About the military, from my limited experience, they are significantly behind the civilian state of the art, except for technology that has has few applications outside of the military, like stealth.
In fact everything secret tends to be behind. Secrecy is a huge burden, and seriously limits all forms of collaboration.
In addition, because military projects are often big and highly politicized you get all the inefficiencies that goes with that. Classification is also convenient for hiding screwups and corruption.
I spent a dozen years as a US defense contractor across a broad spectrum of places (from R&D for the future to working with E3's today), and worked at internet scale and start-up B2B stuff in the other dozen years of my working career.
I think that the major difference about deployed military technologies- in contrast to both military R&D and the entire commercial side- is that they are, by and large, incredibly rock solid and reliable. If they aren't, they don't actually get used. It takes a lot of effort to get them that way. I remember once at a testing ground for our robot tanks of the far future, right next door was an outdoor test-track. And they were testing a kitchen trailer (a kitchen for ~200 men that can be towed by a Humvee). And they drove it around the track continuously for three weeks, stopping only long enough to change drivers/vehicles, and the four times a day they would halt and make 200 people meals, and then pack up and get back to driving. This was one of several reliability tests that the kitchen trailer had to get through before it was accepted for service.
Our R&D stuff couldn't handle that (it needed 3-4 engineers to carefully monitor it at all times), but the stuff that needed to be in the hands of some random 18 year old with a two week training course had to be rock solid to use, do regular maintenance on, and fix, even when they were only getting four hours of sleep a night. If it wasn't up to that level, then the troops ended up ignoring it, leaving it behind when they went out to do their job. And by and large, from what I could tell, most of the stuff they had was that reliable. There were some cool things that we were doing in the R&D space, but we were a long way from that level.
One thing I meant to add: this extensive testing- and the enormous amount of documentation/training materials necessary to take an 18 year old with average ASVAB scores and produce someone who can cook meals for 200 other soldiers on four hours of sleep a night- is both why military things cost so much, relative to commercial grade stuff, and why they don't get updated particularly often. Frequent software updates that change menus around play havoc with the detailed training powerpoints that the military relies on to produce those 18 year old tool operators.
Secret Squirrel projects (which I was near but never read into) can get away with lower reliability because they can count on the users to be much better trained and prepared, though again, from my brief encounters with these sorts, they will ignore anything they don't trust to be completely reliable. Reliability matters far more than cutting edge for like 99.9% of military gear.
The funny thing is when you have that spill over to civilians who then take it to 11.
Case in point: firearms. The standard-issue M4A1 is actually pretty good on that front already, but for civilian ARs, there's a whole cottage industry around making improved components that can handle even more abuse.
Knives, as well. Your average military field knife is something like 80 years behind the curve on materials, especially steel. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's "good enough" (given what they're realistically used for) and cheap at that. But civilians can and do drop 10x money for knives that you can baton wood with and still have a shave after, even though there's no practical use for that kind of thing.
> drop 10x money for knives that you can baton wood with and still have a shave after, even though there's no practical use for that kind of thing.
Excuse you, I just came back from a 6 month backpacking trip where I had to split my own kindling along the way AND shave regularly and I didn't have weight for a knife/axe AND razor blade
/s
> a 318-page report [...] said the SAIC software was incomplete, inadequate and so poorly designed that it would be essentially unusable under real-world conditions. Even in rudimentary tests, the system did not comply with basic requirements
I figured the reason Palantir was so successful was because it was a SV software company instead of a defense contractor dabbling in IT or specialized government consultancy.
The military doesn't have the luxury of things being unreliable. It puts a pressure on them that corporations don't necessarily have: they'd rather have a less-effective but proven system than a potentially-more-effective but riskier system (especially since each system they have comes with massive logistics support).
Ironically, corporations can afford to take more risks of failure (financially and project-wise) than militaries because failure for them doesn't mean actual human death (and when it can, you see processes come in that look a lot more like military processes).
It's actually the commercial/consumer side that gets more reliability than the military side.
The military should have very reliable systems, and they often know the point at which their systems will fail (MTBF calculations are easier to develop with their record keeping). However, the military also has an almost unlimited budget and body count to keep just reliable enough things working much better than they should. It's also really bad about actually competing companies against each other.
The commercial sector, targeting consumers, is where you actually get reliable systems. Why? Because consumers will go towards either the cheapest option (reliability is replaced with ubiquity in the market, it's replaceable) or the more reliable but more expensive options. They (individuals) don't have an unlimited budget or unlimited time to maintain everything in their life. There's competition in the commercial world that's completely absent in the military world
The two major exceptions are where COTS products have taken over (definitionally, DOD is using commercial, often consumer-targeted, products instead of military specific products) and special forces. Special forces often bypasses normal acquisitions processes and so ends up having a better chance to compete vendors against each other than other parts of the military.
This doesn't mean everything the DOD procures through normal acquisitions is inherently unreliable, but reliability is only one of many factors and often only really discovered after selection and full-rate production has started. By that point, the DOD is committed to it for years to come. Each DOD procurement is separate enough from others that you don't even get huge opportunities for reuse. The F-35, to pick something from this century, didn't get components that were shared with other aircraft in the DOD fleet. It's almost all new, which means a lot of things were learned about its reliability after it started flying. It has new comms, new radar, new almost everything. Even the engine (though that probably used many subcomponents shared with other engines) was a new engine just used by the F-35.
Post Cold War, most militaries shifted to COTS and less boutique development. Turns out, you only need to put resources in a few places to stay ahead (stealth, sensing and measuring, space, hypersonics, drones, etc).
In fact everything secret tends to be behind. Secrecy is a huge burden, and seriously limits all forms of collaboration.
In addition, because military projects are often big and highly politicized you get all the inefficiencies that goes with that. Classification is also convenient for hiding screwups and corruption.