I think the group was held back by overly pessimistic Wall Street forecasts until about November of last year. And then the budget information began to leak and it was much more positive than most had been anticipating.
I think it could embolden other companies if they succeed to cut back on health care costs by passing it off on other employees.
I think this thing quite possibly could go a lot more than a month or two,
They (results) were well above expectations, it was a good quarter. I would expect most of these defense firms to flatten out as far as top-line growth is concerned, but for a while at least they are going to maintain growth in the bottom line.
They threw sand in the production engine. They're getting the planes out, but at a high cost.
Obviously, there's been pent-up demand that has materialized since 9/11. Everyone stopped buying for a while.
I'm sure that this is one of the things that has been thought through by Northrop, and probably the reason they hesitated so long.
The Chinese market is probably going to be as strong as any single country in the world over the next 20 years, ... so it's certainly one that Boeing wants to continue to be dominant in.
We'll probably have orders that may be no more than half of what we had last year.
If you aren't coming up with enough of an improvement in performance, there's really no reason to proceed with it.