Margaret Mullins
In the summer of 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, Les Aspin, and William Perry, then the deputy secretary of defense, hosted a dinner at the Pentagon for defense industry leaders. The Cold War was over, they informed the gathering, and the federal budget would not support them all. With no looming Soviet threat justifying ever-rising defense budgets, consolidation would be necessary.
Just after it happened, this meeting was dubbed the “Last Supper” by the CEO of the Martin Marietta Corporation, a major aerospace and defense firm that went on to merge with the Lockheed Corporation in 1995. Other similar mergers would follow. The gathering has since become a convenient origin story for why the U.S. defense industrial base lost the ability to meet the military’s needs and the defense acquisition process became so onerous. According to this narrative, the Defense Department simultaneously meddled with and neglected the industry, creating the inflexible behemoths that dominate the sector today while cutting off pathways for emerging technology companies to compete.
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