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Military acquisition reform has important backing
Comprehensive acquisition reform proposed by the Trump administration has broad and bipartisan backing. Designed to strengthen both the military itself and its supporting defense industrial base (DIB), the initiative as outlined in Defense Department documents issued in November has been long in gestation.
Among those championing the reforms: Mac Thornberry, the former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and advisor to Amazon Leo for Government. The Texas Republican retired from Congress a few years ago but remains active in defense and procurement reforms – issues he pushed for during his congressional days.
Looking at the community of suppliers to the Defense Department, Thornberry said in a recent interview, reform must do more than ease a few Federal Acquisition Regulation rules. That’s because of the mass of what constitutes the DIB.
“I think that the defense industrial base is far broader than we’ve thought about before,” he said. That is, it goes wider and deeper than the large, prime contractors who make airplanes, ships and tanks.
“Now it includes everything from communications and batteries and minerals to space and cyber. There are more players than there have ever been before,” Thornberry said.
More than the breadth of the DIB favors reform, though, according to Thornberry. A perhaps more important factor is the innovation coming in so many technologies from the private sector – innovation often aimed at commercial use but which also proves essential for the deterrence and lethality of U.S. forces.
“It used to be that the government would be the leader in making the best tank or the best ship or the best fighter jet,” Thornberry said. “But now it’s often private industry that is the best at artificial intelligence or quantum or a lot of things in space.” Ergo, “If private industry is the best at making a lot of the stuff we need to protect the country, relationships have to evolve between government and industry and also among allies.”
Add in the speed at which the technology front is moving, and the need for faster, more streamlined acquisition becomes more pronounced. In the Cold War era, much innovation was sparked by defense needs in the first place – things like stealth coatings, radar guidance and revolutionary energetics. Now, Thornberry points out, innovations occur whether the Defense Department takes two weeks or two decades to acquire them and turn them into capabilities for troops.
Thornberry cited still another factor in favor of acquisition reform: “How interconnected it all is. We tend to think of the separate military services, separate domains, separate theaters around the globe,” he said. “In a way, it’s all interconnected, one global theater right now, especially when you talk about space and cyber.”
The result? “We can’t just fall back on the way we’ve done things in the past,” Thornberry said. “We’ve got to change. Partnership is the key word. It must not just be a label. It’s got to be a reality for us to take advantage of everything that the best in the country can produce.”
Make room for space
Among the policy updates the administration emphasizes is greater use of the very commercial technologies driving the economy. Much commercial innovation occurs in space, specifically in the burgeoning technologies of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Competing vendors, including Amazon Leo, have launched hundreds of small LEO satellites that robustly fill a missing link in the worldwide communications network.
As for defense, Thornberry said, “The only way we can do a lot of what needs to be done for the country’s national security is in and from space.” The LEO capacity stands as a case in point for the need to more readily adopt commercial technologies.
“If you’re going to provide the best that the whole country can produce for the benefit of the war fighter,” Thornberry said, “you’ve got to take advantage of that commercial part of space.”
He added, “I’ve been surprised, as I have left government, at how much investment is going into space, from both the companies and the investment community.”
Two advantages of technology pursued by multiple companies are the resulting levels of competition and the resiliency of not depending on a sole supplier.
“That is true in space as well,” Thornberry said. “If you’re going to rely on commercial space providers, as we must, then you’ve got to make sure you have the resilience of multiple providers.”
In fact, he said, the Defense Department needs greater supplier diversity in all of the domains in which it operates.
“We’re not going to have one company or two or three companies that are going to solve all our national security issues,” Thornberry said. “We need to have this diverse ecosystem with partnerships of various kinds.”
He added, “And that’s especially true, I think, in space.”
Within the ecosystem of suppliers and technologies in space, Thornberry said, the government will require disparate systems to interconnect. He cited Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reference to modular, open systems architecture.
That means, Thornberry said, “you can have different capabilities, but they have an interface that means you can put a plug in whatever sort of capability you need to; and that interface is something that’s available to everybody.”
The open systems approach, which he said Congress tried and ultimately failed to codify a few years back, is now needed for projects such as the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) project and the Golden Dome missile protection program. Both Defense initiatives are essentially integrations of multiple existing systems and capabilities.
Acquisition for speed
Space has become a highly contested environment, Thornberry said.
“Anything that is valuable is threatened and gets under attack,” he said, “and we see adversaries doing that. They have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. We’re seeing a whole variety of capabilities to deny us the advantages of space.”
Moreover, this is happening “at an incredibly fast rate,” he said. It all gets to a key goal of acquisition reform. Hegseth “talked about the importance of speed, and I do agree that that is a characteristic we have not placed at the top of the pecking order, but we have to now.”
That includes the speed at which commercial technologies get adapted and turned into capabilities. Thornberry called Ukraine and its war with Russia a masterclass in agility afforded by speed of adaptation.
“Ukraine can adjust their drones with a week’s time,” he said. “We’ve got to get better at adapting to meet the circumstances and working through commercial providers is the only way that can happen.”
Ukraine shows what’s possible and needed everywhere.
“A few years ago, it became clear that adversaries were moving at an incredible rate to improve their capability,” Thornberry said. “At the same time, technology in general was advancing at an amazing rate.” He noted that the Pentagon had programs here and there to speed technology adoption. These include the Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force’s Kessel Run.
Thornberry said those efforts produced results, but not systemically. He said there’s evidence of resistance deep within the bureaucracy then and now. Therefore, he said, the latest effort to reform acquisition throughout the Defense Department requires comprehensive adoption to succeed.
“The tendency is to do things the way we’ve always done them. If we do that, we will not be able to defend the nation,” he said.
Besides speed, the acquisition system must produce a market attractive to companies in the first place, Thornberry said.
The old-line defense companies have learned the existing system, “and they’ve done some pretty innovative things in limited spheres,” he said. “But they’re oriented towards the rules and requirements that the current process gives them.”
By expanding use of other transactional authority (OTA) and, as Thornberry put it, letting off some of the procurement shackles, more defense-focused innovation would flow from commercial companies and startups.
Equally crucial, the Pentagon must find a way to send clear and consistent demand signals to maintain the attractiveness of the defense sector to the investment world.
“They need to have some wins. It doesn’t mean everybody wins, but these folks need to see that there is the potential for a profit in making these investments,” Thornberry said.
He added, “The purpose of all this is to get the very best that the whole country can produce into the hands of the war fighters so they can defend the country.”
As for acquisition reform, Thornberry said, “Will the investors continue to invest? Will the commercial companies be willing to work in defense? Is there a chance for startups to earn enough business to stay in business? All of that is yet to be determined.”
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