Last year I had the dubious pleasure of working with some junior officers in the Department for Education. They were terribly bright, and generally pleasant people who wanted to see their department make real progress; but they knew f#ck all about what goes on in real schools and did not batt an eyelid when a Minister ordered them to break the Law (suppression of free speech in this case).
Furthermore, they have a set of procedures, to which they probably offer sacrifices in secret. Consequently, they really, really do not like it when you prove to them their procedures have not, and cannot, work. Unless you hand them another procedure which does work and let them pass it off as their own 'development', in which case they quietly let you do what you like. Another option I used was to reverse engineer the formulae in their planning and monitoring spreadsheets. I managed to concoct a set of fanciful numbers which both satisfied their criteria and allowed us to basically do what we liked. Since they have little experience of reality, they accepted them.
This would seem to match Tucumseh's description of MoD/DE&S. One could, looking at the structural elements, suspect this is true of all Government Departments these days.