Hegseth: Pentagon ‘Fundamentally Reshaping’ Weapons Buying Process

FORT MCNAIR—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed to undertake far-reaching reforms on the way the U.S. military buys weapons, promising a sweeping overhaul of the way the Defense Department determines requirements, handles the acquisition process, and tests its kit.

The fundamental goal, which Hegseth underscored in a one-hour speech at the National War College, is “speed.” He repeated the word more than 25 times in his remarks.

“We won’t do incremental improvements,” Hegseth said to some 270 attendees, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, senior Defense Department officials, and—perhaps most importantly—defense industry executives. Air & Space Forces Magazine was one of the handful of media outlets in the room for the speech, which was cordially received by most of the attendees here. 

“This is about fundamentally reshaping our approach from concept to delivery,” Hegseth said toward the end of his remarks, summing up a sweeping overview of alterations to nearly every single part of the Pentagon’s acquisitions enterprise in an address entitled “The Arsenal of Freedom.”

“We’re injecting speed and agility into every facet, ensuring that we can outpace our adversaries and maintain our technological edge in places like AI, cyber, and space,” Hegseth said. “It’s not about building a military that is not only strong, but it’s how to be adaptable, resilient, and ready to meet any challenge with a magazine depth that makes sure that any fight we choose or that which is thrust upon us is an unfair battle.”

The push for acquisition reform is not new. For decades, the Pentagon has promised to alter its sometimes cumbersome weapons purchasing enterprise, which is marked by baseline requirements for basic capabilities, extensive testing programs, and regulations designed to ensure fair competition for the nearly trillion dollars the Pentagon spends annually.

One change in emphasis this time is that Hegseth stressed the speed of getting new capabilities into the military’s hands more than a focus on cost savings. 

Hegseth said the U.S. military must be willing to accept an imperfect kit that may not meet all requirements if it can be delivered faster, be modular or updatable, or with greater competition and private investment.

The vexing issue is “not just about what we can make, it’s how much of it can we make,” Hegseth said. “It’s how much of it we can make, how quickly, and how quickly we can deliver it.”

Many of the details were previously disclosed by Air & Space Forces Magazine and other publications, but the address was the Pentagon chief’s first systematic presentation of his new acquisition philosophy. 

Hegseth’s approach, former officials and analysts said, carries the risk that the military may invest in systems that do not fully work as intended or fund multiple programs that do not pan out.

“The War Department will be ready when the time comes,” Hegseth continued, using the secondary name for the agency authorized by a Trump administration executive order. “We will have—and we will be—the arsenal for freedom.”
 
“Previous administrations have tried and failed to address these issues,” Hegseth noted, though he insisted the Trump administration would be different.

Acquisition Overhaul

Hegseth’s vision for overhauling the Pentagon’s acquisition system is the latest—and most significant—in a series of procurement reforms he’s introduced over the last year. In March, he mandated that all DOD acquisition offices apply commercial best practices to software acquisition, and in June he unveiled sweeping changes to the way the department buys and fields drones, calling for the services to achieve “drone dominance” by 2027.

More recently in August, Hegseth announced the department would scrap its cumbersome requirements process, known as the Joint Capability Integration and Development System, and replace it with a Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board.  

The Secretary’s newest reforms call for more streamlined buying practices, commercial-first acquisition approaches, and greater production capacity across the industrial base.

Hegseth’s plan for achieving greater speed involves making program offices more flexible and accountable. Along those lines, he called for the services to replace program executive offices—which manage acquisition efforts as individual, siloed programs—with a portfolio approach that is more flexible and encourages resource-sharing. 

Proponents of portfolio acquisition say the construct could provide more flexibility to move resources among programs as threats and needs evolve and more transparency into how much funding is actually required to perform certain missions. 

Hegseth called for the services to adopt commercial-first acquisition strategies and said the department will now prioritize schedule performance over compliance while also ordering programs to set iterative delivery targets that emphasize fielding technology incrementally on a more regular cadence. To hold companies accountable, DOD will introduce “portfolio scorecards” that measure performance based on how much commercial capability a program contains or whether it is meeting schedule targets.

The Pentagon will also move toward what Hegseth called “multi-track” acquisition, requiring programs to keep multiple vendors on contract for certain key technologies until initial production.

“We will foster competition, embrace modularity and pursue multi-source procurements at every opportunity, moving fast to contract, test, scale and deploy when a solution is clear,” he said.

To increase production capacity, the department is creating a Wartime Production Unit, which Hegseth said will replace the Joint Production Accelerator Cell, established in 2023 to boost weapons manufacturing capacity.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the new office will differ from the JPAC, but Hegseth noted that the unit will develop financial incentives for companies to increase production rates and delivery speed and negotiate contracts on faster timelines. 

Modernizing Foreign Military Sales

The Pentagon also has several initiatives underway to improve its foreign military sales process, which Hegseth, and others before him, have criticized as broken and ineffective.

“President Trump is securing deal after deal to bring cold, hard cash to America manufacturers, but our processes are too slow and our industrial base is too inefficient to keep up and deliver on time to our allies and partners,” he said.

Hegseth confirmed reports that oversight of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees foreign military sales and helps train allies on U.S. equipment, would shift from the Pentagon’s policy shop to its acquisition office. A tighter link to the acquisition community, Hegseth said, will help speed weapons sales to foreign governments.

Along with the DSCA realignment, the department has directed programs, as they develop acquisition strategies, to consider and incentivize exportability as part of that process. Hegseth said the Pentagon is also modernizing its IT infrastructure and working with Combatant Commands to root out inefficiencies and support faster deals.

Industry Response

Initial reactions from experts and industry to the reforms were largely positive, likely in part because they reflect similar bipartisan proposals made in recent years by Washington think tanks, former Pentagon officials, and lawmakers. The House and Senate armed services committees both have pending legislation that calls for changes to weapons buying practices that prioritize speed and increased production capacity across the defense industrial base. 

Jerry McGinn, director for the industrial base at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote Nov. 5 that there is “broad, bipartisan consensus” that the defense acquisition system is sluggish and industrial base capacity falls well short of what the U.S. military would need in conflict. 

“These reform efforts have been building over the past decade through various initiatives, such as the creation of a defense innovation ecosystem through the Defense Innovation Unit and similar organizations, as well as the congressional commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) reform, and have now reached a critical mass,” McGinn wrote.

The memo includes a detailed implementation schedule that would require the undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment to issue guidance within 45 days and the military services to submit their own plans of action within 60 days. Within that same time frame, the services must identify initial program portfolios and by the six-month mark, they must publish “portfolio scorecards” that lay out schedule-driven requirements and prioritize commercial technology integration. 

Sticking to that implementation plan will be key, McGinn said, making a nod toward past reforms that have failed due to a “lack of follow-through.” He noted that one self-inflicted constraint that could work against the department is the size of its acquisition cadre, which has shrunk amid the Trump administration’s federal workforce cuts.  

One executive, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the reforms, said that while past reform initiatives may have lacked the vision, strategy, and buy-in to succeed, Hegseth’s message and plan are clear.

“I think this administration is the best opportunity I’ve seen in my career for this to actually work,” the industry executive said. “I’ve never seen more alignment across the services up and down the ranks for this type of stuff to get implemented. … My confidence in it is growing.”

Several firms released statements with similar praise. Applied Intuition, a software and AI-focused startup, said the Pentagon’s reforms will make it easier for non-traditional companies to work with the department.

“The Department of War’s move toward an acquisition approach that mirrors commercial development is the most important step it can take to accelerate capability delivery,” Applied’s Chief Technology Officer Peter Ludwig said in a statement after Hegseth’s speech. “Modern systems evolve too quickly for bespoke development cycles.”

The Aerospace Industries Association, which represents both traditional and non-traditional defense and commercial firms, said the Pentagon’s reforms are “ambitious” and “long-needed,” and will require close collaboration to

“For this plan to work, industry and government must work closely to implement these reforms and fine-tune the details,” AIA President Eric Fanning said. “We welcome the push for innovation and the promise of real, actionable change. The defense industrial base is ready to answer the call.”