> “Let's imagine we’re going to build a better war-fighting system,” Schmidt says, outlining what would amount to an enormous overhaul of the most powerful mili

> “Let's imagine we’re going to build a better war-fighting system,” Schmidt says, outlining what would amount to an enormous overhaul of the most powerful military operation on earth. “We would just create a tech company.” ... Independent studies and congressional hearings have found that it can take years for the DOD to select and buy software, which may be outdated by the time it is installed. Schmidt says this is a huge problem for the US, because computerization, software, and networking are poised to revolutionize warfare. I'm not sure if "tech company" is the right model for weapons systems. Tech companies are often terrible at support and reliability. The military needs rugged and reliable systems with long service lives, and tech companies aren't know for that. They are known for taking shortcuts on QA, releasing with bugs and fixing them in a later release (if at all), not supporting products for more than a few years, etc. Also, I'm not sure how military software can be "outdated," except compared to rival militaries. It's specialized stuff, and can be state of the art even it's written in Ada. > Schmidt says, because of procurement rules that forbid the Pentagon from handing out money without going through careful but overly lengthy review processes. The process can definitely be changed, but I feel like this is probably complaining about the tradeoffs. Isn't the current process designed to minimize corruption/maximize fairness (e.g. anyone has a fair shot if they can meet the requirements)? If you reduce the reviews, I bet there will be far more complaints of large contracts going to well-connected cronies.