That's a very interesting question. My pet theory is that it has to do with outsourcing and the widespread belief in the private market that software developme

That's a very interesting question. My pet theory is that it has to do with outsourcing and the widespread belief in the private market that software development is a product just like any other that you buy on the market. When your average intelligence agency has a million dollars to spend on a project, it will keep a house full of smart people and tell to forth and create, paying their bills and keeping their backs. We might call this the academic model, if it wasn't so far from how academia works today. When a civilian government agency (or any large private entity for that matter as they are completely similar in this regard) have a million dollars to spend on a project they immediately start phoning the big boys: We've got a million to spend on this project, can do do it? It is all a bit exaggerated of course, but in this made up example one will get a working, if perhaps shoddy product, and one will get a server filled with very important powerpoints while the product itself tends to be late and slow. Or to put things in a simpler way and less of a rant: I suspect it is a lot easier to spend a million dollars on a highly specialized system, than to do the same on a very generic system anyone could build. The corollary is that the same intelligence agency would fail in the same way a private or civilian organization would when implementing a new payroll system.