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"Chris, Think of it this way. Let's call DoD the Defense Corporation, a massive firm with millions of employees and straphangers and annual sales of about a half trillion dollars. It has major subsidiaries with a very high degree of autonomy, with some small pockets of joint development. The subsidiaries want to do their absolute best to protect their product lines. But the CEO has some pet rocks of his own (e.g. Special Forces) as well as some product lines he wants to pare back, if not shut down in their entirety. But the report to shareholders (the Congress) requires up front marketing (hence the glossy brochure aspect), to which the separate product lines are then appended. By canceling nothing, everybody gets a share of the pie, leaving all free to fight (bureaucratically speaking) another day."
Our Loyal Reader continues, "If the most willful Secretary of Defense since Robert McNamara could not force major changes in defense policy and procurement during a tenure that now stretches over five years, then no one can. Ironically enough, the massive budgetary increases since 2001 (in current dollars, a 41% increase, exclusive of the supplemental allocations for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the GWOT) has ended up keeping everything alive. It's only when the numbers really begin to bite that tougher choices are made. So, GM and Ford have no alternative to downsizing, because people aren't buying what they are trying to sell. DoD gets a pass, because the Congress (for all the obvious reasons) can't bear the thought of saying no, especially in their districts. As George Shultz once observed, `nothing ever gets settled in this town.'"
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