It would be interesting to see the, I'm sure thousands, of requirement and design changes the government specified over the years it took to develop the F-22.
Sure, we can blame the contractor but having worked on developing a couple of ACAT 1 programs over the last ten years it is a surprise anything gets built with the byzantine DoD acquisition program running the show.
DoD Agile development may even be worse if my current experience is any guide.
Concur, and the more bells and whistles an aircraft or weapon systems has, the more time it takes to get prime contractor to get a product to Developmental Test Squadrons so they can shake it down for Spec compliance after the very tight knothole of flight clearance process by an small army of performance monitors. Once it gets through that lengthy "phase", it has to be certified ready for Operational Test and production quality articles given to the Operational Test Squadrons. Meanwhile, this drawn out process creates opportunity for requirements creep and dilemma of technology refresh (after Critical Design Review, configuration is frozen yet by time a system is ready for testing, many times processors inherent in any aircraf tor weapon design are typically obsolete or no longer available).
And adding more complication to the mix, despite numerous attempts to reform the acquisition process, there a myriad of reports and documents that have be churned out to get through the Acquisition Milestones.
That said, author of the article is totally wrong about contractors being motivated to draw out the developmental process to make more profit. The nonrecurring engineering effort to bring an aircraft or weapon system into production rarely, if ever, brings profit to a company. They want to get to production as soon as possible because that is where they make their money. Often times, they invest quite a bit to propose products as well as get a product developed sufficiently to get it through developmental testing and into production.