General Dynamics Flyer 72 @AUSA...

Thanks to Matt for the pics!

Wow.  GD has really worked on this vehicle made it much much better than it was when it first came out but they're hit with a slow procurement system.

While GD and others were working on candidates for the internally carried vehicle solicitation, the services were all climbing aboard the SOCOM solution of using off the shelf farm/hunting/rec vehicles to fill the role.

Now?

Now these guys are faced with a much cheaper solution being all but formally adopted while they engineered a solution following the system laid out by the Pentagon.

Something is gonna have to give or manufacturers will get to the point of feeling burned. 

This is why the industry/pentagon partnership will not work.  The Pentagon might want to formalize the relationship and make industry more responsive but troops will always gravitate to what works and works now.

The solution is inside the Pentagon itself, not industry.  Requirements writers should be forced to scour the internet to find products that fill a need without having to be "invented" before they make a request to industry.