IMO it's all about the money being the main motivating factor. With government contracts more money should mean you can do a better job - which is why these con

IMO it's all about the money being the main motivating factor. With government contracts more money should mean you can do a better job - which is why these contracts are so large. But there's a conflicting motivation to 'generate value for shareholders.' And this is further confounded by conflicts of interest in oversight. Congress not only receives large donations from the military industrial complex, but is also literally invested in these companies, and also stands to work as 'consultants', lobbyists, and and the like after leaving office for 7+ figure salaries. So you get a system where so long as money's getting spent, everybody's pretty happy - and the more, the merrier. It seems that in the past there was more ideologically (rather than financially) motivated leadership of many industries. One can see this today by comparing companies like SpaceX with Boeing. SpaceX is an ideologically driven company with a goal of colonizing Mars, headed by an eccentric engineer. Boeing is a financially driven company headed by an accountant. One has already revolutionized the entire space industry multiple times and is sending costs plummeting. The other has now spent tens of billions of dollars and well over a decade trying to rework Space Shuttle era tech into a new overpriced rocket that's already effectively obsolete before it's even finished. [1] And Boeing is also one of the largest military industrial complex contractors. Of course in 40 or 50 years, SpaceX will just be another Boeing. Maybe there's an argument for not perpetuating massive companies. They all seem to go from ideologically driven to MBA driven, yet their inertia and size makes it quite difficult to compete against them, resulting in an overall stagnation in technology and efficiency. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System