President Donald Trump’s Washington is pushing to overhaul how the defense world supplies the U.S. military with war-fighting technologies. It’s a project that promises to impact how tens of billions of dollars are spent and shape what the next generation of war-fighting looks like.
It’s an all-of-government effort with White House executive orders, a push from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for changes at the Pentagon and Capitol Hill’s imprimatur through key provisions in its annual defense policy bill.
“This is as big a change for the Pentagon as Goldwater-Nichols,” said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), referencing the watershed 1986 law that restructured the Defense Department.
Déjà vu? The convergence of action is injecting new optimism into the long-running effort to make the Pentagon more nimble. The Trump administration is not the first to try to speed the process for purchasing equipment and grow the number of companies supplying the tools of war.
But Mike Brown, the former head of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, said previous attempts have been more one-off in nature and not “as comprehensive as this.” Now, Brown said, the executive branch and Congress are “arm in arm” clamoring for change.
“It’s a reflection of how important commercial tech is,” Brown told us. “We need more than just F-35s and submarines.”
At the Pentagon, the changes include overhauling existing program executive offices and rolling out more flexible budget authorities. The compromise version of the NDAA, meanwhile, aims to codify many of those efforts.
The annual defense policy bill would also require DOD to prioritize buying commercial capabilities, exempt certain programs from some of the Pentagon’s most onerous regulations and bolster the acquisition workforce.
Moving out. The success of the endeavor ultimately depends on what happens next.
Aerospace Industries Association President and CEO Eric Fanning warned that a big hurdle is putting these measures into action, calling it “a lot of reform to implement at once.”
“The Pentagon is going to have to sort of rack and stack and prioritize what they do, because it will take sustained leadership effort to implement these changes,” Fanning said.
Any changes in this space will have big implications for the defense “primes” — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and RTX — and nontraditional companies looking to pitch commercial solutions to military problems, like Palantir and Anduril.
Already, there’s some concern the Defense Department could be softening its approach. Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon industrial policy chief who’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued in a recent op-ed that DOD’s final memo “watered down” earlier draft acquisition changes.
But at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., this weekend, Hegseth maintained his commitment to overhauling the acquisition process. Hegseth said the Pentagon would move “from the current prime contractor-dominated system” to one fueled “by dynamic vendor space” and defined by faster production.
“Our objective is simple, if monumental: transform the entire acquisition system to rapidly accelerate the building of capabilities and focus on results,” Hegseth said.
