BAE Systems (1999): New prime

Korean contact is thinner than Lockheed's: Hawk trainers and later teaming stories, not a whole ROK fighter generation. Compare Rheinmetall and Hanwha for the land-systems export boom that BAE watched from a different specialism. Intensity is low; duration is long because the ancestor works are Victorian-to-present.

A nationalised industry that learned to lobby BAE is what remains when a state aircraft industry is privatised, merged, and then asked to live on exports and a US foothold. de Havilland, Avro, Vickers, and the 1977 British Aerospace grouping are the catalogue. Barnes Wallis sits in the Vickers memory more than in the 1999 brand book.

Royal Navy yard politics belong also on the RN page. Marconi electronics plus BAe airframes made a "systems" company in the same decade Lockheed merged in the US. The name is a strategy: stop being only a plane maker. No classified electronics primer belongs here. Al-Yamamah and the SFO investigation are the civic file English readers can actually read. They are political history, not a sales manual.