My father worked for Marconi then GEC just before the BAE Systems merger. He worked extensively on defence equipment there and at other companies.
The engineer's perspective of it is that the MoD is notorious for presenting poorly-written, ever-changing specifications, designing things already exist, ordering off the shelf then making so many mods that they may as well have made new, complaining when this behaviour extends deadlines and inflates costs, and generally behaving in a capricious, difficult and inefficient manner. This commonly has engineers (not necessarily management) bouncing their heads off the wall at the obviousness and the stupidity of it all.
From what I read on this forum this is a familiar situation (right down to the architectural/cranial percussion) to actual military users of this equipment too, which suggests to me that there is something hideously, enormously rotten with the thick layers of bureaucracy and management that exist between designer and end user.
I only know any of this secondhand, but the thing is that the engineer's end of this has apparently been the same since the 1950s when things were, according to old people, not so bad. Has something more subtle changed?