“To big to fail” means “to many people on the gravy train to keep it going”.
Someone needs to teach the Defense department project management skills. Kill it if it needs to be killed, and move on.
The Russians are fielding tanks, helicopters, and fighters two or even more generations ahead of what we have, and the money keeps going into a fighter than is pretty hard on the pilots.
I don’t think people in this country understand what project management really is. I have not seen very many good projects since the 50s and maybe the 60s.
I can tell you what it is not. It is not endless Gant charts stewed in minutiae, endless meetings over very little, hoardes of people who have nothing to do with product, teams without managers and supervisors, lack of accountability with consequence, shape shifting of objectives. It is project leaders brave enough to declare ongoing failure, stop it and stop the bleeding and realign and retool for success. There are some things that are mutually exclusive in nature and some things that just can’t be done now. The jokes about bureaucrats and politicians being so stupid to declare they will repeal the laws of physics are not fairy tales.
How did General Groves build the Pentagon in the blink of an eye and then go execute the Manhattan Project? It was not just money being thown at the problem. It was something we don’t seem to have much of these days and that is not politically correct determined leadership. We have corrupted the meaning of leadership to the point it is unrecognizable.