Washington: The return of President Trump as commander-in-chief could mean more hardball negotiations with defence contractors.
But Trump’s focus on cost cutting and potential insistence on hard deals may run into resistance from an industry that has grown wary of the kind of contracts that put them at greater risk — particularly aerospace firms developing expensive aircraft heavily reliant on new, high-risk technology.
And as the Air Force faces a cash crunch limiting its ability to modernise key parts of its force, it remains to be seen whether a second Trump administration will free up more resources for programs such as a next-generation fighter.
John Venable, a retired F-16 pilot and senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said that Trump can leverage his unique ability to command public attention to put pressure on underperforming defence contractors. He pointed to Lockheed Martin’s delays in getting necessary upgrades into the F-35 as an example.
“If [Trump] spoke about Lockheed Martin publicly and the board of directors heard that, you would see a change in the direction and intensity on the delivery of [F-35] products,” Venable said. “If he flinches in the direction of US industry, particularly in the military industrial complex, I think you’re going to see a lot of this stalling of production away. This, ‘We can’t get parts, we can’t assemble things fast enough, we’re having software issues.’ Those excuses are not going to fly with this guy, and I think the military and industry will all benefit from that heat.”
Trump frequently touts his business acumen and ability to strike deals, particularly his administration’s 2018 renegotiation of Boeing’s contract to build two new VC-25B Air Force One presidential planes. Most recently, Trump blasted “unbelievable waste and fraud” in the government in an October 31 live interview with Tucker Carlson. One of Trump’s early actions as president-elect was to put business tycoon Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a government efficiency commission tasked with rooting out waste.
“I saved much more than $1 billion when I came into the White House in one day, when I said, ‘I’m not going to pay that much to Boeing for Air Force One,’” Trump said October 31. “It took about a couple of weeks, you know, saying I’m not buying it. No, I don’t want it. But there’s a plane that you’re saving much more than $1 billion, and you’ve got thousands of things like that. Not as much, and in some cases, much more.”
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