Our "leaders" and civil servants have no understanding of engineering and technology
The fundamental issues is that our political leaders and most of the civil service have no idea when it comes to technology and engineering, and a disdain for those who do. The results is that the decision makers on engineering projects lack the ability to separate truth from sales BS, or to negotiable deliverable specifications. At best they are misled, at worse, in their ignorance they push for things that are just not viable.
With ESN, we have AirWave, as system incorporating from day-one specialist function (e.g. push-to-talk), using low frequencies to allow full coverage, and designed for very high availability, being "replaced" with a "service" built on top of a commercial phone system. The commercial system is designed to maximize profit from the infrastructure investment of mobile carriers, lacks push-to-talk (which is hard to retrofit), and uses high frequencies designed to maximize bandwidth at the expense of coverage.
Throwing money at the problem, and sticking their head in the sand, will not fix these fundamental issues, yet no-one will admit it is doomed.