Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday laid out a wide-ranging suite of changes to the military’s troubled and sluggish acquisition process, intended to speed up the pace at which the Pentagon buys new weapons and other systems.
“We will rebuild the defense industrial base into a new arsenal of freedom,” Hegseth said in a speech at the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington.
Speaking before defense industry leaders, Hegseth outlined his intention to do away with the existing Defense Acquisition System — the process by which the department acquires and fields new systems — and replace it with a new Warfighting Acquisition System, focusing on moving quickly and addressing threats jointly, across all services.
“We need acquisition and industry to be as strong and fast as our warfighters,” Hegseth said. “The Warfighting Acquisition System will dramatically shorten timelines, improve and expand the defense industrial base, boost competition and empower acquisition officials to take risks and make tradeoffs.”
The new processes, Hegseth said, will be able to get projects done in a year that used to take three to eight years.
Hegseth pledged to move away from a system dominated by a handful of massive prime contractors that he said is “defined by limited competition, vendor lock, cost-plus contracts, stressed budgets and frustrating protests.” Instead, Hegseth touted a defense acquisition model that makes more use of “dynamic” vendors that can produce weapons faster by investing “at a commercial pace” and are able to more quickly scale up production.
“The Department of War will only do business with industry partners that share our priority of speed and volume above all else, who are willing to surge American manufacturing at the speed of ingenuity to deliver rapidly and reliably for our warfighters,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also pledged to eliminate burdensome acquisition regulations that unnecessarily mire weapons systems in excessive studies, testing and reporting requirements.
And he said the Pentagon will award bigger and longer contracts to companies for systems that have proven their worth, so the companies can feel confident enough to invest in their own industrial base.
The Pentagon will also focus on buying commercial solutions first to get systems in the hands of troops faster, Hegseth said, even if it means buying systems that don’t meet every requirement at first and have to be improved.
And the Pentagon will give program leaders more power to steer their programs, move money and quickly adjust performance priorities to get systems delivered on time and under budget, Hegseth said.
The Pentagon is reorganizing its cadre of program executive offices, or PEOs, that oversee major systems, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or the V-22 Osprey, into portfolio acquisition executives, or PAEs, who will be able to operate with more authority.
Hegseth said those PAEs will be the sole individual accountable for the performance of their portfolios, and will “have the authority to act without running through months or even years of approval chains.”
“These PAEs will be empowered with the authorities to make decisions on cost, schedule and performance tradeoffs that prioritize time-to-field and mission outcomes,” Hegseth said. “That means less time identifying what our warfighters need, releasing solicitations to industry and finalizing contracts to get production running at scale.”
Hegseth also announced the end of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, or JCIDS, which he described as “slow, … bloated and disconnected from reality.”
“To put it plainly, JCIDS became a years-long bureaucratic anchor that dragged us down while our adversaries surged ahead with purpose and precision,” he said.
Hegseth described a sluggish JCIDS process that took nearly a year to approve documents to define the requirements for new weapons systems, and then locked down those requirements so firmly that they couldn’t adjust to reflect a changing threat environment.
The bureaucratic quagmire has become so severe, Hegseth said, that the Pentagon’s highest priorities — such as acquiring critical munitions, the Golden Dome missile defense project and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ push to quickly field the mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles during the Iraq War — have taken steps to move outside the official process.
“We shouldn’t have to go outside the process to make it work,” Hegseth said. “If urgent needs are met by circumventing [the standard process], we can’t rely on that. Instead, the entire process must move at the speed of critical munitions, Golden Dome and the MRAP.”
Hegseth ordered the Pentagon’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council, or JROC, to stop validating service requirements under the old JCIDS process as much as legally possible and shift JROC’s focus.
JROC, which is headed by Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. Christopher Mahoney, has traditionally been in charge of setting the requirements for the military’s weapons systems, or defining what they must be able to do.
Hegseth said JROC will “start identifying and ranking the joint force’s toughest problems,” or joint operational problems that drive priorities for the whole military.
In place of JCIDS, Hegseth said the department is setting up three new organizations. The first is a Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board, which will be headed by Mahoney and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, to ensure the department is directing enough funding to countering those top priorities.
The second organization is the Mission Engineering and Integration Activity. This is intended to “bring the best minds [from] government, industry and labs together early to experiment, integrate, iterate and prototype solutions, instead of watching good ideas die at the hands of a worthless process,” Hegseth said.
The department is also setting up a Joint Acceleration Reserve, which is a source of funding set aside that can steer money to promising programs and quickly get them into the field where service members can use them, Hegseth said.
Hegseth also ordered each service to go over its internal requirements processes, to cut red tape, bring industry into the process earlier and make sure their internal priorities align with the joint operational priorities.
Hegseth’s proposals drew support from industry associations such as the Aerospace Industries Association, which called the speech “an ambitious, long-needed overhaul of warfighting acquisition.”
“The Pentagon’s plan is exciting, and it’s what America needs to outpace tomorrow’s threats,” AIA President Eric Fanning said in a statement. “For too long, red tape and outdated rules have slowed our ability to deliver for the warfighter. … For this plan to work, industry and government must work closely to implement these reforms and finetune the details.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
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