The Pentagon Built a Faster Engine, Nobody Built the Steering

The Department of War has just executed the most ambitious acquisition reform in six decades. It scrapped JCIDS — the requirements process that ossified innovation for a generation; replaced program offices with portfolio executives, and built a Warfighting Acquisition System designed for speed.

The changes deliver on years of reform proposals. They also risk repeating a costly mistake of the post-9/11 wars: chasing evolving threats with rapid fixes while no one is responsible for understanding them. Industry will help determine which path prevails.

Counter-drone fight as test case. We’ve seen this movie before

Consider the counter-drone fight, the clearest test of the new system. Washington treats it as an engineering puzzle: build a better jammer, field a cheaper interceptor. The technology shelf is full — directed-energy weapons at $12 a shot, drone-on-drone interceptors with more than a thousand kills in Ukraine.

While the technology works, the process for getting it to the warfighter does not.

Soldiers today engage FPV drones that cost a few hundred dollars with $400,000 Stinger missiles, because the cheap interceptors proven in Ukraine still have no fast path into U.S. formations. A new drone variant appears on the battlefield every week, built from commercial parts and open-source software. A firmware update that defeats a jammer costs nothing and takes hours. Our counter, even through the reformed system, takes months.

This is not a technology gap. It is a cycle-time gap. And I have seen it before. From 2010 to 2013, I led the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force at the height of the counter-IED campaign in Afghanistan. The structural parallels are exact: cheap dual-use components, knowledge that spreads faster than countermeasures, adaptation at near-zero cost, tactical variation that defeats one-size-fits-all solutions, and an institutional reflex to throw technology at a systems problem. We spent $75 billion on counter-IED and lost that fight anyway. Drones are IEDs that fly.

The part nobody owns

Here is what the reforms miss: Successful innovation runs in six phases — detect, define, develop, deploy, assess, distribute. The reforms invested almost entirely in the middle two, develop and deploy. Nobody persistently monitors how the threat evolves at the tactical edge. Nobody scopes each unit’s problem with enough precision to drive useful solutions. Nobody measures whether fielded systems actually work against an adversary who adapts after every engagement. And nobody moves what one unit learns to every other unit facing the same threat at operational speed. Three of the six phases have no organizational owner.

The department built a faster engine. Nobody built the steering — the mechanism that decides which problems the engine should be pointed at, whether the solutions worked, and who else needs to know.

Industry’s new role

That gap is the industry's opportunity — and its obligation. The DoW can’t solve this problem by itself. Companies that want to matter in this market need to do their part. They should start by doing three things differently.

First, invest in problem discovery, not product pitches. Requirements still originate in headquarters, not from soldiers watching the problem in context. The companies that win the next decade will be the ones that put engineers and business developers forward with operational units to understand problems before proposing solutions. The quality of your solution is determined by the quality of the problem you choose to solve. Einstein’s formula applies: 55 minutes on the problem, five on the solution. Most of industry has that ratio inverted.

Second, build for adaptation, not for the requirement. If your product cannot change in weeks — modular hardware, software-defined behavior, upgrades at firmware speed — it is obsolete on delivery. The adversary’s development cycle runs in days. A requirement frozen at contract award is a snapshot of a threat that no longer exists.

Third, plug into the new portfolio structure as a sensor, not just a supplier. Industry keeps asking the department for a clearer demand signal, and fairly so. But the demand signal has to come from somewhere, and the fusion cells that Portfolio Acquisition Executives need — nodes that merge ground truth from the field with what industry and the labs know is possible — cannot function without industry feeding data in and absorbing assessment data out. Companies that operate at that tempo will define the portfolios. Companies that wait for RFPs will trail them.

Doing these three things means stopping three others. Stop building to frozen requirements and calling it responsiveness. Stop treating a prototype contract or a demo-day win as the finish line — it is the starting line of the assessment the department never runs. And stop spending capture budgets decoding what headquarters wants instead of discovering what the warfighter needs. The hours are the same; the direction is not.

New authorities need new operators

None of this works without people, and people are where the reform agenda is thinnest. The department is converting the Defense Acquisition University into a Warfighting Acquisition University, trading compliance training for scenario-based judgment. That is the right instinct. But this year’s defense authorization offered little else on workforce, which means the authorities changed faster than the people who must wield them.

We know what works: experiential, problem-first education. Hacking for Defense has spent a decade putting university students to work on real national security problems alongside the people who own them. It has produced a generation of founders and public servants who know how to interrogate a problem before building a solution. That model needs to scale — into the department’s schoolhouses, into two-way exchanges between government and industry, and into industry’s own training pipelines, which today produce engineers who have never seen the field and capture teams fluent in the FAR but not in the mission.

The department has reformed how it acquires. It has not yet reformed what it acquires, whether it worked, or who else needs to know. Industry can wait – and hope – the government will close that gap, or it can help close it — by discovering problems & opportunities at the edge, building for adaptation, and educating a workforce trained to out-cycle an adversary rather than out-comply a regulation.

In this fight, the adversary does not need to out-technology us. He only needs to out-cycle us. We have already paid $75 billion to learn where that leads.

Pete Newell is a retired U.S. Army colonel, former director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, and CEO of BMNT. He co-created Hacking for Defense with Steve Blank and is the author of “The Innovation Targeting Cycle.”

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