That's another great question.
The engineer in me splits this procurement system into three portions. The pre-solicitation portion, the solicitation portion, which leads to a contract award, and the contract award and delivery of goods and equipment, in most cases, for us.
With regard to your question, the pre-solicitation is often underestimated because if you want to buy a plane or build a ship, you need the appropriate lead time. You cannot just turn around and expect a ship to be delivered in two or three years. You need the lead time. That lead time is sometimes misappreciated in the pre-solicitation activities.
Within the solicitation activities, sometimes we also underestimate the complexity of the procurement. For instance, in a shipbuilding project, the design phase is significant. It does pay off to take a bit more time in the design phase ahead of signing the big contract to build a ship.
After the contract award, where the strong, rigid accountability should really start, then it's a partnership with industry, and we need to work better with industry. However, that planning phase is also a phase where industry needs to be involved, and to me, we could do that better.
With regard to your exact point, sometimes, yes, projects will sit in a phase where we ask, “What are we doing? Which requirement do we really want?” and we underestimate the time that's going to be required to deliver.