SpaceBanter.com - View Single Post - ...Lockheed Ruins Eight 123' Coast Guard Cutters!

**Rand Simberg[_1_]**

On Mon, 21 May 2007 06:22:33 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Henry Spencer) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

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.

It's not only in *their* nature, but the government often encourages
it. The Pentagon and Goldin certainly almost forced it in the
nineties. USA, for example, was pretty much a shotgun marriage. And
no one seemed to complain much about ULA, though by any rational
analysis it's in defiance of the Sherman Act.