HOW LONG?

It took this allegedly smart guy over 3 years to learn that the Department of Defense has acquisition labs with senior staffs made up of the biggest/baddest rice bowl protecting people ever and that they will never give up their software engineers even if Alec Baldwin pointed a gun at them and those little critters write the code on their schedule, their timelines, their terms and when they feel like it and oh, go get them a sammich. I remember peering down that particular muzzle wondering why our graphical data fusion system was kluge and could not adapt to new hardware instead insisting that we buy the last 12 microsoft windows 85 compatible 10 year old laptops on the planet by making a special plea to the Irish owners and paying roughly 20 times the going rate for brand new laptops.... It had reached the point in DOD, even 20 years ago, that the only way weapon system acquisitions could or would change is if one sent in Alec Baldwin with an awful lot of ammunition.