Meh, I dunno: I've done all three points of the triangle (KO, PM, user), and I find the tripod to be one unstable structure. Suckitude of just one leg results in pain. For what it's worth, Army people that do this stuff all come from other branches; I think the Air Force is the only service where you can go right into some kind of acquisition field straight out of Basic Training/OBC. Army type officers have all at least commanded companies, and some were 3s/XOs prior to changing fields. NCOs are all reclasses from something else, as well.
See, what I'd be interested in finding out is what the final spec for your widget looked like in the contract. Let's say your requirement as the user was for the widget to weigh, say, no more than ten pounds, be no more than (note I use "no more than" rather than "MUST be 8.123 pounds like the one we say at the trade show that we liked") a foot tall and a foot wide. You know what room you have to work with, and how much you can carry. You know what you want it to do, and that what you want it to do is in the realm of the possible.
What I'm guessing is that somewhere along the way, your requirement as the user got tweaked by the TRADOC people (assuming you are Army), and extra got added to the requirement, which drove size or weight up. If that's not the case, and the contract for the widget clearly sets thresholds in the design for the production version, then there's a problem that the Government has every right to claim remedy for. The Government doesn't just take it in the shorts if what was asked for isn't what was delivered; I don't know who's telling you that, but they're wrong on that count.
So anyway, the $1M question is: "what was the contractually-explicit specification vice what was delivered"? I know this doesn't help your situation at all (and I really don't know if we carry the same widgets), but it bears asking. If the lowest bidder isn't going to deliver the right item, the contract doesn't get awarded to them. This happens far more often than the reverse, but obviously doesn't sell newspapers were it to be published.
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