contracts always strongly incentivize ‘excessive outsourcing’, and Boeing’s absorption of MD increased the dependence on government contracts, though Boeing was already on that road (especially after taking on Rockwell). Government oversight (almost) always discourages large profit margins, which makes increasing low-risk costs very appealing. In addition to that, there are strong political incentives for ‘distributing’ contracts widely, with the Space Shuttle being a famous example of this, having parts made or assembled in 48 different states.

[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.

[undersuit]

Those government inefficiencies are a great source of profit. Cut the FTEs today because the contractor's unrealistic low bid looks better on the budget. Make sure to hire a woman or minority owned for-profit road construction company, or hell just let the roads get so bad a pizza company can make it into a very effective ad campaign. I think we are a country hobbled by capitalism, afraid to do anything because it might hurt profits, even if it will hurt people.

NASA led private contractors to develop the Saturn V rocket and associated modules, now NASA is buying solutions, services, and products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Crew_Program

[dmix]

Early NASA was the sum of the private companies and the smartest nerds pulled from academia that they absorbed and turned into an organization. These people brought their culture of production and research from where they came from and built something great. Now NASA is merely a legacy gov agency whose culture is that of every old gov agency. Risk adverse, checkbox focused, political pawns, professional budget wranglers, etc.

Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.

Public-private partners is a good idea because public orgs that need to produce IRL things are very flawed, but you still need national interests beyond market interests so this is the compromise that has worked many times.

But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.

Boeing has no risk and neither does NASA because they can just keep choosing the safe choice, Boeing. What a lovely market.

We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old. And we need to force any public-private arrangements to legitimately foster competition, which means lots of compromise beyond a VC type situation, like reducing the litany of special interest checkboxes (jobs, geography, diversity, etc) and paperwork for small companies.