From Irv Blickstein, RealClearDefense: “For the Department of Defense (DoD) the bulk of acquisition regulations derive from procurement and acquisition laws enacted by Congress. From the Packard Commission in the mid-1980s to the Goldwater-Nichols Act in the late 1980s, the acquisition reform initiatives in the 1990s to the Weapons Systems Reform Act of 2009, new institutions, bureaucracies, and regulations were instituted. In 2016, after the military service chiefs testified that they were not a part of the acquisition system, the Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that gave those positions limited but powerful voices in the process.”
From H.R. McMaster, Small Wars Journal: “Many of the recent difficulties we encountered in strategic decision-making, operational planning, and force development have stemmed, at least in part, from the neglect of history and continuities in the nature of war, especially war's political and human dimensions. To compound the difficulties we encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq, we may be missing an opportunity to learn from those experiences. That is because four fallacies about future war have become widely accepted; these fallacies promise that future war will be fundamentally different from those that have gone before it.”