efficiency problems of the US military can largely be blamed on a few factors: 1) It's absolutely, mind-mindbogglingly huge and it's nearly impossible to track

efficiency problems of the US military can largely be blamed on a few factors: 1) It's absolutely, mind-mindbogglingly huge and it's nearly impossible to track all that's going on in the many, many different areas in any meaningful way. 2) Due to (1) and all the areas it supports, many actual projects are relatively underfunded for what they're expected to produce. 3) Because of (2) and the fact that it's public money, there's a lot of focus when going a few steps above the working level to make things efficient, remove redundancy, push for more collaboration, get more bang for your buck, etc. This often creates scope creep as things support more than what they can handle [see (2) now getting worse for maybe a little more money being added to the program] and are now expected to deliver the single solution to a multifaceted problem. 4) Because of (3) the program now has a lot more hands (people) who contribute to or rely on the outcome. This also starts to grind things to a halt as the program becomes more difficult and laborious to manage given all the new moving parts, people involved, and inevitable demonstrations and experiments to support. The best way to be efficient in the US military, is to stay small as long as possible. To carve out some area that no one else is going to touch (so you don't get merged or lose funding) and make that 'your lane'. This adds to the challenge in (2), which leads to (3)...i guess if maybe we weren't so aggressive with (3) we wouldn't have as much challenge with (2) after some time for things to settle. That said, (3) is inevitable because of (1).