In 1947, the “Bible” of the nation’s military contractors—Armed Forces Procurement Regulation—was a slim volume of about 100 to 125 pages long. Today, the A.F.P.R., which governs in minute detail all those who do business with the Pentagon, has expanded to four huge volumes totaling something like 1,200 pages, with new ones added daily.
[In the 1950s, it took] four to five months to execute a contract from the time of an acceptable price quotation was received in the Pentagon to the time the contractor received the final document. Today, the same contractor estimates that an average of nine to twelve month is needed for the same process.
That was from the Jan. 1965 article “Slow-Down in the Pentagon” by Hanson W. Baldwin, Foreign Affairs. The Federal Acquisition Regulation is over 2,000 pages, and the defense supplement to the FAR is over 1,000. I don’t think that gets at the whole thing, since the FAR often references other regulations which then have data item descriptions, implementation guides, and reporting formats. As for time to contract, it can take 2 years from RFP to award, though innovation hubs are pushing to get the window down to something like 30-90 days.
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