Originally Posted by Excargodog

Military procurement really can’t do cheap. Not won’t, but literally can’t. The labyrinthian procurement laws stacked upon one another by Congress over the last hundred years really preclude any but the few big established defense contractors from bidding on pretty much any requests for proposals - just because of the overhead of keeping in place people who understand the damn rules. Then, assuming you really are successful in the years long process you have to split the work up into 40-50 pieces to farm out enough of the work to enough states to assure that Congress will actually fund the production. So the process of contracting is guaranteed to be long and expensive and the production itself will be widely geographically distributed and involve intricate supply chains with all the logistics and management issues that requires.

Worst of all, you have so few competitors due to the resulting defense contractor consolidation that you have no real way of managing them because they are now too damn big to allow them to fail. Look at Boeing and all the problems with the KC-46.The selection of the Boeing bid was made in 2011 as the KCX to replace the KC-135. Now, 15 years later, the KC-135 is still an integral part of the tanker force and Boeing is still working on getting the KC-46 up to the contract requirements. But you can’t really discipline Boeing. You let them fail and no one can support the aircraft they’ve already delivered.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you out there work for airlines still flying the 707?

No, I really didn’t think so.