Well,
They've screwed it up in-house, and of course, it'll be even worse outsourced. The only way that's not the case is if the contractor does better vision management and systems design than the customer - and can enforce that, which is exceedingly unlikely - even the customer doesn't understand what the best solution would be here, and who knows their issues better?
A good insight here: "critics object" are not named, but are there any without ties to one of the contractors unlikely to win the bid? Bueller? Anyone? Dontcha love the spin that implies some nameless source with great judgement is calling out some error (but never specifically). It's rare any entity without an agenda gets heard at all these days, outside things like this comment section - and some of the people here have agendas too (I'm not guilt-free myself).
Yeah, putting all your eggs in one basket is often stupid...but if the problem was in large part due to lack of coordination, then many baskets (the way things are) can be worse. This isn't a simple problem..
It's more complex than that wildly successful F-35 program with the trivial logistics issues, right? Oh, wait!
The temptation to allow or deliberately produce lock-in will be overwhelming, and and again, we'll find out who truly has the power here - how'd that attempt to break up Microsoft go, again? Or the breakup of the monolithic AT&T, which after a few years came back as Verizon....we just lost Bell Labs, no big deal, they never did any good, right?
And inevitable, as no one's going to want to take the time for a proper design anyway. As is usual with these things, some existing methodology will be jam fit to the situation, and will be a poor fit - no matter how this eventuates.
Reading this I should have posted as amanfromneptune or something...