Margaret Mullins: Debunking the myths of the Pentagon’s ‘Last Supper’

If you’ve paid attention to the defense acquisition space long enough, you’ve surely heard of the “Last Supper” — the secret 1993 dinner meeting in which Secretary of Defense Les Aspin invited the CEOs of America’s largest defense contractors to share the news that the Pentagon was going to scale back spending leading to a consolidation of the defense industrial base. While that meeting and the decisions tied to it have come to define the past three decades of defense contracting, it has also been riddled with myths, according to Margaret Mullins, Director of Public Options and Governance at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. Mullins joins this episode of CTRL + ALT + DEFENSE to share the reality of defense acquisition consolidation and how that history can best inform how the Pentagon should approach the current pivotal moment of transformation it’s encountering, where it must scale industrial innovation to compete with adversaries like China and Russia.