WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday the Pentagon is revamping how the military buys weapons, shifting the focus away from producing advanced and complex technology and toward products that can be made and delivered quickly.
Hegseth, speaking to military leaders and defense contractors in Washington, said the “objective is simple: transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing, to rapidly accelerate the fielding of capabilities and focus on results.”
Hegseth gave his address, which ran for more than an hour, at the National War College. It delved much more into military minutia than a previous big speech to hundreds of military leaders abruptly summoned to a base in Virginia, where he declared an end to “woke” culture and announced “gender-neutral” directives for troops.
Hegseth acknowledged the granularity Friday, saying, “If folks are watching this on Fox, their eyes are rolling over.”
The defense secretary argued his changes are meant to move the military away from the more traditional process that prioritized delivering a perfect, if expensive and late, product in favor of something that is less ideal but delivered quickly. Some experts say the changes could mean less transparency and the military ending up with systems that may not function as expected.
“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,” he said. He asserted that what used to take several years could happen within one.
The shift is coming as Russia’s grinding war has seen an underfunded Ukraine using cheap, mass-produced drones to effectively hold off a technologically superior Moscow, which is armed with advanced missiles and hundreds of tanks.
“Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” Hegseth argued in a July memo before declaring that “while global military drone production skyrocketed over the last three years, the previous administration deployed red tape.” That memo lifted some Pentagon restrictions on drone purchases.
Todd Harrison, a defense budget and acquisition expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said Hegseth’s ideas represent a significant shift in how the military would buy arms.
But he warned that if contractors aren’t incentivized “to check all the boxes” for everything the military wants in a product, “they may deliver something faster, but it may not do what you want it to do.”
The way the U.S. military buys weapons and platforms has faced criticism for various reasons for decades. In recent years, the most famous example of the Pentagon’s failure to get the right gear to the front line was the scores of troops that died from roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan because of poorly armored vehicles that weren’t designed for the conflict.
Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates used his influence to quickly develop the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, or MRAP, through the acquisition process in under a year.
Hegseth acknowledged the effort Friday, noting that “the entire process must move at the speed of … the MRAP.”
More recently, other Pentagon efforts have tried to replicate this dynamic to quickly deal with the threat of China invading Taiwan or quickly develop swarms of drones, with mixed results.
Hegseth also argued that the companies that sell weapons and platforms to the military need to “assume risk to partner with the United States.”
He then took aim at the large defense contractors, saying the Pentagon will move away from the traditional system where there is limited competition to “harness more of America’s innovative companies.”
Harrison said risks are inherent with turning away from traditional contractors — they possess deep expertise and are mostly publicly traded companies. That means “we have more visibility into their liquidity, the stability of their company, their board,” he said.
With the changes comes a possibility for greater fraud and abuse.
”Whereas many of these newer companies, we have very little visibility inside how the company works, who owns what, how they make decisions — it’s all very opaque,” Harrison said.
