President Trump’s April 9 executive order, “Modernizing Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base,” hits the right notes and endorses the right approaches. After decades of ever-new studies, commissions, and legislation to streamline the defense acquisitions process—followed by halting and sporadic Defense Department implementation—it is encouraging to see a commander-in-chief directly tell the Pentagon to get on with it.
The executive order recognizes that DOD has, for too long, failed to embrace fully the more flexible rules and tools it already has on the books. These include other transaction authorities, commercial solutions openings, and the Adaptive Acquisition Framework launched during the first Trump administration.
The order builds on Secretary Pete Hegseth’s March 6 memo, “Directing Modern Software Acquisition to Maximize Lethality,” which requires the Pentagon to make CSOs and OTAs the default acquisition mechanism for buying defense software, not the exception.
The order also takes aim at the 30-year-old Joint Capabilities and Integration Defense Systems—better known as JCIDS—for validating military requirements, which, combined with traditional Pentagon and Congressional budget cycles, usually takes an absurd number of years to get a new weapons capability approved and funded. In all, energetically implementing the order’s direction to “eliminate or revise any unnecessary supplemental regulations or any other internal guidance” should shrink the 1,500-page Defense Federal Acquisitions Regulations to a fraction of its length.
Not mentioned in the order, but consistent with its spirit and direction, is the long-ignored Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, which requires DOD to buy commercially available products using industry-standard contracting mechanisms—that is, fixed-price contracts. FASA has been the law of the land for more than 30 years, but has been rarely heeded, leaving the U.S. military with substandard IT and taxpayers with inflated bills. It has also effectively barred the door to many innovative software and hardware companies. The Pentagon’s enforcement of FASA for rapid access to commercial technologies would, in many cases, obviate the need to work around the current system via special pathways or novel authorities.
Combined with the bold reforms proposed in the FoRGED and SHIPS bills, we may be finally transforming the way our nation develops, funds, procures, produces, and sustains weapons of war. Using the capabilities of the commercial sector, where nearly all software innovation originates, is critical to that effort, as the defense secretary’s software acquisition memo recognizes.
Recently, the Pentagon has embraced AI from non-traditional commercial firms to great effect for intelligence, targeting, and other combat operations. However, its adoption has been much slower on the logistics side of the house.
In fact, too often DOD professionals who acquire bleeding-edge technologies for the warfighter do so using primitive spreadsheets, emails, conference calls, and other semi-manual processes; or, at best, a kludgy government IT deployment that falls far short of what a commercial developer would provide—or a commercial customer would tolerate.
Consequently, DOD program officers are in a constant state of playing catch-up, dealing with obsolete parts, supply chain gaps, and the near-impossible task of disintermediating foreign suppliers. For all the caveats about military systems being fundamentally different, there’s no tenable reason why the procurement and maintenance of defense equipment can’t be a lot closer to the way Caterpillar orchestrates its supply chain or Walmart restocks its shelves.
These applications are, in fact, available to the Pentagon—already developed, tested, and validated—through the dynamism of the commercial sector. We’re talking about AI-enabled platforms that track the availability, sourcing, and risk profile of parts, components, and materials across the globe. Consider that in recent weeks, soldiers in Army Futures Command exercises used real-time data and AI-powered workflows for live inventory tracking and predictive demand planning. It’s long past time for the supply chain to be connected fully to the kill chain as a matter of routine: from sensors to shooters to sustainment.
A massive, federal multi-year, multimillion-dollar IT construction effort—with the usual cost growth, schedule slip, and disappointment—isn’t necessary. Taking this traditional route would be industrial-level malpractice given the availability of commercial software-as-a-service applications ready to go on contract signing day. It is also—as mentioned earlier—legally unsupportable, given the law’s clear guidance to use commercially available products as a matter of course.
Given that nearly 1,200 of the Pentagon’s 2,000 or so acquisition programs are business systems, the Defense Department has a historic opportunity to shed costs and improve operational efficiency across the board.
It is also a fleeting opportunity, as new leaders in the executive branch and Congress are aligned on not just the need for root-and-branch acquisitions change, but on the basic elements of that change: from traditional government cost-plus contracts to commercially-standard fixed-fee contracts; from bespoke federal contractor and FFRDC enterprise IT installations with lagging upgrades to turnkey software-as-a-service that improves continuously and avoids “vendor lock”; and from the failed process-driven behaviors of the last several decades to outcome-driven incentives and accountability that are the business norm.
The proof of real change—versus another passing flirtation with acquisitions reform—will come at the working level, with the choices made by contracting officers and program managers across the Pentagon and within the services. It will require not just the right rule sets and technologies, but also leaders within the institutional military who will drive and empower their organizations to pursue those changes and make them stick. It will also require judging those leaders by their ability to shorten lead times, reduce downtimes, and dramatically expand production.
Consider that heading into World War II, the United States didn’t have much of a defense acquisitions system—really just a handful of mid-level supply and logistics officers. However, as recounted by historian Arthur Herman, it had men like Franklin Roosevelt and William Knudsen—then CEO of General Motors — who unleashed the creativity and productivity of American industry to generate prodigious quantities of armaments.
Then, in the early years of the Cold War, patriots fiercely devoted to results, like Adm. Hyman Rickover and Gen. Bernard Schriever, combined organizational genius and an iron will to create America’s nuclear submarine and ballistic missile forces. They did so in a fraction of the time and budget that a middling modernization program requires today. Experience, expertise, and sheer longevity were essential factors. Rickover led the Navy’s nuclear enterprise for nearly three decades; Schriever effectively oversaw the Air Force’s space and ballistic missile forces for more than a decade.
By comparison, acquisition leaders today, in keeping with the military’s career management system, will rotate through Program Manager or Program Executive Officer billets every two to three years—sometimes less. Just as an acquisition officer begins to get savvy to the nuances of a complex program, he or she will move on to another assignment.
More than any other “workforce” reform, doubling the length of uniformed and civilian program office tours is apt to improve acquisition outcomes. It should be possible for a sharp colonel to begin managing a fledgling development program, then see promotion to one- or two-star general as the program progresses to low-rate then full-rate production, testing, and fielding.
Language that extends acquisition management tours can be incorporated into the implementation plan for the executive order, which the Pentagon owes the White House in 60 days. As China routinely conducts massive military exercises to simulate the blockade or invasion of Taiwan, the time for incremental measures is long past. With the president, the defense secretary, and both sides of the Congressional aisle impatient for action, we have no reason to wait any longer.
Jeffrey “Jeb” Nadaner is senior vice president of Govini. He has served as deputy assistant defense secretary for industrial policy from 2020 to 2021.
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