Having been involved on the receiving end of military contracts for the US and Israel I can shed some light on how disasters build from a small cloud on the horizon to a major hurricane.
The news reports make a military contract sound so simple. Headline: “Today, Boeing signed a contract with subcontractors General Dynamics and BAE to produce the new FCS weapons system.” Looks simple, right?
If the process for getting the final product is a line with ten points on it, this is only about point number 5. At each point imagine a mile square plot of land and a hundred people in a group. We cover them with a blanket. The blanket is the contract. Their purpose is to navigate straight across the field and hand the blanket to the next group. But everybody under that blanket wants the blanket to go in a different direction. This is called politics, graft, corruption, and cronyism.
The first point is Congress. Every politician wants the weapon system produced in his district or state. When they are covered by the blanket they struggle to go in that direction. Let’s say the Army wants to go straight across the field. They pull that way. Other companies lobby their Congressmen to make the blanket go towards them.
By the time the blanket goes to one of the sides of the field, (it will never go straight across) things have changed. Inconvenient facts, like this or that subcontractor is connected to, in the Israeli case, Iranian intelligence, are forgotten or covered up.
The next point on the line is moved to wherever the last group got to and the entire project is skewed to accept the new starting point. This happens at every point on the line until something is finally delivered.
The customer wanted a race horse. He gets something with a giraffe’s head, a donkey’s body and elephant feet.
No one along those ten points has the power or the will to correct the problems. All they are empowered to do is take their flawed starting point and get it across their mile of field.