Posted on 06/29/2024 8:49:53 PM PDT by hardspunned
June 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. Army awarded Lockheed Martin a multi-year contract worth $4.5 billion for its air defense Patriot Missiles system, the Pentagon said on Friday. The Patriot system is one of an array of sophisticated air defense units supplied by the West to help Ukraine, as it continues its defense against Russia's invasion. The contract covers 870 PAC-3 MSE missiles and associated hardware.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
My pension continues.
Americans are being raped by the useless, bloated MIC that has not won a war in 60 years.
Lockheed is the largest contractor for both military and civilian contracts.
They are a critical player in the Deep State.
They have the kind of power that can determine whether Biden stays or goes.
The MIC has won every war—they have the balance sheets to prove it.
Time to crush Lockheed and to replace it with contractors that actually can build things that do not cost a $ kajillion.
Good luck finding someone not on Lockheed’s payroll—directly or indirectly.
See my tagline.
Lockheed is Exhibit 1.
Well at least they didn’t give the contract to Boeing. They can’t seem to engineer and a build an airplane that can fly anymore. “Well there’s hours of time on the telephone line to talk about things to come
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground”. James Taylor
Me Too
Go to have FR company
KC
These aren’t used on drones typically.
Cruise missiles are their usual diet, with an occasional aircraft or ballistic missile.
The whole defense industry is a skin-tag on the body of the US economy. Or, say, its like Jupiters moon Io vs Jupiter itself. The US government regulates it all, the whole economy, and the leeches live off exploiting regulations, legal cases, consultancies, etc and etc. They are attached to every organ in that huge body, not just defense contractors.
It helps to research the whole, to gain perspective. One place to start is with US medical spending. Just one piece of it, but much, much larger than defense.
Lockheed is a tiny, tiny thing, and 4.5 billion is small change.
“MIC that has not won a war in 60 years.”
Which one did they win in 1964 ?
Ive worked in that industry.
Problems -
- Specs are always changing due to ongoing R&D, and R&D costs tend to be absorbed by contracts like this. There are multi-layers of upgrades and tech integration ongoing. This is a complex system with radars, multiple datalinks, etc.
- This is not continuous production but batch production, in which a lot of facilities need to be stood up again for each contract. Inefficient, as far as unit costs go.
- Order numbers are very small. 800-odd units for a very complex device like this is going to give you a very high unit cost. They should have ordered 10,000.
You are welcome to indulge yourself in freestyle performative rage. Will you get an 8.5 or better? Its up to the judges!
Or you can try understand what’s going on.
The rip-off dance takes 2 partners, the government and the contractor. We should fire 90% of the Pentagon civilian drones and pass a law that former government officials cannot serve on corporate boards for 10 years after retirement.
At least is the system going to be updated versions?
😂. I worked Space Systems for 36 yrs.
Oh! So your FR name isn’t short for Racketman and you aren’t in the mob? All this time I was afraid you would have me whacked if we disagreed about something.
Whose phone calls get picked up?
This is a decent priority list. Revenues are a good metric, because that’s what’s being skimmed.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-revenue/page/2/
All the US defense businesses are on page 2 or worse.
“They should have ordered 10,000.”
They are incapable of building volumes anything close to that.
And have been since the Vietnam War ended.
The ability to build those volumes begins with ordering such volumes. That justifies investment, etc.
As for capacity in aerospace, the capacity crash happened post-1991.
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