What I'm talking about is social and economic forces acting pretty much out of anyone's control. The people that work with them are compartmentalized and isolated, and they are small cogs in big machines. And of course, there are inter-service rivalries, personal and corporate agendas that people feel compelled to further because their salaries are paid, and careers evaluated, by someone else. The behavior of large organizations often favors the survival of the organizations themselves, not the needs of the society that created them. And the people who work there cannot ignore these forces. Very often they have no choice but to do things that they know are stupid, or wrong, because that's their job.

I'll give you an example from the other sides's point of view, perhaps that might be ideologically more acceptable to you.

When the USA started developing supersonic bombers, like the B70 Valkyrie, the USSR realized it needed a counter to them. The MIG 25 Foxbat was the result. A big, expensive plane that could fly very high and very fast and shoot them down. The plane never did work out, it had the performance, but it had technical problems and was difficult to integrate into the USSRs air defense system effectively. But the decision was made to build them anyway. People's careers were dependent on this weapon system. A massive infrastructure to support it was coming on line.

Then the Americans canceled the B70 program, and their other supersonic bomber, the B1 Lancer, was reconfigured into a different role as a low altitude, subsonic, terrain following penetrator. Our operational supersonic strategic bomber, the B58 Hustler, was decommissioned. Suddenly, the Russian Foxbat became a plane without a mission. It had no targets to shoot at.

Unfortunately, the Foxbat still had a constituency. Factories had been built to produce it, crews trained to maintain and operate it, special bases built to fly it from. A lot of promises had been made and money and resources had been lavished on its development, and other, important systems starved to rush it into production. They couldn't just cancel it! So the Russians continued cranking them out, while attempting to hastily shoehorn them into other ludicrous missions, like long range naval reconnaissance, air superiority fighter, and selling them to their allies, like the Iraqis, who were too dumb to know they didn't need them and couldn't use them. And of course, the Foxbat was such a technical triumph, the Comrade Generals just couldn't bear to part with it. Who says warriors don't have a sentimental side?

Economic and political, and even personal factors tend to overshadow purely military decisions. The idea of using submarine launched ballistic missiles to knock out Russian air defense sites so our bombers could get to their targets
came from two separate sources: the US Air Force was afraid that their bombers were becoming obsolete because of improvements in Soviet air defenses, and the US Navy was fishing for major upgrades to the sub force. The solution, to work together so they could both keep their funding. The idea that the submarines could have knocked out the targets the bombers were aiming at was conveniently forgotten. I guess you could call it inter-service cooperation! And the idea of using our last line of defense, our most secure weapons (SLBMs) in the opening stages of a war, instead of at the end, which as you pointed out makes the most sense, took a back seat to other, more administrative concerns. Fortunately, this idea was never implemented, but the fact it was even considered is a sobering thought.

This is not an ideological comment. It is a meditation on the behavior of all large organizations and the careerists that toil in them, and my examples have been military ones, from the US, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. It has nothing to do with my political preferences, it has to do with the annoying propensity of military men (as well as politicians, government bureaucrats, technical management and business executives) to sometimes pick their careers over their duty. Or perhaps I could be more charitable and simply say their stake in the program may tend to subconsciously color their judgement.

Or I could bring up how a company I worked for managed to successfully lobby the Reagan administration for permission to declassify and get export licenses to sell the Red Chinese some highly sensitive remote sensing technology with numerous military and intelligence applications.

Strangelove was a comedy. The real world can be a farce.