Aside from the painfully obvious hyperbole... Having a brand new model of a ship break down during an exercise is the 'best case' scenario for failure. There a

Aside from the painfully obvious hyperbole... Having a brand new model of a ship break down during an exercise is the 'best case' scenario for failure. There are important aspects of this that should be taken into account. First, nobody died. Second, the fault didn't occur during combat. Yes, there are some projects that waste insane amounts of funding with underwhelming results like the Army's 5 billion UCP (Universal Camouflage Pattern) and Air Force's F35 programs. Cases like those usually occur due to personality-driven leadership. Imagine you have an officer with a lifetime of domain-specific knowledge but little/no experience with product development. Give him an objective, a line of funding, and the responsibility to draft a contract to make it happen. This is the usual case. Things can go south for a few reasons. The officers in charge don't reach out for outside feedback/advice, and default to relying solely on the advice of the contractors. Poor assumptions are made or requirements are overlooked, delaying production. The procurement process takes such a ridiculously amount of time that COTS equipment goes obsolete and/or can't be sourced by the time it's required for implementation. To make matters worse, contracting guidelines dictate that projects follow a waterfall design model. The specification process all happens up-front. Lots of bureaucracy, lots of documentation, lots of steps where mistakes and bad assumptions can/will be made on a tight time schedule. There are exceptions to the rule but generally field testing doesn't take place until after launch. People wonder why the military spends billions of dollars training and 'playing war' every year. They do it to iron out the kinks in their equipment, organization, and processes. If the services do their job (which most do very well) they will identify, report, and correct problems before they're put to the test in a wartime environment. In software development terms, prototype with a waterfall and iterate over time. The difference being, on software projects iterations happen on the scale of weeks/months. On military projects, iterations happen on a scale of years (ex 3 or 5). The news will jump on any sign of weakness chanting 'muh taxpayer dollars'; oldschool politicians like McCain will sponge up the public attention calling for 'the good old days of big iron' (aka sitting ducks); and, none of that matters because war changes and the tools of war need to adapt to overcome those changes. All I can say is, I respect the fortitude of the service members who do this type of work. It's truly a miserable, thankless job, fraught with unbelievable obstacles and little support. Source: I used to work on a contract under MARCORSYSCOM, which is basically the product development division of the US Marines.