Agreed. Yes, we have national security interests in having the capability to build airplanes, etc., but there must be a way to maintain that capability without permanently giving one company and its executives the right to mismanage unlimited amounts of money. Maybe some more flexible mechanism that can handle networks of smaller companies achieving the same end result.
If you consider it national interest, why as the biggest shareholder and bagholder do you not have board members that veto actions that are profitable but bad for national interest?
No it's the other way around. The Boeing we have today is the result of mergers. For example McDonnell Douglas that built the f-18 amongst other things was acquired in 1996.
They merged the companies, but outsourced component manufacturing to the lowest bidder and didn’t bother to check the lowest bidder was actually delivering what was needed.
The popular story is when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in the late 90's, Boeing's engineering-driven culture was replaced with the more financialization-driven culture from McDonnell execs.
The 737-MAX saga was kinda the culmination of when profit-motivated shortcuts bump up against realities of engineering safety margins. I'm sure everyone has their campfire variation on this, tons has been written about it.
So yeah on the financial shenanery, but more culture/people-in-charge than conglomeration-megacorp per-se.
