(sic)As it stands now Lockheed has sold the Pentagon a pile of garbage and the Navy will not have a viable next generation aircraft and will have to start over from scratch. (sic)
Having dealt with government contract work I would say most likely that should read, "The Navy's specifications and constant scope changes have resulted in massive cost overruns and delays resulting in systems that will not meet the envisioned requirements but being built to the letter of the specs"
I was involved in a contract with what was essentially a government agency once. (They claim in big letters on the front page of their website that they were a private company, not a government agency, but the mere fact that they considered that necessary will show you how practically indistinguishable from a government agency they are.)
They hired my company because my company had a stellar reputation for low-cost, high-quality, blazing-fast work, and we have that reputation because of the processes, procedures, motivations, and disciplines we have learned to work under. They needed some stuff done by a completely immovable deadline, and they needed it to work, so they hired us.
Then they immediately began telling us how we would have to do our work, what tools we were allowed to use, and what conditions we would be required to live under: namely, the same methods and tools and conditions that existed in the agency itself that made it impossible for them to get done the job they were hiring us for.
First, we should have known better than to try working for a government agency, but we didn't. Second, when they tried to impose on us the same conditions that made their own people piss-poor at developing software, we should have given them a stark ultimatum, but we didn't. (Money was too good, I suspect, although I have no direct knowledge.) Instead, we clung to the project clear through to its utterly predictable crash-and-burn failure, and then took all the blame for it. (That's one of the main purposes of a consulting company: to take the blame.) So that was a bit of a smudge on our li'l ol' reputation, but at least we got the money, I suppose.
It seemed to me that that ought to have been an irrefutable lesson to my company about working for government agencies, but now I hear we're negotiating a project with a state Department of Taxation.
Sheesh.