The thing you have to understand is that your initial statement has literally no foundation to it. There isn't any solid proof that program failures like this are direct means to keeping workers employed (where it is implied that they otherwise wouldn't be). I am also not really sure how some crazy guy (I am being hyperbolic) betting hundreds of millions of dollars (some of it his own funds) somehow becomes analogous with a purposefully obtuse military industrial complex scheme to keep people employed.

There are certainly cases where the government soaks up funding, gives it to a company, for absolutely no other reason that we can tell other than to just funnel money along into their little corner of the country (and thus their constituents).

But I have a really hard time believing that is the case here.

It's hard to say with any certainty, to be sure. But I wouldn't be so skeptical -- Nixon did after all announce the Space Shuttle program in part to help secure his re-election. That too in California in a naked attempt to win SoCal.

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=kje_BAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA12&ots=...

NASA was always a jobs program as well as what it ostensibly was for, it was officially tasked with industrially uplifting the South, which became an even bigger thing when LBJ became president. The area to the immediate northeast of MIT was still mostly a wasteland when I showed up in 1979 because NASA all of a sudden decided that Houston was the ideal place to put the Mission Control Center....

After Apollo, that became many times more what it was for.

You beat me to it. I was going to add something along lines of expanding existing corruption where military people authorizing it get cushy jobs in return over time. The "revolving door." So consistent that it should be our first hypothesis for every program like this.

It is an extremely inefficient jobs program, an extremely inefficient research program, and an extremely inefficient aircraft. As he said: do one thing, and do it well.

It /is/ a pretty good wealth distribution program, though. If you count dollars distributed, not number of recipients.

>>It is an extremely inefficient jobs program, an extremely inefficient research program, and an extremely inefficient aircraft.

Yep. Just like the aircraft: tries to do too many things, ends up sucking at all of them.

I agree, except the problem is that it's sold to the public as defense, not as a jobs program. Part of the sales job is involves having American pilots fly those airplanes into combat.

Decades ago there was the Boeing/Airbus fight over government spending in the aerospace industry.

Boeing was angry that Airbus got cheap credi backed by or from the government, Airbus was angry because Boeing got all the military money from the government.