The acquisition reforms announced last week by Secretary Pete Hegseth reflect a revolutionary shift in mindset: after decades of aspiring to remain the world’s most advanced force, the U.S. military has finally recognized that adaptability trumps performance.
Better late than never. The last few years of war in Ukraine, the Red Sea, and Israel have been screaming the lesson that better kit doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, “better” means something different than it did even a decade ago.
Rather than faster, bigger, or rangier, the better solution today is one that is already fielded and good enough for the current situation, as we noted in our work with the Pentagon in the runup to the reforms’ release. The only guarantee is that “good enough” will be different in a few weeks or months.
Build an adaptation pipeline
The Pentagon has long taken years to envision, specify, manufacture, and deliver systems to warfighters. The fundamental bet was that these exquisite products would remain superior to countermeasures at least as long as it would take to produce their replacements.
Hegseth’s Nov. 7 directive recognizes the futility of this approach in the modern era. Under the acquisition model announced last week, the pipeline is more important than the product. Any weapon, sensor, or drone will only be relevant for a short time in its current form, so the military needs a robust problem-to-product pipeline that will deliver the next version.
The secretary announced three transformations that will build his department’s new adaptation pipeline. First, he killed the toothless joint-requirements process that was a rubber stamp for service wishlists. In its place, he established a way to define and rank joint problems from combatant commanders, then tie them to dedicated funding for solutions.
Second, he ordered the department to give acquisition executives real authority and accountability. Portfolio Acquisition Executives, or PAEs, will own their programs entirely, including funding, development, specifications, contracting, and delivery. They will have the authority to make trade-offs between performance and schedule to field relevant capabilities when they are needed. And if PAEs cannot deliver, senior leaders will replace them.
And third, Pentagon acquisition will embrace real modularity, rather than the interoperability cosplay of static and proprietary “open architectures.” The new directive requires that systems have machine-readable interface specifications posted in government repositories. Any vendor will be able to build compatible software modules without asking for the system developer’s permission.
This matters because modern military systems are increasingly software-defined. A missile is basically a collection of computers with explosives. By separately competing modules for everything from seekers and guidance and navigation controls to propulsion, PAEs can swap in appropriate components as new technologies and needs emerge. Our adversaries already do this with commercial parts. We’re finally catching up.
Like the commercial best practices, the new acquisition model will enable adaptation through a continuous integration and delivery pipeline. When interfaces are exposed and government-owned, innovation can happen at the edge, not just in the prime contractors’ labs.
Stop fighting yesterday’s wars
Some traditionalists worry that prioritizing timeliness over performance will lead to poor-quality products rushed to meet deadlines. This misunderstands modern military competition, which is about constant adaptation rather than generational, game-changing leaps.
For example, last month Ukrainian air defenders realized their U.S.-supplied Patriot interceptors were missing incoming ballistic missiles due to a combination of new Russian flight profiles and saturation attacks. U.S. and Ukrainian engineers and operators are now scrambling to reprogram decades-old Patriot software.
This wasn’t the first case of 20th-century U.S. designs failing in 21st-century conflict. Less than a year into the war, Ukrainian troops found that Excalibur GPS-guided artillery rounds were no longer hitting their targets. Despite costing more than $100,000 each, the U.S.-supplied rounds could not adapt to use other navigation methods in the face of Russian jamming. Today, Kyiv’s defenders rely on terrain-mapping drones alongside traditional artillery.
Ukrainian forces are keeping those drones relevant through an even more aggressive adaptation cycle. Every day, soldiers and technicians reprogram radios and control software and evolve tactics to counter the latest Russian jammers and counter-drone systems.
The U.S. military hasn’t been spared from the adaptation imperative. As Houthi attacks mounted in the Red Sea, U.S. Navy engineers and surface warriors recognized they needed to use shorter-range defenses to avoid burning through a lifetime of Standard missiles in a month. Now guns and jammers take out more drones than do surface-to-air missiles.
The lesson from these contemporary battlefields is that. Instead of attempting to manufacture weapons for a predicted future, militaries need to use what is available today to solve today’s problems.
The leap to 21st-century mobilization
As these contemporary battlefields suggest, the Pentagon needs this new acquisition model to prepare for 21st-century mobilization.
Within any realistic peacetime budgets, the defense industrial base will never have the capacity to build today’s weapons at the scale needed for sustained confrontations like those in the Red Sea or Ukraine, much less a great power war against China. The U.S. military will need the commercial sector.
That’s the same approach Secretary Hegseth’s predecessors took during World War II, but the industrial base and the military are very different now. Instead of bombers rolling out of Michigan auto plants, the Pentagon will need contract manufacturers that build everything from MRI machines to vehicle chargers to start assembling drones and missiles by the tens of thousands.
That only happens if the War Department follows through on modular designs, open interfaces, commercial-first procurement, and prioritizing speed over sophistication. If not, today’s weapon stockpile could be tomorrow’s junkpile.
Bryan Clark is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute.
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