DEFENSE ACQUISITIONTime to Accept Risk in Defense Acquisitions
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth launched enterprising Pentagon reforms that prioritize speed in acquiring new military capabilities, but this ambitious proposal is at risk of running into the same bureaucratic obstacles that have plagued past efforts.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced “a war of bureaucratic attrition” in a speech on Friday afternoon. The target of his address was the Pentagon’s perennially-criticized process for buying and fielding military capabilities. The first weapon in this bureaucratic war is a memo reportedly titled “Transforming the Warfighting Acquisition System to Accelerate Fielding of Capabilities,” based on an early draft the media acquired last week, which directs a sweeping set of reforms across the Pentagon’s entire acquisition system—such as the requirements for new military capabilities and how they are put on contract, tested, and fielded.
The goal is to get the U.S. military new capabilities faster and foster a more competitive defense marketplace, where newer defense companies—such as Anduril and Palantir—as well as start-ups, can flourish alongside traditional defense primes like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. These proposed reforms are long overdue and, generally, reflect bipartisan consensus that the Pentagon’s baroque and antiquated approach to acquiring military technologies should be overhauled.
The big question is whether these reforms will lead to actual change in how the Pentagon buys capabilities for the ground, in the air, at sea, and in space. Professionals across the armed services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense will have to shepherd reforms while also abiding by the rigorous constraints Congress imposes on defense acquisitions. There are decades of inertia and red tape to overcome. Reforms will succeed only if they propel innovation and will fail if they replicate old problems among new defense industry suppliers or undermine testing to verify if new capabilities work.
Built for another era
When the United States maintained an uncontested technological edge, the greatest risks in acquisition were overspending or moving more quickly than the armed services could absorb. Those risks have been eclipsed by a far greater one: falling behind. “We mean to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk,” Hegseth said.
The Pentagon’s acquisition system is not built to meet a moment where rapid technological change in areas like artificial intelligence is shifting the capabilities the United States should acquire. The United States is also increasingly facing down China, which is rapidly producing missiles, fighters, ships, drones, and other military capabilities that appear on par or even superior to those of the United States in some cases.
