That how the military gets things done, by having a trained officer corps which can think on a local level and the higher up give general guidelines for how to proceed in different situations.
I could fill pages with complaints and criticisms of the way companies do business, but sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of being the worst way except for all the others
No, because a tech company is all about avoiding work. Tech companies do as little as possible to reach the benchmark and no more.
The military is about "Getting unit X of work done. Period." Whether that work is stupid or irrelevant is not up for debate once it's assigned. The work must get done; it will get done; there is a minimum standard; the cost is now irrelevant."
And that leads towards the extensive investments in training, doctrine, equipment, logistics etc. And so the majority of military employees are not "doing work" in the sense that a tech startup is, where every employee is directly engaged in optimizing the system's value chain - that kind of work occurs only in the core command, around the generals and planners and architects and researchers of the next war. The majority of the work is simply maintenance of the system so that the needed response is possible when called for.
And I believe this examined difference in organizational purpose also applies across a lot of businesses. The value chain is always shifting in surprising ways, but generally in the direction of lower maintenance.