I think this article does a wonderful job explaining why the military is built the way it is:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/08/the-command-and-co...
If Command and Control is such a bad way to run a team, why does the military use it?
This was explained to me in NCO school. I was in the Israeli paratroopers in 1986. Probably the worst paratrooper they ever had, now that I think back.
There are several standing orders for soldiers. Number one: if you are in a mine field, freeze. Makes sense, right? It was drilled into you repeatedly during basic training. Every once in a while the instructor would shout out “Mine!” and everybody had to freeze just so you would get in the habit.
Standing order number two: when attacked, run towards your attackers while shooting. The shooting makes them take cover so they can’t fire at you. Running towards them causes you to get closer to them, which makes it easier to aim at them, which makes it easier to kill them. This standing order makes a lot of sense, too.
OK, now for the Interview Question. What do you do if you’re in a minefield, and people start shooting at you?
This is not such a hypothetical situation; it’s a really annoying way to get caught in an ambush.
The correct answer, it turns out, is that you ignore the minefield, and run towards the attackers while shooting.
The rationale behind this is that if you freeze, they’ll pick you off one at a time until you’re all dead, but if you charge, only some of you will die by running over mines, so for the greater good, that’s what you have to do.
The trouble is that no rational soldier would charge under such circumstances. Each individual soldier has an enormous incentive to cheat: freeze in place and let the other, more macho soldiers do the charging. It’s sort of like a Prisoners’ Dilemma.
In life or death situations, the military needs to make sure that they can shout orders and soldiers will obey them even if the orders are suicidal. That means soldiers need to be programmed to be obedient in a way which is not really all that important for, say, a software company.
You need a 3 star general's blessing to get computers because the whole military is built around authoritarianism and slavish obedience. It is built on those things because, in war, they are necessary. This has an unfortunate knock-on effect of making every decision take way too long and severely limits the autonomy of everyone in the chain of command, in often ridiculous ways. But if it comes down to being better at developing new tech, and winning a war, the army clearly has priority on the later rather than the former.