Oligopolies are a universal phenomenon in military manufacturing as only massive enterprises have the scale to deliver to the requirements - so this is unlikely to be the cause of the ills described in the article.

The most significant problem might be - counterintuitively - the guaranteed and consistent over budgeting. Imagine if every year your company's IT budget inflated by 100%, regardless of what you spent it on, or what the actual business requirement was. You're going to end up searching for ways to spend the money, over paying for overly complicated products and pursuing all sorts of boondoggles which clutter the strategic vision. The guaranteed budgetary increases destroys budgetary discipline and corrupts the entire system and its products.

Given that its politically impossible to cut the budget, the US military is in a bind of its making, with the only way out might perversely be to actually to start a war(s) in order to raise expenditure against this guaranteed income