Re: This is pointless and silly.
News flash: The DoD does not build their own cars. Or guns. Or rifles. Or uniforms. Or tanks. Or radars. Or ships. Or airplanes.
Never has. Never will.
It's not that they could not, it is that their core mission is to use these things, not build them. These are very different skills, and it doesn't make sense to attempt to create industries internal to the DoD when external ones work just fine.
The main exception is crypto, where, for generations, the DoD was not just the primary consumer of the industry, but had national security reasons to keep EVERYTHING about it in-house.
For a time, computer networks might have just barely fallen into the crypto regime. But ARPANET was contracted out! Moreover, the technology is way too useful broadly, and the DoD just does not have the money (really!) to keep up with the pace of development.
So outsourcing is not a horrible idea. There are some major problems, the main (unique) one being that the requirements for a DoD system are way, way different than for a civilian one. Then, of course, you have the entire ******** that military procurement has always been.
The DoD does make (some) of their own food. If you don't know how that goes, find a veteran and ask.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
