Despite an ever-growing and very large budget, the military does not use the most modern technology at scale. The industrial base cannot meet production demand. And the timelines for procurement are astonishingly long. Washington can’t agree on much, but there is bipartisan consensus that defense acquisition is broken.
Many diagnoses invoke a similar origin point: the so-called “Last Supper,” a 1993 dinner hosted by President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, and Deputy Secretary of Defense, and future Defense Secretary, William Perry. At that fateful meal, Aspin and Perry gathered senior defense industry leaders to make clear that with the end of the Cold War, the United States needed a peace-dividend and that industry should consolidate.
According to this narrative, following the dinner, the companies began a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. By the end of the 1990s, the once robust and healthy defense industrial base had collapsed into five enormous companies. The Last Supper, many claim, is why the U.S. cannot produce drones or munitions or rapidly field new technology.
Margaret Mullins, Director of Public Options and Governance at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator (VPA), argues in a new paper that the many narratives incorrectly rely on “Last Supper” as the starting point for today’s problems. Finding the right solutions requires correctly understanding how the U.S. arrived at this crisis in defense procurement. Mullins’ paper debunks four myths about the impacts of the “Last Supper”: that the dinner triggered the consolidation of the defense sector; that the dinner ended surge capacity; that the dinner was the source of a break with the tech sector; and the underlying problem is that the government needs to run more like a business.
Read The Myths of the Last Supper: The Lessons of History and the Future of Defense Procurement on the VPA’s website, and learn more about the analysis on VPA’s Substack.
The Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator focuses on cutting edge topics in political economy and regulation to swiftly bring research, education, and policy proposals from infancy to maturity.
