It isn't just a Pentagon problem, there are things about the federal bureaucracy that I can understand Trump and Musk's frustration over.
Take the US Postal service procuring new delivery trucks.
The USPS needed 160,000 new greener delivery trucks and, because of the way they deliver mail directly into the mailbox at the bottom of the yard, these all had to be right hand drive rather than the US standard left.
Rather than buying an off the shelf product from Ford, (ie modified UK spec Transits) or other vehicles designed originally for sale in RHD countries instead congress insisted on a unique new design to be built in the US at an initial cost of $6bn (about $60k per vehicle)
If they had just bought something like the Transit costing from $40k per vehicle and have had a choice of fuel types and access to a global pool of spares for many years to come.
How much money was wasted between the initial tender in 2015 and the first vehicles being delivered in 2024? How much could have been saved by buying an off the shelf product that could have been delivered in weeks not years?
It isn't just the US either - how often do we laugh (because it is too painful to cry) at taxpayer money being squandered no matter where our home country is because of the fiddling of politicians trying to get re-elected or line their own pockets somehow.
Terry Pratchett was right, all politicians should be sent to jail as soon as they are elected, as it save time in the long run.