I think you're quite right when you say that too many military personnel are involved in procurement.
I see two possible solutions.
The first would be to increase the number of civilians working on this file. The second would be to push procurement to the private sector, as you say.
This could work up to a certain point, but we couldn't go beyond that because of the risk….
The private sector is looking to make money; that's really their main goal. There should still be an opportunity to intervene; there should be an opportunity to conduct a fairly detailed review of the purchases after the fact. I think it would be worthwhile to do so in certain sectors and in the case of certain acquisitions.
That said, every time there are cuts at the Department of National Defence, they are always applied to the procurement sector.
There aren't enough people working on this file, which is causing a lot of delays.