Advances in computerized image processing and on-demand fabric printing have not only made camouflage patterns obsolete, but also the entire concept of choosing a camouflage pattern for all military uniforms worldwide.

What quartermasters need is a machine that will take photographs of the local terrain as input, calculate a camouflage pattern from them, and print that pattern on unmarked uniforms. The result would be matched only by a ghillie suit, which takes actual landscape features and physically attaches them to the fabric.

Such a machine would be rejected any day of the week by a council of colonels during peacetime. During actual wartime, captains will somehow fail to notice uniform violations where the approved patterns have been defaced by the very same equipment that civilian hunters had already been using for years on the canvas for their tree stands and duck blinds.

Beware the military-industrial complex indeed. I'd say the sector was ripe for disruption, but disruptors will be shot on sight.

If you want to get the military to buy something that actually works, you have to market it to civilian outdoorsmen and make it commercial off-the-shelf technology. Some soldiers will use it while off duty or after their service contracts expire, and if you get very lucky with the good ol' boy network, someone will quietly process regular small procurements to ensure that you will not go out of business before you get the chance to save America from a land invasion by the Commie Fascist Nation of Scary Bogeymen.

There has always been a huge gulf between wartime military development and peacetime research. Peacetime always produces stuff that looks cool while doing absolutely everything that needed to be done for the last war, plus a boatload of things that might have been useful if that war had dragged on long enough. Wartime development produces stuff that is cheap, ugly, and works well for the current war.

That's how a soldier's kit can end up with silly string from a toy store or laser levels from a hardware store. By the time the army starts issuing that stuff to its units, the enemy had already stopped using tripwires to trigger booby traps. They switched to non-metallic pressure plates that use the physical movement of reactants to detonate an explosive. And so maybe someone breeds special houseflies to be attracted to the detonator chemicals, and then some poor grunt is stuck feeding the bomb-detector maggots in camp.

And you just have to hope the war doesn't end right there, because then that guy will be a professional maggot wrangler for the next 20 years, training flies to do everything from finding terrorists in truck stops to landing only on the poop from generals and admirals.

The inefficiency is built into the system. You absolutely cannot fix it from where you are sitting. You can consider it a form of welfare for veterans, like VA health care, except with fewer suicides. It would be extremely embarrassing for the military to have to admit that they make some people less qualified to hold jobs in the public sector. Whether that is due to the brain damage caused by explosive shockwaves passing through the skull or the brain damage caused by filling out reams of pointless bureaucratic paperwork is immaterial. As long as stories about neglected veterans hit the news, discharged folks will need to be put into safe jobs. And that is how military contracts go billions over budget. That is why none of this crap ever works until after the war actually starts.