I clicked on this curious as to whether I had worked on any of these. And yep. 3 of them -- 3 out of the top 4 worst in the Americas. The DoD has some successes though.
But there is a profession dedicated to preventing these kinds of failures: Systems Administrators.<p>Proper infrastructure engineers (or "site reliability engineers" as google now calls them) are key for helping architect highly available systems like this; Yet the trend seems to be forcing software engineers follow tutorials from google on setting up key pieces of infrastructure nowadays.<p><i>Edit:</i> it's ettiquite to say why you're going to downvote someone, if what I said wasn't relevant please let me know.
I believe that these complex multi-billion $ projects fail for 2 reasons :<p>- corruption : "let's milk the customer for all they have"<p>- personal ambition : "let's choose what's best for my career instead of what's best for the project"<p>Unless we radically change the way we do things the IEEE will need bigger and bigger green circles on their charts.