I think the defense contractors are living in something of a fantasy if they think not, the gravy train, but the gravy Mississippi, is going to keep flowing forever.
The big lesson of sequestration was that, no matter how bitter and spiteful Obama was about cutbacks, the government is so nonsensically bloated that it was liposuction of a teaspoon of fat, hardly noticeable.
So the question back to those defense contractors, is how many gallons of pure fat are going to have to be sucked out before we get anywhere near the meat?
Time to go back to working for your bread, and producing on time and on budget. And from the government side, once a blueprint for a project is sent to the contractor, it is finalized: NO MORE CHANGES. Sorry if this means that 200 naval officers don’t get to claim they were part of the project, because they made some change to the design, on their resumes.
Some contractors are very necessary but a good many only exist as a result of a government grown too big. Look at the NSA, if they were doing only what they were supposed to be doing they wouldn’t need God knows how many people to do it.
The top 10 military contractors take in nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars per year and those are contractors that I consider to be mostly necessary. On the other hand are companies like Booz Allen which exist by the hundreds and cost us hundreds of billions per year themselves. Booz Allen (a politically connected company) took in nearly $6 billion taxpayer dollars last year alone.