War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced several changes to the military‘s weapons acquisition processes during a Friday afternoon speech to defense industry leaders at the National War College in Washington.
“Our objective is simple: transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing, to rapidly accelerate the fueling of capabilities and focus on results,” Hegseth said. “Our objective is to rebuild the arsenal of freedom. American industry and its innovative spirit are begging to be unleashed to solve our most complex and dangerous warfighting problems.”
The defense industry needs to operate faster while being less risk-averse, Hegseth argued, noting that, like the War Department itself, production has been slowed down by long-standing bureaucracies.
“We need to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk, by taking greater calculated risk in how we build, buy, and maintain our systems, we will gain speed to more quickly provide capability to the battlefield,” he said. “An 85% solution in the hands of our Armed Forces today is infinitely better than an unachievable, 100% solution, endlessly undergoing testing or awaiting additional technological development. These are of no use to troops in harm’s way.”
One of the changes Hegseth announced is a reorganization of the existing program executive offices into portfolio acquisition executives. The PAEs will have the authority to make decisions on cost, schedule, performance, and more, instead of waiting for higher-ups to make those approvals.
He also announced the decision to shift the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees foreign military sales cases, from under the undersecretary of war for policy to the undersecretary of war for acquisition and sustainment.
“President Trump is securing deal after deal to bring cold, hard cash to American manufacturers, but our processes are too slow and our industrial base is too inefficient to keep up and deliver on time to our allies and partners,” Hegseth said, adding that he has heard criticism from allies about how long it takes for foreign military sale deals to be fulfilled.
Many of the executives in attendance for the speech work for the primary defense contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, though it also included newer defense startups and major cloud companies, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, according to Defense One.
L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik said the company was aligned with the secretary’s vision for a more agile defense acquisition system shortly before his speech.
“We’ve embraced and invested in commercial products and business models for decades, adopting open architecture, scaling production and rapidly fielding innovative technologies,” Kubasik said in a statement. “We are committed to expanding the commercial business model within a streamlined and less bureaucratic acquisition framework.”
Hegseth began his address by quoting a portion of the Sept. 10, 2001, speech given by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
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“I’d like to talk to you about an adversary that poses a threat, a very serious threat, to the United States of America,” Hegseth said, quoting Rumsfeld. “This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating in five-year plans from a single capital. It attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond, with brutal consistency, stifles free thought, and crushes new ideas. The adversary I’m talking about is much closer. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy, not the people, but the process, not the civilians, but the system, not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that is too often imposed on them.”
These changes come on the heels of President Donald Trump’s April executive order that called for a “rapid and transparent foreign defense sales system.”
