…at least when it comes to bidding on big defense contracts, hinted The Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows in his 2002 article on how Lockheed Martin beat Seattle-based Boeing for the contract to build the Pratt and Whitney-powered F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter. Fallows described the scene at Lockheed Martin when its managers and employees learned they won the contract. “Before the word ‘Lockheed’ was fully out of [Air Force Secretary James] Roche’s mouth, the audience in Fort Worth erupted and drowned out the rest of his remarks. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican from Texas who had come to show her support, leaped into the air and screamed.”
The reaction was understandable. In 2002, the Pentagon projected building over 6,000 F-35s, at around $200 billion. So it’s not hard to understand why Fort Worth’s gain was Boeing’s and Seattle’s loss. But Boeing officials didn’t seem that depressed, suggesting they were playing the long game, one that emphasized what they “considered to be the real future in aviation—unmanned combat and reconnaissance aircraft that were more advanced versions of the Predator drones used in Afghanistan.”
Fallows went on to describe how Lockheed’s version of F-35, some versions of which can take off and land like a helicopter, came out ahead in the process. In the end, though, he asked, “what did Lockheed win?” An unnamed civilian analyst answered:
They [Lockheed] have bought themselves the opportunity to compete continuously through twelve straight annual funding cycles to keep this thing alive. It’s going to be tough because the airplane is not exactly what anyone wanted, and more-pressing things will come along.
And what might those more-pressing things be? Unmanned aircraft. But wait: there’s more irony. As Fallows wrote,
Many members of Boeing’s JFS team have been switched to its unmanned-vehicles project. When meeting with several of them I mentioned a nightmare scenario for Lockheed Martin: that Boeing, while playing the good loser, would get its revenge by successfully promoting unmanned vehicles as the real way to make defense affordable. The Boeing men all laughed when I said this. Of course, that is what they have in mind.
How does the shift to unmanned aircraft affect Pratt and Whitney? The Hartford Business Journal recently reported that the Navy’s X-47B drone, which is as big a manned fighter and powered by a Pratt engine, made history when it became the first drone to land successfully on an aircraft carrier. 
