I appreciate that it's difficult. It's like saying, “I take vitamin C pills and I'm still alive, so vitamin C pills must have saved my life, but I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't taken the vitamin C.” I appreciate the challenge in my question, but to whatever extent you can provide that information, I would really appreciate it, and I think it would be useful to the committee.
The question of procurement that my colleagues have raised is an important one. Over the course of the last 200 years, government has played a very limited role in the advance of transportation technology. Most of the innovations have come from the private sector.
The one exception to that really is mass procurement, mostly for military uses, of transportation technology. In those instances, though, the government was actually buying something that it needed to use. It was not buying airplanes, for example, to promote more innovation in aerospace; it was buying flying machines that it could employ in a war. The purpose of the procurement was not to support industry, but rather to serve a need that the government at that time had.
To what extent do you think procurement policy should be based on subsidizing innovation versus providing the government with a good or service that it actually needs?