Let me tell you a story.

I'm coming at this from the technical publications side of things, but the same story is true for literally everything in MIL-STD acquisitions / procurement.

Let's say I'm a single-digit-headcount business and I have an amazing cupholder for the US Army. It's absolutely bulletproof, it fits all their vehicles, it's got a printed circuit thing in it that does all sorts of stuff, and it's maintenance-free (only needing to be tossed into the return bin when it goes bad).

I go to sell it to the army.

"But wait!" they say. "You need to provide MIL-STD-3031 documentation!".

OK. Where do I learn how to make documents in 3031 format?

"Ah, here is the standard implementation from LDAC. Pretty sweet, huh? Off you go!"

I page through 3031's LDAC implementation, and, lo-and-behold, the only spec files are for PTC Styler, an inordinately priced (and terrible) piece of software.

"Just add it to the contract!" says the Army. My LRIP charges go up by almost double, and now I have an entirely separate doc toolchain that needs to be sustained basically forever.

I float a review of the documentation, but it finds its way beyond the Procurement guys to the actual Program Office. The Program Office says, "3031?! No one uses 3031. It's faggy Euro S1000D crap. Use 38784 (MIL-STD-38784)."

38784 comes from where? "Oh, call these guys. Five Old Ex-Officers, Incorporated. They'll set you straight. Add 'em to the contract. They'll know how to do it. They're old buddies."

But wait, I say. What about 3031?

"Oh, just do a 3031 release for the requirement, and do rev service in 38784."

Needless to say, Five Old Ex Officers has me on a whole different toolchain, with no overlap whatsoever. The 3031 toolchain is running parallel. Needless to say, neither of these doc formats is parseable by any software written in the last two decades.

Do you want to know the running tab for documentation on this goddamn cupholder, before a single document has been put to paper? Assuming one writer and two reviewers, we're up to more than 150k annually, just for license costs and basic "maintenance" (which you can't opt out of - that's in the spec too)- not including styler, initialization, or whatever else, which will also include paying to bring a vendor team on-prem because you can't do cloud anything (due to ITAR and other requirements).

That's going to be, over five years, well over a million dollars. A million dollar cupholder manual - not even including the charges for doing any of the actual work (charges which will, themselves, be inflated because of the toolchain idiocy).

Now, repeat this for literally everything in the US Military.

Yeah.

These shenanigans need the world's biggest sledgehammer, yesterday, because I guarantee the PLAN doesn't do this bullshit. They need a manual, they find the best way to do a manual for the mission. You screw with that, you get re-educated.

Of course, "mission" is a big part of our problem here - the damage done to procurement over the period of the aughts was awesome, and can't be overstated. The GWOT was a farce. The Obama-era "drone war" was horribly counterproductive. The fact that we had only "acting" executive leadership from 2016-2020 didn't help things either; there are a lot of things that "Acting" SecDefs can't sign off on or force. Anyway. It's nothing a determined polity can't overcome. It all depends on how "determined" we want to be. I suspect that, as with 1941, "determination" will be fueled by dead and dying sailors in far off ports.