In February, Bill Greenwalt and Dan Patt offered the new administration blunt advice for dealing with the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), the Pentagon mega-bureaucracy that slows the delivery of equipment to our warfighters: “Burn it down.” (First Breakfast wrote about Greenwalt and Patt’s white paper on JCIDS, “Required to Fail,” here.)
Bill and Dan got results. In April, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum calling for a review of JCIDS within 180 days, among other worthy reforms.
Now that review is complete—months ahead of schedule. Secretary Hegseth has issued another memo ordering “the disestablishment of JCIDS,” a halt to the joint requirements process, and the overhaul of how the Armed Forces identify what technology and equipment they need.
SECDEF didn’t actually say “burn it down”—but he might as well have. The point of eliminating JCIDS, he writes, is to initiate “decisive change” that will allow the military to act “with urgency.” Lest anyone misunderstand the intent, he also writes, “[i]n carrying out these actions, no new review layers or other bureaucratic processes that may impede timely fielding of new technologies or capabilities will be created.” The point is delivering capability at the speed of relevancy. Anything that impedes that goal has to go.
This order is the latest broadside in the Defense Reformation. It’s a stunning vindication of a point I’ve been hammering now for years: even in as byzantine and broken a bureaucracy as the Pentagon, change is possible—if we insist on change. What it takes is a few heretical heroes who are willing to ask the question, “what if we actually tried to win?”, and a few leaders with the agency and authority to act on that question.
JCIDS’s obituary isn’t a story about process (although of course there was plenty of box-checking, memo-writing, and process speed-running involved—this is the government, after all). It’s a story about the power of people. Precious few thought JCIDS could be deleted. It was the system. It was an immovable object. It was managerialism—documenting our decline in triplicate. JCIDS was merely a few decades old, yet institutional inertia and force of habit reified it into a fact of life, as permanent-seeming as the Pentagon itself.
If you doubt this, consider the parade of vice chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who knew that JCIDS was broken, over many years and many presidents... but who didn’t fix the problem. Greenwalt and Patt document no fewer than 10 attempts at reform. General “Hoss” Cartwright said that JCIDS had “been gamed to death,” and that “we’re going to throw it away.” Admiral Sandy Winnefeld tried to downsize JROC and expedite joint requirements paperwork. General Paul Selva tried to get combatant commands involved and accelerate the timeline from setting a requirement to starting a program of record. General John Hyten tried to update JCIDS’s “industrial age model” for the information age. Admiral Christopher Grady tried to impose a top-down approach. Congress, jaded from endless promises and little follow-through, tinkered with its own series of reforms. With the possible exception of Cartwright, everyone accepted JCIDS as an inevitability. No one acted to end it.
Until now.
Defense Reformers can take a well-deserved victory lap for getting this done. That’s the point of this post. But we can’t get complacent. It’s one thing to announce a reform and another to execute it. (Greenwalt and Patt know this well, from their many papers documenting well-intentioned changes, like the DoD 5000 series, that ultimately backfired.) Strong leadership and unceasing forward motion are necessary to ensure the bureaucracy doesn’t settle into familiar grooves and revive the Spirit of JCIDS in new guises.
Now, the services will bear greater responsibility for creating the requirements for their technology and equipment, bypassing the JCIDS process at the beginning. SECDEF has ordered the service secretaries to review their requirements processes to “expedite outcomes, strengthen force design, enhance industry engagement, and enable experimentation-led approaches.” The results of those reviews will be critical to success. As Greenwalt points out, getting combatant commands and industry involved in a meaningful way will also be important.
The most vital thing, though, is not getting sucked back into the quicksand of “process.” Moving boxes around on the org chart is often mistaken for progress. But process is not progress—it’s the illusion of progress. The fundamental reason JCIDS deserved to die is because it created a labyrinth of process that preoccupied countless patriots with busywork instead of real work. We got rid of the process to empower our people so they can go forth and conquer. We need to stay vigilant and ensure our actions are always oriented toward that goal.
The good news: the events of the past six months prove we have the people in place to push for dramatic, rapid change. The heretical heroes are in the driver’s seat. Let’s keep our foot on the accelerator.