In September, Defense News reported, Boeing’s new CEO for everything, Kelly Ortberg, fired the CEO of its Defense, Space & Security division, Theodore Colbert. The department is Boeing’s second-largest by revenue behind commercial airliners, contributing 30% of its bottom line, according to its most recent annual report. Though things were in rough shape when Colbert started the job in 2022, he wasn’t able to engineer a turnaround.
The company will have to explain why the defense business remains a loss-maker despite global turmoil in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere — which in part can be chalked up to “fixed-price contracts” with the U.S. government that make it hard to cut losses when developing new equipment becomes costlier than expected. That’s why fixing Boeing planes is the only profitable business Boeing has going right now.
Plus, Colbert presided over…
