By Ryan Morgan
As the Pentagon reflects on recent conflicts and assesses the challenges to come, it is preparing several measures to dramatically overhaul its arms procurement process and rush new weapons and equipment to America’s warfighters.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth first detailed the arms acquisition overhaul in a 70-minute speech at the National War College in Washington on Nov. 7, calling for a process that will allow U.S. warfighters to keep pace in rapidly evolving conflicts.
“We’re leaving the old failed process behind, and we’ll instead embrace a new agile and results-oriented approach,” Hegseth said.
“What used to take sometimes, when you add it up with requirements, three to eight years, we believe it can happen within a year.”
Hegseth said this overall plan to streamline the acquisition process will rest on five pillars. Here are the reforms and what they will mean in practice.
1. Grant Longer Contracts for Proven Systems
The first pillar of Hegseth’s vision for reform is to award larger and longer-lasting contracts to defense industry partners.
He said this will signal to those arms makers that there is a steady demand for their products, and thus incentivize them to continue to invest in the U.S. defense industrial base.
Over the course of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the United States has routinely furnished Ukrainian forces with arms, straining its own stockpile of munitions like the 155 mm artillery shell.
In an early attempt to keep pace with Ukraine’s demand for 155 mm shells, the U.S. military began to pull shells from a stockpile it had kept in Israel.
After terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, then-Pentagon press secretary Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed the U.S. military had to return shells to its stockpile in Israel to meet the demands for their military campaign in Gaza.
A Pentagon memo addressing the new acquisition reforms notes that some of its munitions production targets have been decreased at times to cover shortfalls in other programs, creating wide-ranging procurement figures from one year to the next.
The Pentagon said more stable contracts for such programs will ensure the U.S. defense industry is “better postured to increase capital investment and gain production efficiency with sufficient confidence of the return on their investment, provide more responsive delivery timelines, and increase production volume and velocity.”
2. Take Imperfect Solutions, Then Improve
Hegseth’s second pillar for acquisition reform is to rapidly adopt the systems that defense industry partners have already begun to prepare, even if those systems don’t perfectly meet the requirements of a specific Pentagon program.
“It means that we will be open to buying the 85 percent solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100 percent solution,” Hegseth told his audience at the National War College last week.
In another set of comments on the acquisition reforms during the Northeast Indiana Defense Summit on Nov. 12, Hegseth said, “an 85 percent solution tomorrow is a lot better than a 100 percent solution that is never in the hands of a warfighter.”
The Pentagon said it intends to lower the barrier for smaller businesses and startups to participate in the acquisition process and offer solutions for the military’s needs.
As part of its plan to gradually improve its systems, the Pentagon intends to establish new feedback channels to draw upon advice from end-users.
The military also plans to rely on feedback from its global allies to help it evaluate and refine new systems.
3. Let Program Leaders Make Adjustments
Hegseth’s third measure to overhaul the acquisition process is to give program leaders more latitude to make changes along the way.
“We will empower our program leaders with the control, expertise, and authority to direct program outcomes to move money and quickly adjust the priority of required system performance to deliver on time and under budget,” he said last week.
Among the Pentagon’s stated goals of the overall acquisition reform is to transition from a culture of strict compliance to one of speed and calculated risk-taking.
Addressing the reforms during a Nov. 10 press call, Undersecretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael Duffey offered assurances that this newfound flexibility isn’t a requirement to throw all caution to the wind.
“We’re emphasizing speed, but we’re not mandating speed,” Duffey said, adding that the department will depend on the judgment of program leaders, “to understand where does the need for speed balance with the risk that we would undertake to cost and/or the performance of the system.”
4. Incentivize Industry Partners That Prioritize Urgency
Under the new reforms, urgency will be a priority both for the Pentagon’s program leaders and for their defense industry partners.
As part of his fourth pillar for acquisition reform, Hegseth said the Pentagon “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.”
In line with Hegseth’s fourth reform pillar, the Pentagon has described a range of efforts it will undertake to expedite the contract award process.
One such method for speeding up the contract process is to encourage new vendors to compete.
“The defense industrial base has been consolidated from 51 prime vendors following the Cold War down to just five major prime contractors developing our most critical weapon systems today,” the Pentagon’s acquisition transformation strategy memo states.
This consolidation of vendors, the Pentagon said, has led to stagnation within the defense industry, leading arms makers to build “the world’s best and most exquisite weapon systems at low volume while relying on obsolescent parts, outdated manufacturing processes, and stale innovation.”
The Pentagon said it will also use every contracting tool at its disposal, including expedited and low-cost contracts, to speed the delivery of weapons and equipment to end users.
Additionally, the Pentagon will seek ways to quickly resolve disputes in the bidding process and discourage frivolous disputes by making the losers pay.
5. Remove Regulatory Barriers
As a fifth and final pillar for transforming the acquisition process, Hegseth vowed the Pentagon would work to eliminate regulations and layers of bureaucracy.
He said these layers of red tape can manifest in the form of outdated accounting practices and lengthy testing and analysis that can delay the start of a program.
“Anything that unnecessarily slows down government contracts will be eliminated,” he said.
To speed up the process, the Pentagon plans to invest in new testing equipment and ranges. The department said it also intends to “decrease the number of bureaucratic test managers and increase the number of actual testers of our weapon systems.”
To expedite the accounting process, the Pentagon intends to move away from the government’s traditional Cost Accounting Standards method of accounting to the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles method widely used in the commercial sector.
To streamline the method for measuring a program’s progress and performance, the Pentagon intends to implement a simplified scorecard system.
“The scorecards will allow department leadership to assess portfolio and program health and allow for a ‘by-exception’ approach to oversight,” the Pentagon said of its scorecard-based plan.
