Posted on 02/17/2017 2:41:31 PM PST by RoosterRedux
Days before taking office, President-elect Donald Trump made two surprise calls to the Air Force general managing the Pentagon’s largest weapons program, the Lockheed Martin F-35 jet.
Listening in on one of those calls was Dennis Muilenburg — the CEO of Lockheed’s chief rival, Boeing.
Trump, who has repeatedly criticized the $379 billion F-35 program as “out of control,” made the highly unusual calls to Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan on Jan. 9 and Jan. 17. Muilenburg, whose company makes a fighter jet Trump has suggested might be an alternative to the F-35, was in Trump’s New York office for a meeting during the second call. He appeared caught off-guard but was able to listen in on the call, according to two people familiar with the calls, who asked to remain anonymous discussing sensitive information.
“I would consider the calls to be very straightforward. He asked a lot of very, very, very good questions because he was in the learning mode,” Bogdan said of Trump. Speaking to reporters Thursday after a congressional hearing on the F-35, Bogdan said that Muilenburg’s listening to the call “was not inappropriate. The things I talked about in front of Mr. Muilenburg were clearly publicly releasable information. I understand the rules.”
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
The Art of the Deal style winning. Ping.
So?
I love Trump keeping the “people” informed. Talk about transparency.
Impeachable offense,obviously.
transparency.
= = =
Get ahead of the MSM spin.
The man does know how to squeeze the tender bits. Having a Boeing exec listen in on his “fact finding” conversation with a Lockheed exec is pure and unadulterated genius. Machiavelli would be impressed.
If you know anything about the next gen fighter competition, the fix was in....you can watch a PBS NOVA program about the competition....
WE NEED more competition, not less! The gov in the last 20 years has allowed too many acquistions in the DOD aerospace market.
Time to make them compete again.
While we are at it, let’s create some new competitors!
Love it when the vindictive hubris of such creatures acts as a selfie of their underlying ignorance.
The headline implies Trump should be hanged at sunrise. The last sentence says nothing inappropriate happened.
It’s a positive article. We’re just so used to the press bashing Trump, we’ve come to expect everything to be negative.
Donald Jobs Trump working the phones.
Pray America woke
Seattle Times? Isn’t Seattle basically an extreme leftist camp?
But he still does a yeoman's job as traitorous Senator.
“.you can watch a PBS NOVA program about the competition....”
Yeah, the Death Spiral episode. One of the last few Nova episodes which was informative. The producer of that segment was one of my mentors in Hollywood. He told me it took more than 200 phone calls just to meet the Lockheed guys.
Boeing still has a major presence in Seattle. And the Seattle Times has reporters assigned to cover Boeing.
I seem to recall that back in the day there were three major aircraft builders, Boeing, Lockheed, and Northrup. These companies were asked to bid on a contract to provide what the Pentagon wanted, as an example a fighter/bomber which had the capabilities described in the offer too bid.
These companies would then design and build what 5hey believed was the best idea and hand it over to the Pentagon for testing and evaluation.
The gov would test them and eventually after the kinks were ironed out one was selected andthe others went home after pouring millions into r&d only to come up empty.
Exactly. Trump could build an orphanage and the media would somehow find a way to spin it as controversial.
There were more companies back in the day. Most have been gobbled up by the three you mentioned, or given up on (military) aviation and/or gone in other directions.
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