For the requirements, these are written by an office in the military with say a dozen people in it. They will each serve in there for two to ten years then move

For the requirements, these are written by an office in the military with say a dozen people in it. They will each serve in there for two to ten years then move to someplace completely different. None of them will be experts in radio design. They are going to listen to what their "customers" want, which will be an incrementally better version of what they already have. They are going to listen to what radio salesmen want to sell them. They are going to listen to what some futurist tells them is possible. And then they will write a specification. The resulting spec may or may not be possible to implement. It may have pairs of requirements which require great cost to implement both, where the sane thing to do would be to relax one slightly, but the spec is cast in stone and that will not happen. It may have specs which could be vastly improved at small cost, but that also will probably not happen. In industry, ideally, there would be a series of give-and-take rounds between marketing, the product designers, the engineers, and manufacturing which will find the efficient solutions to the conflicts and identify cost effective enhancements. This can't happen in military procurement because to engage in a design process with a company or companies would be unfair to the other bidders. They might engage a company to help them write the requirements, but it would be one which does not bid on the final contract and does not enable the iterative design cycle. As a procurement system, it can fail spectacularly and is almost guaranteed to preclude optimum solutions, but it also deters cronyism and snake oil peddlers. If it seems like it always fails, remember that you never hear of the contracts which come in on time, on budget, and deliver a usable product.