The genius of our World War II procurement was the ability to produce large quantities of weapons that were rugged and reliable, not necessarily innovative.
Consider the M-4 Sherman tank. Vastly inferior to the German Panther and Tiger; outgunned and under-armored. In battles with Panzer units, a standard tatic was for some Shermans to take on the German tanks while some of their colleagues tried to maneuver around for a shot at the Germans from behind, where their armor was thinner. The Sherman also had a nasty habit of catching fire after being hit (but to be fair, so did a lot of other tanks). Many British crews nicknamed their M-4 “Ronsons,” after the cigarette lighter that lights “first time, every time.”
There are other examples as well. Initially, the “solution” to our bomber losses in Europe was supposed to be something called the P-75 fighter, an ungainly looking contraption with contra-rotating propellers. While dubbed a wonder plane, it was no better than the existing aircraft it was designed to replace. Fortunately, someone had the good sense to cancel the P-75, after someone else hit on the idea of putting a Merlin engine in the P-51.
The procurement whizzes also stuck with inferior (and defective) torpedo designs far too long, resulting in the loss of some U.S. submarines and their crews. On the surface, our Liberty ships suffered problems in design and construction; a few simply broke in two under rough conditions. About 30% of the remaining ships had severe cracking problems, a result of their rapid assenbly and the lower-grade steel used in their modular sections.
The biggest problem with military procurement today is that weapons systems are extremely complex, and the armed services keep making design changes in the R&D process. Those factors result in long lead times and billions in cost overruns. These problems are further exacerbated by our desire to create revolutionary, versus evolutionary systems. But revolutionary has its advantages; the advent of stealth aircraft made billions of dollars in air defense weaponry obsolete.
Going back to the WWII model might give us cheaper systems (and more of them), but at a price, namely a reduction in our technical superiority. With today’s under-sized military forces (compared to the Second World War), it’s an advantage we can’t afford to lose.
You know why the Sherman would light so easy right? It ran on gasoline
That's a very good point. The revolutionary approach does carry the risks of cost overruns and subsidizing artistes with engineering degrees, but the mother lode is a weapons system that's so new, no enemy has any idea on how to defeat it.
It's pretty obvious that the revolutionary approach grew in the wake of the atom bomb, which was such a weapon. Very expensive to develop, took a long time and a lot of manpower to deploy, but it was scary enough to force a quick unconditional surrender from the Japanese Empire.
Unfortunately, many expensive and high-tech weapons systems are designed by clever people who don't see how such systems can be defeated in the field by using surprisingly ordinary means. If the Pentagon's adavanced-weapons department were wise, they'd contact hard-headed gadget-heads like the ones found in the Sipsey Street Irregulars and here. Then: swear the group to lifetime secrecy; give them limited top-secret clearances; show them the hot new hi-tech weapons designs; and then, ask them how those revolutionary weapons systems can be taken down by ordinary gadgets. Doing so would weed out the too-clever-by-half designs that can be thwarted by good old-fashioned mechanical aptitude.
Not to mention: a secret consulting group meeting in secret is far less visible than the inevitable field-testing.
Blame Lesley J. McNair, he obstructed the building and deployment of the M26 Pershing, because of his views on Tank Destroyers and anti-tank doctrine.
The procurement whizzes also stuck with inferior (and defective) torpedo designs far too long, resulting in the loss of some U.S. submarines and their crews.
It is worse than that, the factory and their friends in Congress threw up multiple road blocks in fixing the problems and getting good torpedeos. Every procurment flaw you can think of occured in that fiasco.