Actually, having had some experience with it, the defense procurement complex can get fossilized without periodic shake up. We should never allow suppliers to become entrenched and find ourselves in the position where we throw our hands up and say “Who else can possibly do this?” Entrenched supplier incumbency is a hazard.
How modern defense procurement works (speaking from experience with Air Force acquisitions) is that you first fully define your requirement and publish it to industry as an RFI. You then get back responses from industry that inform you of supplier capabilities and recommended courses of execution to meet your requirements. You use that industry feedback to fine-tune your requirements and issue an RFP. And sometimes you need to start over with a clean sheet, or bring in an unconventional supplier(s) to do things in new ways not anticipated in the past.
I’m simplifying the steps, but the basic philosophy is that you must continually be challenging industry and fostering competition. You don’t assume that one or more past incumbents are the only possible answers. I will also note that it is now customary for “past performance” to be one of the factors to be scored in any defense procurement. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Boeing is wanting in past performance right now, and would have some challenges getting a good score from a source selection team.
Just look at the shake up of the space launch industry in recent years. If I would have told you 20 years ago that new player(s) would totally revolutionize the space launch industry and run circles around the established big league players, I would have been laughed off of a discussion forum. And yet here we are.