About 20 years ago, I interviewed some Navy weapons scientists who were worried about the then forthcoming BRAC 2005. They warned that the Navy was about to shut down its entire in-house engineering and laboratory network, which provided consistent design guidance and quality control for the branch's ships and weapons, since then CNO Vernon Clark was hellbent on emulating the USAF to cut RDT&E costs to the bone. The USAF had turned all its in-house scientific and engineering functions over to the big contractors like Lockheed and Boeing and practically eliminated its laboratories, thinking that the contractors would be more efficient. In theory, that sounded good, but in reality, the big contractors were corrupt, as were the politicians who influenced procurement, so USAF procurement became a bloated cash cow, with aircraft that took decades to develop with massive costs overruns, or in other words, the F-35.
As it happened, the Navy only eliminated some of its labs during that BRAC, enough to cause the disasters that have been the LCS and USS Ford. So those Navy scientists I talked to were prophets.