The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.