War Secretary Pete Hegseth tore into the Pentagon’s entrenched acquisition bureaucracy in a fiery address this week, comparing the department’s planning culture to Soviet-style central planning that he says has crippled innovation, risk-taking, and the nation’s ability to prepare for war. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Hegseth accused decades of War Department policy of being paralyzed by "impossible risk thresholds" and "burdensome and inefficient processes" that have turned the Pentagon into a self-reinforcing machine where "process, not outcomes, matter."
He argued that previous administrations only made things worse by trying to "go around the process rather than confront it head-on," leaving both the U.S. military and defense industrial base weaker and slower to adapt. "The institution shapes the individuals as much as the individuals shape the institution," Hegseth said. "Over time, the prevailing pattern becomes more and more entrenched, risk-averse and immovable."
Hegseth said this bureaucratic inertia has spilled over into the defense industry itself, creating a system where contractors profit from inefficiency rather than performance. "The defense industry financially benefits from our backwards culture," he said. "Schedule overruns, huge order backlogs and too-predictable cost increases become the norm."
The secretary warned that the result is "an absence of urgency, a fear of innovation and a fundamental lack of trust" between the Pentagon and its suppliers — precisely the kind of dysfunction, he argued, that America’s adversaries exploit.
"Our military and our taxpayers need a defense industrial base that it can count on to scale with urgency in a crisis — not one that is content to wait for money before taking action," Hegseth said.
Hegseth’s remarks are part of a broader push within the administration to accelerate defense acquisition reform, streamline contracting, and restore what he has called "wartime urgency" to the Pentagon’s day-to-day operations.
The Army has become the Pentagon’s test bed for acquisition reform, rolling out some of the most aggressive efforts to speed up weapons procurement and cut through the red tape Hegseth blasted in his remarks. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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The Army and Department of War more broadly are emphasizing a "commercial-first" approach: using commercial technologies and industry models instead of bespoke, highly custom, defense-unique systems where possible.
"They’ll do a lot of that outside the traditional procurement process. That flexibility lets them innovate and test at a speed that’s just really hard to do in the conventional force," Driscoll said. "They basically just use their corporate credit card to go online and purchase things to test, and they will find what works."
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