Disrupting the DoD? Start with acquisition reform

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December 17, 2024

As I write this, Trump has also named Pete Hegseth, a retired Army major and television presenter, to head the DoD and carry out many reforms to the behemoth government agency. Hegseth, with his decorated warfighter background, cares deeply about those in uniform, but he has limited experience running a bureaucracy this size and will have challenges enacting change in such a behemoth. During an interview with the Shawn Ryan Show on youtube.com, he told the show host he wants to purge what he called woke generals, reform training, and return the DoD to being a more lethal force by speeding up procurement. All of that hinges on his confirmation, which is no guarantee.

Lethality is greatly aided by technology and by getting the best commercial, high-performance weapons, sensors, and armor to the warfighter as fast as possible. Speeding up the tech-development-to-tech-deployment chain is a change just begging for acquisition reform.

Speeding up acquisition – a topic we’ve covered many times in this space – flavored conversations I had with readers and advertisers in Washington at the annual Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting in October. Most of those conversations started with discussions of what the MOSA – modular open systems approach – mandate actually means for the acquisition process.

I was told that flag officers are saying they want MOSA: They see it as a way to get tech deployed more quickly. All have seen the success of quickly deployed autonomous solutions in the war in Ukraine and want the DoD to be able to move that quickly. However, there is an upfront cost to MOSA initiatives and it’s not for every system. It’s not a panacea to improve capability, but rather a way to lower long-term life cycle costs and a way to leverage commercial tech early in a system development cycle.

And there’s the rub: How do you get the DoD to speed up, break through bureaucratic walls, and grab the innovation?

In 2018, Ken Peterman, then president of Viasat’s Government Systems division, told me there is a certain amount of inertia in acquisition policy. “For 50 to 60 years the government has been an inventor of technology,” he said. “It doesn’t know how to buy a turnkey service. Its model is based on breaking down an ecosystem into parts such as waveforms, modems, etc. This encourages long developmental cycles and higher costs. By leveraging commercial solutions, the government is able to do the opposite; because by purchasing a service the government can access a complete, functioning system all at the same time, with no risk and no delays. Early adoption of these … technologies can help solve warfighter problems now.”

Six years later the inertia is still there. The DoD acquisition process continues to be glacial. Many people thought the DoD’s 1994 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology mandate would speed up acquisition and lower costs of technology. Today, many think that MOSA strategies will finally enable both. These strategies will do that to some extent and will also bring new companies into the DoD orbit with new innovations, but they are not a complete overhaul of acquisition practices.

It has been my experience covering the DoD that efforts to replace or eliminate government-acquisition processes often end in failure or do not change anything in the long run. Eliminating whole departments and drastically reducing the workforce, as Trump’s appointees promise to do, could accomplish that. We’ll see if Musk, himself a defense contractor, can help break down those bureaucratic walls. 

In recent years, to get around the slow acquisition process, the U.S. government created new processes and dusted off old ones to test, develop, and procure technology and get it more quickly into the hands of warfighters.

Rapid-acquisition offices, increases in Other Transactional Authorities (OTAs), and the Defense Innovation Unit’s developmental offshoots like the Air Force’s AFWERX and Special Operations Command’s SOFWERX are examples of efforts to prototype technology and leverage commercial innovation and small business. Of all of these the Space Development Agency has the most funding and momentum, aiming to launch viable products every two years.

The obstacles to reform are not few in number and will only increase. Hegseth told Ryan the U.S. is a decade behind in weapons procurement. However, as SecDef he may only have two years to catch up, as the 2026 midterms may bring Democrat control back to Congress.