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Notes -
I'd generally agree with this, with a nod to history as well. When countries start to mobilize their military industrial bases for war / ramp up, the general balance of 'cost vs speed vs quality' gets upended. You are lucky to consistently get one and sometimes two of those inn peacetime, but then it's fortunate to get even one as the money race begins. Between corruption, inexperience, and incompetence amongst all the new blood chasing the new money, process quality often goes down.
This is normal, and predictable, and possibly even unavoidable in same way that accidents happen if you bring enough teenage boys and girls together without sufficient supervision. You can find tales of procurement corruption in American history (feel free to laugh at the American Civil War), the most militarized police states (see the Nazi war econnomy), and state-command economies (see China metal production in the great leap forward period... and quality scandals over the last few decades). None of this predictability makes it a non-issue or 'acceptable,' but it's not exactly uniquely ruinous, or unique in any real sense.
But really, one of the nice things about a relatively free media ecosystem is how such media environments provide almost free quality-control prods for public awareness. It's rarely the countries with easily pointable corruption scandals that do worse, despite having more stories. It's the countries where the corruption scandals are rarer because the corruption isn't brought to light, or even crime against the state actors to do so.
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