Military Industrial Complex vs the Market

Here's more on the decline of America's defense indistries from the Heritage Foundation:


-Congress has tried repeatedly over the years to steer defense contracts in directions that would supposedly shore up or expand America’s military-industrial capacity. Yet these efforts have nearly always interrupted the natural tides of the market and led to unintended consequences, including inefficient practices, high prices and limited choices for the military. America’s war-fighting institutions have consistently achieved better results when they have relied on the free market to decide where and how products should be made.

and:

Consider the Navy. Ours is the most capable in the world, and no other nation builds warships as well as we do on the whole. But the U.S. does not manufacture aluminum-hulled ships, even though the Army and Marine Corps find aluminum-hulled catamarans manufactured in Australia to be of great value to their war-fighting strategies. So to get those weapons, we must look overseas.