Well, yes, when you are unable or unwilling to build the product to modern safety standards, you should be forced to cancel it.
F/A-18E/F
777
The F/A-18 is from the 70s, and the Super Hornet's from the mid 1990s.
The 777 first flew in the mid 1990s.
There's not much recent to brag about.
Why push a cutting edge technology for which there is no immediate need into operational status?
Why not instead harvest the low-hanging fruit, while simultaneously using it to refine carrier operations, and then restart UCAV development later when technologies have had more time to mature?
Aboulafia had like fifty graphs on exactly how Boeing is doomed, at least as a unified company; they might survive in pieces after a GE-style split. Big B is spending all their money on precisely the wrong products, and leaving the right products to die on the vine.
This . . this must be what it was like with the late stage evolution of the Soviet design bureaus, but far, far, far worse. With somehow less accountability.
No one inside knows what anyone else is doing, and they're this close to just shipping boxes of parts and marking off a successful delivery of a finished good.
How Boeing has avoided the Mother Lode of all Fines is a mystery to me. Except it's not really a mystery, we all know why, but . . please let me keep my illusions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_787_orders_and_...
My impression is that usually or always the company just ends slowly dying instead. I'm thinking of IBM, and maybe Intel, GE, Boeing.
But maybe it's easier w/ software, less capital and physical equipment than a company building something
But they're not. That's... the whole problem really.