I agree with you considerably.

 

But the problem doesn't start with the defense contractors.

The problem comes for the general sense of unaccountability from the very politicians we elected to lead our great country.

Until they have to start accounting for every cent just as the rest of us must do with our own checking accounts and family budgets, the problem won't go away. We'll just keep putting off onto the next generation, doing little more in the here and now than putting band aids on the problems, yet maniuplating the media/press into seeing it as some miraculous fix (no matter how short term).

 

Did we really gain anything everytime we delay a given defense program on the grounds of technical hurdles or whatever, in an effort to save budget money in the here and now, if years down the road when we finally get it up and running at speed it ends up costing us more per unit?

 

Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot on this one.

 

But that's what happens when we don't upgrade our own stuff often enough instead of wasting fortunes one systems that take more than a 1/4 century to mature from their inception.

 

(notice that current USAF F-16s are a tad inferior to the latest Block 60s that can be bought from LockMart?

And even our much-touted F-15E has been superceded by the even-if-only-slightly upgraded F-15K & F-15ST.)

 

If anything, we should be doing more upgrades in small bateches to as many platforms as we can (air, land, sea).

Sounds prohibitively expensive initially, and a logistics nightmare too, but we could localize the upgade lots to specific areas at a time, kind of like a gradually-sloped increase, instead of giant steps at a time which leave us with capability gaps approaching the end of one system's lifetime and the slack time while we implement the new systems across the board.

But, if we guaranteed more refit/upgrade work to the various defense contractors, maybe they wouldn't soak the govt so much everytime they get selected for one of those precious few major contracts.

And it also would encourage more of the smaller start up companies to offer their ideas for upgrade kits.

That would benefit us many ways:

-keeps competition going.

-keeps jobs diversified.

-keeps our technological manufacturing edge honed.

-not having singular classes of any major weapons program, if there is a threatening defect in any one system, it doesn't shut down a large chunk of our military capability by grounding entire fleets due to one defect.

 

There comes a point when buying in bulk risks more problems than it resolves.