I agree they know "little" about firearms. Don't confuse "armed forces" with the political machine that (mis)appropriates funding for weapons systems after the equipment in the field has far exceeded its useful duty life cycle. It's a political boondoggle and we know it.
I'm not "confusing" anything. I've worked on government projects for most of my 35 years in engineering, including one-of-a-kind land mine finding equipment.
The entire government acquisition process is convoluted and expensive specifically because of the rules put into place by Congress to avoid conflict of interest in the purchasing process.
Congress doesn't decide how the money is going to be spent by the armed forces or any other department. Departments have budgets approved by Congress, and then there are other projects that are outside of the budget and become line items in the federal budget.
I've worked on both kinds of projects. The last one I worked on was a $253M DOE project that was a congressional line item in the federal budget.
Really, I have a fairly intimate understanding of how things get purchased by the federal government. If the Army has decided they need a new handgun - that's their decision and they have to sell it to a whole host of people before it gets to the Secretary of the Army, several Assistant Secretaries of Defense, and then the Secretary of Defense.
All of that happens BEFORE Congress appropriates money for the US Army. It's not up to Congress to second guess all of the people in the chain of command who've made the recommendation to fund a specific purchase.
If the Army has made its case, and fits the acquisition into their budget - then it's not up to Congress to pull a specific project out of the budget and redirect the money.
It's not like somebody in the Army gets a wild hair and decides to buy something, and then Congress "misappropriates" the money. There's a whole lengthy process before any money is dedicated to a purchase.
If the money is part of the appropriations for the Army as part of their budget - then that's how the ARMY has decided to spend the money appropriated for their budget.
An acquisition is a drawn out process on purpose, and for numerous reasons.
The Army has nothing to do with HOW things get purchased, they can only follow federal laws and the mandated acquisition process.
The DOE project I worked on took 10 years from conception to completion. The cost escalation alone over that time period accounted for the project costing at least 20% more than the cost analysis in the first report submitted to the DOE for review.
They've been trying to build the Chemical and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) facility at Los Alamos National Laboratories since 1989. The original cost proposal was a mere $88 million. The last budget I saw had the cost approaching $5 billion...
The new pistol isn't going to get any cheaper by waiting or spending the money how Monday Morning Quarterbacks think it should be spent.
I'm betting that if you could look at the backup documentation and reports on the purchase, you'd find out they've done a whole lot of work to justify the purchase.
Nobody in a government agency spends that much money without reams of reports and cost analysis that backs up the decision.
You may not agree with any of it...but, that's immaterial as you're not any smarter than they are - and they have the documentation and you don't.
Then, there's the problem of two colors of money: acquisition and operations & maintenance (O&M) within the budget. You can't buy new equipment with O&M money; and you can't do O&M with acquisition money.
Sometimes you have to buy new equipment because that's the money available.
