thoughts on ULA

Thoughts on an article in the Air Force magazine
http://www.afa.org/magazine/dec2006/1206watch.asp
about the United Lauch Alliance.

Besides that that name is BS, I ask myself why to keep up the fiction of a private company.
ULA builds for a sole customer, the state, or to be more precise for two of its agencies (NASA, USAF).
I ask myself what NASA does. Why not sell integrate that “ULA” into NASA, let NASA build their own rockets, plus those for the USAF.
But then, with shrinking numbers and diversity of equipment, and also shrinking exports in some sensitive areas, I ask myself if a state owned defense complex wouldn’t be a better solution.

Wouldn’t it be simpler and more straight-forward approach to hand over ULA business to NASA? These are not the 1950’s any more with those rapid technological advances, were you had three competing services maintaining their own respective manufacturing base.
Although I know that they never did it, I think it’s time for NASA do go into manufacturing business instead of that maintaining that “ULA” fiction.