Christmas-tree programs recruit allies but can threaten rival budgets

The EFV became a Christmas-tree project on which many organizations hung their preferred future capabilities. Attaching more subprojects can be politically rational because each contractor, constituency, workforce, and user community becomes another defender of the main program. That coalition encourages participants to believe a sufficiently important project is too big to cancel. The same expansion raises cost and can make the program a threat to other major acquisitions competing for the same budget. This political logic helps explain why requirements keep growing even as a vehicle becomes less affordable.