There was definitely a point (late 90s?) when Microsoft finally figured out how to play the game. Coincided with the antitrust stuff.

To be fair, it's not always out of maliciousness. A lot of gov workers/contractors join the supplier company because they know the product and how to fix it better than the people currently at the company. Similar to the guy who infamously got hired at Apple just to fix a bug.

You're just forced to use vendors and if you actually care about the mission, it's just a different team on the same mission.

Of course you know you're being taken advantage of, and long-term maybe you should have gone to the non-technical side to fight it, but at the end of the day you just want to keep the young boys being shipped off to war safe, and you're much better suited to achieve that by remaining on the technical side.

...or so I've heard.