What people tend to miss is that the likes of Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing do this shit on purpose because they are public companies with few customers, and e

What people tend to miss is that the likes of Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing do this shit on purpose because they are public companies with few customers, and effectively zero accountability. They are literally forced by public markets to continually grow profits, and I'd wager Lockheed spends a gargantuan amount of money on black projects and research that they can't really turn a profit on (let alone disclose much less sell off), so they have to resort to making a profit by bilking the Pentagon in any way they can. Since the Pentagon doesn't give a damn about passing an audit, and the revolving door between defense companies, industry lobbyists, and the Pentagon is so huge, they can just get away with it. Spare me the bullshit about jobs and readiness, it's not good for the economy to continually employ people to utilize 30 year old tech to prepare for a battle that will never happen. Look at Abrams tanks - some senator couldn't face the prospect of not being re-elected, so they continually pushed for Abrams to receive billions to continually produce tanks, which went out of style after Desert Storm....which was in 1993. The Pentagon didn't want more tanks, and said as much many times, yet nothing happened. Those tanks were produced for years and had no use and sat in a massive warehouse. All so that senator could enjoy their cushy benefits, nice lobbying kickbacks, and not having to actually run a competitive re-election campaign, much less do the hard work of saying "look folks, your jobs are irrelevant now, here's some money to go re-train in a different industry". Now, is spending on military tech inherently bad, even on unprofitable or pie-in-the-sky ideas? No. Is it a bad thing to invest in the engineering sectors? No. Should it be done? Yes. Is it good to invest in technology and in education? Yes. Should companies that are completely reliant on Pentagon funding be allowed to be "private" entities who need to adhere to the whims of wall street bankers above all else? Absolutely not. Should they be allowed to lobby? No. Should they be allowed to hire tons of former military officials to effectively just be "relationship" people so the money keeps coming in? Absolutely not. The root cause here is that there's a revolving door between the Pentagon and private industry, and we're turning a blind eye to it.