This is not a story of acquisition gone awry,” Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, told Defense One. “This is a story of the requirements process creating so much inertia that the Army couldn't get out of its own way, and it just kept rolling and rolling and rolling.”

And that's where you start to see in the story, things starting to crumble,” Miller said. “As all of us know, as soon as you remove the requirement for airdropability, you're no longer actually helping infantry. You are just as maneuverable as a main battle tank at that point, which means you are less maneuverable.”

And it didn’t come up again until last year, when Fort Campbell prepared to take possession of the final product. Or if it did, perhaps, the amount of work it would take to go back and change the requirements felt insurmountable.

“There is a monster of inertia,” Miller said. “No one wants to stop anything at that point, or certainly go back and re-look, because if you make any edits to the requirement, you have to restart the process.”