“THE PROJECT ON GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT (POGO)”
“Mergers and geographic groupthink have helped wring innovation out of the defense business. “As the defense industry has shrunk, all of the contractors began to look more and more alike.”
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“It was a striking passage in a Christmas Eve Washington Post story about a company that helps small businesses get contracts from nearby big corporations. “These small suppliers have been heavily reliant on the health of big companies in their regions,” it read. “If you are in Houston, your business lives and dies with oil and gas. In the Midwest, it’s automotive. Boston caters to medical device companies. Washington is well known for its aerospace and defense.”
Well, it may be well known now, but that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Defense-contractor headquarters tended to be where the factories were, far away from the decision-makers in D.C. Lockheed and Northrop were in California, for example, and General Dynamics was in St. Louis.
But General Dynamics moved to D.C.’s Virginia suburbs in 1991. “Winning contracts is not just a function of providing the necessary aircraft or submarine,” a St. Louis-based defense industry analyst said when the move was announced. “There also, sorry to say, are politics that get involved in a lot of these decisions. It’s something that’s difficult to quantify, but you know it does have a place in these decisions.”
Lockheed shuttered its California headquarters in 1995 after it merged with Martin Marietta. The deal reflected “Southern California’s dwindling role as a mainstay of the U.S. aerospace industrial complex,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. “Lockheed Martin chose Martin Marietta’s home of Bethesda, Md., for its headquarters, formally ending Lockheed’s long domicile in the San Fernando Valley.”
Northrop moved to Falls Church, Va., in 2010. “We think we’ll be able to do a better job for our customers and our company by having our corporate office there,” Northrop chief Wes Bush said back then. “
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