We've suffered some of the same crap in the UK. For example, there are 'capital charges' on assets. This encourages the MoD not to sit on things it has no use for, such as prime land in city centres, but it also gives it an incentive to scrap perfectly good equipment if it's not needed at the moment. It's fundamentally incompatible with the need for armed forces which tick along in peacetime but have to ramp up quickly in an emergency, using assets which are lightly, or not at all, used most of the time, & need reserves to allow for wartime losses.
Such systems can fail even in commercial environments, I once saw a case which could have cost my employer at the time millions. It operated a mobile phone network. Hardware would go out of production long before the installed base needed replacement, so there was a sensible policy of buying enough spares just before they went out of production to keep hardware working until it was due for replacement.
One day, I was going home late, & met one of my colleagues also catching a late train, & looking tired & pissed off. He'd just spent hours chasing people up & arguing with them to stop hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of spares being sold as electronic scrap, because they'd been sitting in a warehouse for longer than the stores management turnover targets allowed. That would have meant that tens of millions of pounds of network equipment would have needed early replacement. Doh!
One size fits all management principles can cause problems anywhere that doesn't exactly fit the circumstances they were designed for, & systems designed for a commercial manufacturing environment, like just in time parts delivery, are utterly inappropriate for armed forces.
