Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday unveiled a sweeping overhaul to how the Pentagon buys weapons, a restructuring aimed at having the U.S. military more quickly acquire new technology.
Addressing industry leaders and military officials at the National War College in Washington, D.C., Hegseth detailed his vision for the Defense Acquisition System, which he said is now renamed to the “Warfighting Acquisitions System.”
“We need acquisition and industry to be as strong and fast as our war fighters,” Hegseth said. “The Warfighting Acquisition System will dramatically shorten timelines, improve and expand the defense industrial base, boost competition and empower acquisition officials to take risks and make trade-offs.”
He added: “We’re leaving the old, failed process behind, and will instead embrace a new agile and results-oriented approach that used to take sometimes — when you add it up with requirements — three to eight years, we believe can happen within a year.”
The reforms target what the Trump administration sees as an unacceptably slow procurement process, with officials blaming bureaucracy and misaligned incentives that have hindered the military’s ability to get new technology into the hands of warfighters quickly.
The overhaul follows an executive order signed by President Trump in April, titled “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base,” that argued the U.S. “must deliver state‐of‐the‐art capabilities at speed and scale through a comprehensive overhaul of this system.”
“At times we’ve been too damn slow to respond,” Hegseth said of buying weapons. “What we’re doing today marks a new horizon for how we acquire and deliver warfighting capabilities. We’re prioritizing speed, flexibility, competition and calculated risk taking.”
A six-page draft memo on the changes titled “Transforming the Warfighting Acquisition System,” leaked earlier this week, details the changes, which are on a tight timeline to be completed within two years.
“Speed to capability delivery is now our organizing principle,” the unsigned and undated draft states. “Every process, board, and review must justify its existence by demonstrating how it accelerates capability delivery to meet warfighter needs.”
The plan aims to reform existing program executive offices at the Pentagon into new Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs), who will have direct authority over major weapons programs and answer to their “Service Acquisition Executive” with “no intermediate offices or approval layers.”
Hegseth said on Friday that PAEs will be the “single accountable official” for portfolio outcomes and have the authority to “act without running through months or even years of approval chains and they’ll be held accountable to deliver results.”
In order to better track the progress, the Defense secretary said the department is introducing “portfolio scorecards” that will focus on the “time it takes to put weapons in the hands of our men and women who use it, if and when necessary.”
Hegseth also announced that the Pentagon is establishing a “wartime production unit” that he says will focus on “transforming how we accelerate the delivery of critical capabilities to our war fighters” and the team will “manage and execute direct support for our top acquisition production priorities to ensure that we have the best minds in the business.”
Another major change that the Pentagon chief unveiled is that the department will not have to be jammed by the so-called “vendor lock,” having to use the original contractor.
“Talking about meaningful choice where quality and speed matter and where prices go down,” he said.
The memo says: “Maintain at least two qualified sources for critical program content at the appropriate system decomposition level through initial production unless waived by the respective Service Acquisition Executive (SAC).”
The new plan also makes commercial products the default buy, streamlining the solicitation process, with contract incentives that reward early delivery and penalize delays.
“We will prioritize the purchase of industry-driven solutions, commercial solutions, first, that meet our needs faster, even if that means bids do not meet every requirement,” Hegseth said. “It means that we will be open to buying the 85 percent solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100 percent solution.”
In addition, the department will do away with its Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), the Pentagon’s process for identifying, developing and validating joint military capability requirements.
“We’re ending a system that was built for paperwork, not mission,” Hegseth said. “JCIDS is dead, and it was slow and bloated and disconnected from reality and we will do better.”
During the speech, Hegseth also vowed to speed up foreign military weapons sales to allies and partner nations, noting that the technologies are taking too long to be delivered.
“They don’t want to buy Russian, they don’t want to buy Italian, they don’t want to buy French, they want to buy American, but they don’t want to wait a decade for it,” the defense secretary said.
Hegseth has given the Pentagon little time to implement his plans, with the memo noting that the DOD acquisition chief must issue guidance on the overhaul within 45 days and each military service will provide its implementation plans within 60 days.
The Pentagon chief said the defense contractors have to invest in themselves also, instead of “saddling taxpayers with every cost.”
“For those who come along with us, this will be a great growth opportunity, and you will benefit. To industry not willing to assume risk in order to work with the military, we may have to wish you well in your future endeavors, which would probably be outside the Pentagon,” Hegseth said on Friday. “We’re going to make defense contracting competitive again, and those who are too comfortable with the status quo to compete are not going to be welcome.”
