It's not just about patience, there are a lot of guidelines and hurdles to jump through to be eligible for certain contracts. Some of this is for good reason, there have been plenty of cases of contractors bilking the government out of millions with little or no accountability. But it makes the process too complicated for real competition to occur, so perversely although the government turns to the private sector for more competitive prices and cutting edge solutions, it ends up with inferior products.

Also, it's not as though the contractors themselves offer poor compensation. A lot of them actually offer at least market rate, and in some cases higher pay. It's not so easy to figure out how much something is going to cost over the lifetime of a contract. This, combined with the general opacity and bureaucratic hurdles of government contracting makes it so makes it so the government doesn't get the best deal over the lifetime of the contract despite picking what may look to be a good idea at the onset. Of course this is all ignoring political considerations and lobbying issues.

The US Government is the largest corporation in the world, I think the US Defense Department is alone the largest corporation in the world. And none of it is subject to the free market (in many ways for good reason). It's very difficult to do things efficiently at that scale, and its even harder to do it with external political influences of all sorts.