Can a Winner-Take-All Environment Become More Competitive?
The Department of Defense (DoD) should stick with its winner-take-all strategy to develop and produce the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) — which is slated to become the workhorse fighter for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. But as a hedge to ensure that later versions of this next-generation aircraft have the most effective and innovative radar, computer, and software technologies, the DoD should consider spending money to keep a second developer and producer of these vital electronics components in the market. An investment in a second source of such mission systems, the electronics eyes and ears of the JSF, could be relatively modest. But it would provide future decisionmakers with the option to competitively develop a next-generation mission system source when and if it were needed. So concludes a recent RAND study of competitive strategies for the Joint Strike Fighter, performed over the summer and early fall of 2000. The study, conducted in RAND’s National Defense Research Insti
