Defense industry consolidation

[bayonetbrant]

https://twitter.com/salisbot/status/1404780813967822850

[Martok]

Fascinating, and a little disturbing. 


I have to confess, however, that I'd never even heard of Raytheon before. 

[trailrunner]

I started my career when Reagan was president at TRW. During the flat budgets of the 90s, there were a lot of mergers, but TRW held out for a while until they were finally bought by Northrop Grumman.  I had to go there for a meeting after they had been bought, and it was strange to see NG logos all over the company.   I’ve seen many other large companies come and go, and it’s happening at the lower levels too.

Some of these companies are so large, that when dealing with different groups within a company, it’s almost like dealing with different companies. I’ve heard stories of certain companies submitting more than one proposal, thereby competing with themselves.

[Doctor Quest]

I am not in the defense industry but my experience in IT with a variety of customers is that bigger is not better. As TR said there is a real problem with the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing with very large organizations. A lot of time (read: money) can be wasted with that sort of chaos. In the case of the DOD that's OUR money.

[trailrunner]

Regarding the big companies - after I came to the government side, I needed to fund a small project with NG. This was direction from my management. The sensor that they wanted me to fund with NG wasn’t a good fit, but by God I had to use it because stupid political reasons.

However, NG didn’t want my money because it was a small amount and not worth their effort. I forget how much it was - maybe $200k or $400k?  My management was mad at me that I couldn’t get them on contract and would not let it go.  I kept getting called into our lab’s deputy director’s office to explain my failure to him.  Fortunately I was friendly with my counterpart at NG and begged him to take my money. He agreed with me that his sensor wasn’t a good fit, and he was getting in trouble with his management too, but he finally agreed to take my money. I think I even had to scrape up some more funding before I could convince him.

[mcguire]

I am not in the defense industry but my experience in IT with a variety of customers is that bigger is not better. As TR said there is a real problem with the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing with very large organizations. A lot of time (read: money) can be wasted with that sort of chaos. In the case of the DOD that's OUR money.