In article ,
Andre Lieven wrote:
Yeah, its pretty amazing. One might say that the USN and USCG might
suggest to their US suppliers that the USN and USCG might not be
averse to buying ships and boats from overseas.
That might put a scare up the " more efficient private businesses ".

If you want efficiency, I'm afraid you have to look elsewhere than the
government's captive design bureaus. Suitable companies *do* exist within
the US; the trouble is that they're not "qualified suppliers", and also
that they're typically averse to contracts where the paperwork tonnage
exceeds the vessel tonnage (which might not be an issue with the USCG but
certainly is with the USN).

The current situation among defence/space contractors really is mostly the
government's own stupid fault. It's in the nature of the larger and more
established firms in a field to merge into still bigger ones, especially
when business is bad. The way you prevent this from producing monopolies
or oligopolies is to keep the door open to aspiring newcomers -- both by
going easy on the paperwork and the "qualified supplier" rules, and by
making sure that some of the work comes in packages of suitable sizes (the
one-big-contract-every-ten-years syndrome guarantees steady shrinkage of
the contractor pool, since it's naturally politically impossible to take
any sort of perceived risk with such megacontracts). A strenuous effort
to preserve competition at all levels, preferably *including* full
production, also helps: "you can have one contract for the price of two,
or two for the price of two".

Much though I hate to say it :-), the current mess is *not* the fault of
the current White House. The previous one, and the one before that, and
also the two or three before that, were just as inattentive about this.
(The consolidation of established firms has been more conspicuous in the
last 10-15 years, but it was happening long before that. In 1961, the RFP
for the Apollo CSM -- very much a qualified-suppliers-only affair -- went
to *fourteen* companies.) And the vultures are now coming home to roost.
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