> What I'm arguing is that, in order to effectively outsource, one must get good at the so-referred training and integration costs, while hedging against logistics issues
I think by now we have demonstrated that this is false, no? In the 1960s, it was a popular idea (especially among managers) to assume that a company can have a core competency of "management" rather than making products or services. If true, such a core competency would mean
1) You can take a great manager at an Ice Cream making company and move him over to an Aerospace company and he'd still be a great manager.
2) Rather than being facilitators who helped to coordinate talented people, managers had their own talent at "managing" and so you can pay them the kind of superstar wages that were previously paid to superstar performers.
3) The above two skills could be efficiently measured and identified to allow scaling them to a large organization.
This idea was obviously very popular, and so a business structure called the "conglomerate" arose where one huge company would buy and own many different smaller companies all with completely different product lines, because the competitive advantage of the conglomerate was viewed to be "managing" rather than producing, and thus the superior managers would improve margins at pretty much anything they were put in charge of.
But unfortunately what ended up happening was that the conglomerates underperformed. There are still some conglomerate hold outs, like Berkshire Hathaway, but everyone knows that this is because of Buffet's investment acumen, not because Berkshire has a stable of excellent managers. Perhaps there is such a thing as pure "management" skill, rather than say, "Engineering Management", but if such a skill exists, it's sufficiently difficult to measure and/or replicate from one product area to another that none of the businesses who thought they had this skill as a core competency actually had it. This remains the case today -- there are many well managed companies, and many talented managers, but 'management' has never been and cannot be a core competency of any firm.
So this idea that Boeing can shed its core competency from building planes and replace it with a "coordination" core competency is a rehash of the conglomerate dream with the same disastrous outcomes, and many people who saw what Boeing was doing knew exactly what this would lead to.