I'm going to take issue with some of this > The Pentagon’s head-in-the-sand approach is why Lockheed now has a chokehold on nuclear missile modernization, sinc

I'm going to take issue with some of this > The Pentagon’s head-in-the-sand approach is why Lockheed now has a chokehold on nuclear missile modernization, since it bought the key supplier of rocket engines and denies those engines to rivals bidding for the contract to upgrade what is known as the nuclear triad. There are multiple suppliers for rocket engines, both solid fuel and liquid fueled rockets. Furthermore, many rocket engine companies would love to build new rocket designs on fat, fully funded defense time & materials contracts coming up with alternative designs to fit specific form factors or new requirements (ICBMs, interceptors, etc). The newer companies like SpaceX, Rocketlabs, and Blue Origin are particularly hungry, and they are willing to compete against the legacy Defense firms if they are given an opportunity. Now, if the RFPs were written in such a way as to prevent all these new upstarts from competing, well, that is a different problem.