While I am not the person you are asking this question of, I can personally corroborate their story.
During my enlisted years, I saw plenty of this type of behaviour. Some G.S. or officer would be taken to lunch/dinner by the rep from a major defense contractor; guess which company gets the inside scoop on what the military is looking for? Due to multiple deltas between what I believed to be true and what the military was pushing as truth, I got out and went to work for a company doing web-related work.
A few years later, after I had allowed myself to forget how bad the military was, I took a position with a small defense contractor. This contractor had a couple decades of experience working in a particular field of research and were widely regarded as experts in that field. A few years after I joined the company, a major defense contractor got wind of how successful this company was and decided they wanted the pie for themselves.
First, they regularly took the G.S. in charge of the project out to lunch and the golf course. Then they planted the idea that the military needed fail-over redundancy for such a "mission-critical" position held by the company I worked for. The G.S. then ordered the company I worked for to hand over a copy of all production code to this major defense contractor; after all, the military needed fail-over redundancy for this "mission-critical" position.
It doesn't take too many brain cells to figure out what happened next. So, based on my past experience, I would be very happy with never working anywhere near a government institution again. On the bright side, working so close to government allows you to realize the vast majority of taxes are actually legalized theft.
By the same token, I've been told that unless you have an "inside track" it's a waste of time to respond to a government RFP. 80% of the time, maybe more, they already know who they're going to give the work to. The RFP is just a formality.
I agree with that. Some buyers even have the nerve to call to inquire "how we do things?" just to turn around and tell it to our competitors (their friends who they were going to pick anyway).
Next thing we know those competitors are implementing things pretty much the way we described to the buyers.
During my enlisted years, I saw plenty of this type of behaviour. Some G.S. or officer would be taken to lunch/dinner by the rep from a major defense contractor; guess which company gets the inside scoop on what the military is looking for? Due to multiple deltas between what I believed to be true and what the military was pushing as truth, I got out and went to work for a company doing web-related work.
A few years later, after I had allowed myself to forget how bad the military was, I took a position with a small defense contractor. This contractor had a couple decades of experience working in a particular field of research and were widely regarded as experts in that field. A few years after I joined the company, a major defense contractor got wind of how successful this company was and decided they wanted the pie for themselves.
First, they regularly took the G.S. in charge of the project out to lunch and the golf course. Then they planted the idea that the military needed fail-over redundancy for such a "mission-critical" position held by the company I worked for. The G.S. then ordered the company I worked for to hand over a copy of all production code to this major defense contractor; after all, the military needed fail-over redundancy for this "mission-critical" position.
It doesn't take too many brain cells to figure out what happened next. So, based on my past experience, I would be very happy with never working anywhere near a government institution again. On the bright side, working so close to government allows you to realize the vast majority of taxes are actually legalized theft.