At the end of the day, most work done by technical teams within Defense Agencies is implementation, and the R&D related work is done by specific vendors or very autonomous labs (either National Labs or a specific PI at a University)
This is how it works at the Fed just like any other corporation, as well as with any other peer country.
While there are internal R&D projects, most agencies aren't having their engineers design and productionize bespoke environments from scratch - they're implementing existing tooling and buying it off the shelf.
For example, if you want an internal cloud platform, you'll just use Azure GovCloud. If you want to spin up a K8s cluster, you'll spin up an AKS cluster. Want to protect your cluster? You'll just purchase an off the shelf CNAPP.
For defense, R&D is important, but that isn't the DoD's forte and distracts from it's core mission, which is why they offload innovation to the private sector. Even the USSR did this to a certain extent by the 1970s by supporting defense corporations like Mikoyan and Sukhoi that basically operated as state owned corporations that competed with each other.
The issue is the amount of suppliers in the US has shrunk dramatically since the 1990s due to the compliance overhead and requirements such as a single platform DoD wide (a major reason for F35 cost overruns).
On top of that, any fundamental research requires a significant amount of paperwork to justify funding and sets limits on salaries for PIs and Postdocs that are significantly lower than market rate.
Basically, American private industry has largely been divorced from the MIC, and aside from a handful of major enterprises, there isn't an incentive to enter the procurement space. We've accidentally remade the entire 70s-80s Soviet procurement system in the US today.
There are some changes happening in Software and Satellite procurement, but not as much in other sectors like Avionics.
They aren't a significant portion of the DoD R&D infra.
Most FFRDCs and UARCs are staffed by civilians employed concurrently with a regional University or Industry Vendor, and these labs in turn are PPPs often operated by a private sector firm like Lockheed or a university like UCB.
On top of that, the bulk of the budget goes to funding research done outside of FFRDCs and UARCs via programs like DARPA, grants from the DCTO S&T, SBIR/STTR, etc
This fusion of university research, private sector research, and some limited in-house research is what's called Civil-Military Fusion.
The issue is the private sector portion has increasingly been divorced from the private sector, as up and coming private sector opportunities or promising startups don't have an easy on-ramp into the existing defense procurement or research infrastructure, and grantwriting+compliance overheads plus limited grant funding dissuade most companies aside from your Charles River Analytics types from going thru the hurdles.
That has nothing to do with it. You responded to a comment saying "X makes it hard for the DoD to hire people" by saying "X doesn't affect procurement". If you actually realized they were talking about hiring, what you should have said is "they never have to hire anyone so the difficulty with hiring you are talking about is not relevant".
