I can understand the need to keep more than a couple of major aerospace operations in business, but I would like to see the DoD put a little more effort into steering things better. For example, with the JSF bid, Boeing lost to Lockheed, but Boeing should have never been in the competition to begin with. Boeing has never designed a successful fighter, and hadn't even built someone else's design since WWII. They are an airliner/bomber company, so it should come as no surprise that they would design a pretty crappy fighter plane. Northrup-Grumman has been in the fighter design business for decades, but where were they?
Next, we have the MMA contract to replace the P-3, and there is no way that the DoD can give the contract to Lockheed since they just won the JSF contract, so Boeing gets the award. The maritime patrol community spends a lot of time flying low and slow over the oceans, often at night, and propellers provide a much faster response to a sudden need for power than jet engines do. If a VP pilot messes up and gets too low at night, and tries to power out of the situation in that Boeing 767 the way he/she could in a prop aircraft, that plane is going into the water and killing the crew. It's been open knowledge for a long time that using jets to support the maritime patrol mission was inherently dangerous, and now we're placing our folks at risk because we need to spread the money around.
So now with Lockheed and Boeing satiated, we now have to feed money to Northrup-Grumman, which has always been a strike/fighter operation, and has no experience building something like an inflight tanker. So they have to go team up with EADS. Now we have to deal with the possibility of if we take military action that France disagrees with, France could mess up the logistics and sparing for the aircraft because they disagree with what the US is doing.
