“On Sunday night, CBS 60 Minutes aired an episode on price gouging by weapons contractors. Chronic overcharging by arms companies not only wastes money, but it also puts our security at risk by increasing the chances that weapons systems funded by the Pentagon will be overpriced, underperforming, and never fully ready for combat.As the 60 Minutes episode notes, a major contributor to price gouging is the fact that the arms industry is far more concentrated than it has ever been, due to a merger boom that started in the 1990s and has stepped up again in recent years, most notably with blockbuster deals like the 2020 Raytheon-United Technologies merger.In the 1990s there were 51 major defense contractors. Now there are five. Those top five weapons contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — split over $118 billion in Pentagon contracts in Fiscal Year 2022, or nearly one-third of all contracts issued by the Pentagon that year. These companies make most of the bombs, missiles, combat aircraft, helicopters, tanks, and other major weapons systems purchased by the U.S. government, which gives the Pentagon limited leverage when it tries to negotiate reasonable prices or hold contractors to account for shoddy work.In addition to the problems posed by the industry’s near monopoly on weapons production, the Pentagon has made matters worse through lax oversight practices, including failing to gather adequate background information for price negotiations; using too many sole-source and cost-plus contracts; and failing to hold contractors accountable for cost overruns and poor performance.”

Arms industry's price gouging shows how greed trumps national interest