That's less true than it used to be, due to the unofficial end of cost plus. And Boeing is getting to be a bit of a red flag in procurement circles.
More or less all capital-B Boeing programs in the DoD side are - at best - unwell, but "terminally ill" is also making a showing. KC46, SLS, CST-100. There was also the AH-64D/E fictional upgrade kit and bad/counterfeit parts, something repeated on the CH-47 retrofits[1] . . honestly, peel back the skin on a successful Boeing program and odds are you'll see a non-Boeing organization or its remnants (or Phantom Works, or some other little island of competence that's somehow avoided the All Seeing Eye). And this is just the surface stuff.
BDS never recovered from the end of cost plus' Glory Days of the GWoT. Fixed price broke a lot of BDS, because no one really has any idea what anything costs, or even how long it takes to do a thing. Sometimes I wonder just how much is left in the core of the org.
My first memory of working with Boeing was from 2010, when a government encryption requirement led me down a long and tortured road that ended with me training an entire Boeing team on what PGP was (we still ended up handling virtually all of that in-house, at cost to Boeing, because it took eight months to get an answer to virtually any question, as both call and response filtered through two dozen levels of management emails). More recently the USAF tossed Boeing a softball project to glue wings and a GPS kit to Mk82 iron bombs, but Boeing couldn't figure it out - they had to subcon the job to Kratos (this was in the news, but was also confirmed anecdotally). Similar thing with "avionics updates" for <redacted> - the "update" was just a request that an accurate pinout diagram be sent with the documentation. Again, core Boeing just couldn't manage that without subconning it out; they literally did not know the pin #s on a standard ARINC connector that they were themselves using. Pretty close to an aerospace company needing a subcontractor to explain what the Bernoulli Principle is.
I do hope I am wrong about B. It's quite possible I've just had really bad luck when it comes to the division I deal with. But sometimes . . sometimes you wonder, "What . . what if the whole org is like that?"
[1] That's a huge theme across multiple BDS divisions and programs, from UAS to F-15 and Super Hornet. I suspect it's also why BGS appears to be made of money.
For suppliers, it's a valid question, and it gets more valid every year as the cost of doing business with big B spirals. Thing is, it's just so much damn money up front, that the guys up in Mahogany Row don't really care about follow-on costs, like having to support Boeing staff who don't know what a scroll wheel on a mouse does. Now, though, with (another!) active investigation, possibly one where Boeing loses their in-house DERs . . whew, who knows.
From the DoD perspective? It's not really possible for DoD to offload Boeing. The old airframes - F-15, F-18, 7X7 derivatives of all flavors - are the workhorses of US jet aviation . . or they are perceived to be the workhorses, in any case.
Ah, "perceived" . . there's a huge, ginormous other subject here, and that is the subject of a peacetime military. Specifically, whether the metrics we optimize for in peacetime have any bearing whatsoever when it comes to a hot war with a peer. History says, "nope!". Tech and metrics optimized in peacetime buildups almost never have decisive roles in major conflicts, for somewhat obvious reasons: the enemy sees it coming. Everyone's got countermeasures ready to go before shooting starts.
The victor - the technological victor, which doesn't necessarily correlate with the winner - is the one that adjusts fastest to combat experience. That industrial agility is really the thing that needs to be optimized. Trade offs of course are aplenty here; if you adjust hardware too fast, you damage your production capacity and your logistics. Case in point: the US in WW2 were probably one of the slowest-adjusting of the Powers, technologically speaking, but none of that mattered a good god damn when US industrial capacity was greater than the rest of the planet combined. Combining capacity/readiness with agility is the magic bullet. When historians say the T-34 was the most effective armored fighting vehicle of WW2, that's what they're talking about. It obviously wasn't the best, or even a good fighting platform, but it matched Soviet industrial capability to a T while effectively countering the enemy. It was the best design for the system it was part of. Internet people get in terrible screaming matches about this, not realizing that mil historians evaluate systems, not hunks of iron.
Anyway, I'm rambling now. Short answer, yes. Tons.
More or less all capital-B Boeing programs in the DoD side are - at best - unwell, but "terminally ill" is also making a showing. KC46, SLS, CST-100. There was also the AH-64D/E fictional upgrade kit and bad/counterfeit parts, something repeated on the CH-47 retrofits[1] . . honestly, peel back the skin on a successful Boeing program and odds are you'll see a non-Boeing organization or its remnants (or Phantom Works, or some other little island of competence that's somehow avoided the All Seeing Eye). And this is just the surface stuff.
BDS never recovered from the end of cost plus' Glory Days of the GWoT. Fixed price broke a lot of BDS, because no one really has any idea what anything costs, or even how long it takes to do a thing. Sometimes I wonder just how much is left in the core of the org.
My first memory of working with Boeing was from 2010, when a government encryption requirement led me down a long and tortured road that ended with me training an entire Boeing team on what PGP was (we still ended up handling virtually all of that in-house, at cost to Boeing, because it took eight months to get an answer to virtually any question, as both call and response filtered through two dozen levels of management emails). More recently the USAF tossed Boeing a softball project to glue wings and a GPS kit to Mk82 iron bombs, but Boeing couldn't figure it out - they had to subcon the job to Kratos (this was in the news, but was also confirmed anecdotally). Similar thing with "avionics updates" for <redacted> - the "update" was just a request that an accurate pinout diagram be sent with the documentation. Again, core Boeing just couldn't manage that without subconning it out; they literally did not know the pin #s on a standard ARINC connector that they were themselves using. Pretty close to an aerospace company needing a subcontractor to explain what the Bernoulli Principle is.
I do hope I am wrong about B. It's quite possible I've just had really bad luck when it comes to the division I deal with. But sometimes . . sometimes you wonder, "What . . what if the whole org is like that?"
[1] That's a huge theme across multiple BDS divisions and programs, from UAS to F-15 and Super Hornet. I suspect it's also why BGS appears to be made of money.