Corporate style thinking is indeed one of the reasons that the defenses of the United States are in such a mess.
Imagine if defense contractors weren't publicly owned.
Privately owned companies.... What a threat? lol
I didn't see anything said about "ownership". Grey Havoc remarked on "corporate thinking", which, as any rational person who has worked within a large modern corporation knows, is not thinking at all, at least not in any good sense.
"Corporate thinking" incorporates all the shortcomings of collective group-think but replaces the latter's commitment to democracy and social solidarity with naked self interest. NOT corporate interest--self interest, the interests of executive management and those determined to kiss up and kick down in the generally futile hope of replacing those above them. Corporate think sees business as a zero-sum game, where the all important CEO and his cronies can only win to the extent that others lose. So it prioritizes corporate politics over economic reality. It seeks short-term gains that make internal stock options profitable over sustainable, year over year profits or investment in the company. Monopoly is more profitable than competition, so it makes "sense" to buy competitors instead of developing new and better products of its own.
Defense corporations are probably worse than normal in this respect, because they generally have only one essential customer--a sovereign state in which they are incorporated and that has to use their products. So requirements can, in most cases, be ignored. The corporation just needs to cozy up to the right government officials and promise cushy, high-paying, post-retirement jobs/consultancies to selected generals, admirals, bureaucrats, and/or politicians. Sometimes, corporate think simplifies things even further and just pays bribes (Cunningham, the Hunters, and many other examples).
Corporate think can accept all of the above while trying to make its non-executive-track employees believe the exact opposite. Mere workers get business ethics classes that say that the company's high ethics forbid exactly what it does--at least in the case of mere workers. They enjoy the privilege of attending workshops, reading email from the CEO, and seeing posters in the cafeteria, all proclaiming the new quality management methodology. These all rest on the assertion that quality and innovation do not depend on investment in R&D, tooling, or even quality inspectors. Quality is not a characteristic of the things the company makes. Instead, quality is something happens when we embrace methodology and learn and use its terminology (and acronyms): Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma (the one that corporatist demigod Jack Welch used to make his fortune while driving the reliably profitable GE to the brink of bankruptcy), SMART goals, Agile, and many many more that I've thankfully forgotten. If quality problems emerge thereafter, someone didn't use the right wording (or possibly colors) in their PowerPoint slide.
No, at this point, private ownership has nothing to do with the state of the defense industry or of the economy in general. Remember the USSR? The much derided centrally planned economy? The Five-Year Plans? It was a corporation managed by boards (soviets) and a chairman who supposedly ran the economy for the benefit of the owners (the people) but instead made a good thing out of it for themselves by issuing Plans instead of making stuff the owners needed. Who does or does not own resources is immaterial. What counts is control. In the Soviet state that was, the neo-Soviet/mafia state that replaced it, in the US, the UK, or most of Europe, control has long since fallen into the hands of unelected bureaucrats. If you happen to own shares in a major corporation, ask yourself, how much control does that give you? Whether you vote your shares at the annual meeting, don't vote, or don't even own shares, your effect on current corporate governance is the same: nil, just as when Russians voted for the Chairman and Central Committee of the Soviet-era Communist Party. In both systems, you get the slate of officers and members recommended by the current officers and members The fact that said officers and members no longer draw government salaries the way that they did under Stalin does not seem significant to me.
If more people actually read Adam Smith and David Ricardo, these myths about ownership would go away.
Well if they pull a U-2, that will be 2080 or even beyond.
