Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is a large US defense prime contractor. In the wiki it appears as the incumbent against which newer defense builders are measured, as the home of the Skunk Works lab, and as the prime at the center of the F-35 program.

How it shows up

• The supplier base behind a prime. Zane Hengsperger’s April 2026 post says most of Lockheed’s suppliers are unknown by name: $6.9B a year goes to 7,100+ small businesses, $36B a year flows to 13,000+ suppliers across all 50 states, the F-35 has 2,100+ suppliers (nearly half small businesses), and one small Cleveland shop runs the only 50,000-ton forging press. Its point is that the “small shops in middle America” are the defense industrial base (You Probably Have Not Heard… (tweet); see Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain).
• Skunk Works. In 300 Pages on Anduril: Inside Modern Warfare, the speaker recommends Ben Rich’s Skunk Works as one of the best books on high-performance teams: “Lockheed is the company, Skunk Works is the lab, and Kelly Johnson founded Skunk Works.” The same lab is one of the great groups in Organizing Genius, and a case study in the reading-group proposal Organizing Genius — A Reading Group Proposal.
• The F-35. The F-35 page describes the program as the monument to what cost-plus procurement produces.

Where this appears

Tweets

• You Probably Have Not Heard… (tweet)

Podcasts and long-reads

• 300 Pages on Anduril: Inside Modern Warfare
• Organizing Genius — A Reading Group Proposal

Books to read

• Organizing Genius

Concepts

• F-35 · Company Building

Where this appears

• You Probably Have Not Heard… (tweet)