But isn't part of the problem that very technical complexity? It seems time and time again that military acquisition projects are completely sunk by technical c

But isn't part of the problem that very technical complexity? It seems time and time again that military acquisition projects are completely sunk by technical complexity that, when you really look at it, seems wholly unnecessary. Consider the famous story of army radio acquisition (e.g. SINCGARS and JTRS) running fantastically over-budget, over-schedule, and still providing poor reliability, all due to extreme complexity, while the Marine Corps has been very successful using off-the-shelf products made for rugged commercial use. In the case of radio systems, are the needs of the military really that different from the needs of e.g. the oil exploration industry and the freight dispatch industry? I believe that a fundamental problem is that the defense-industrial complex intentionally exploits the acquisition process to drive up the complexity of every system to tremendous levels. This looks defensible because it's always easy (e.g. for a politician) to say that the military needs the best cutting-edge equipment, but it also contributes enormously to the profitability of defense contractors. This was a pretty swell strategy for the defense contractors but has turned out bad now that (and 'now' here is like the last 30 years) the complexity of many military systems has been increased beyond the ability of the contractors to actually deliver, even at the enormous agreed-upon prices. But it actually still works out fine, because the DoD, congress, etc. have totally failed to put the brakes on well after the complexity trainwreck has begun. During the Gulf War the Marine Corps went to war with Banyan VINES practically bought out of the local big-box store. Now the AMHS is a fantastically complicated acquisition program that still seems inferior to Isode's "Military XMPP" offering - and then in practice soldiers are using Telegram. DoD tries to push an integration system to relay IMs from one system to another because they can't manage to standardize on any one product anyway. An IRC gateway is still a critical feature because, who knows how many millions of dollars later, IRC is still one of the most usable options available to the warfighter. How much of this complexity is actually necessary, how much of this complexity is just the contractor's salesmanship?