Five Proposals for Mobilization—And the History that Backs Them Up
FAI’s creative proposals for the Department of War cut through the Gordian knot of defense reform
Think tank reports rarely make for compelling reading. That’s why when we come across one that defies the genre, we have no choice but to recommend it. The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) recently published Going on Wartime Footing: Five Big Reforms for American Defense. Author Tim Hwang defines wartime footing as “a wholesale mobilization of the defense industrial base that would prepare the country for major combat operations and the prospect of a scale of conflict not seen for a generation.” As the authors of a recent book about this very topic, we agree any reforms need to match the scale of our current emergency.
From a Citizen’s Proving Ground to a Defense Acquisition Delta Force, Hwang’s proposals are ambitious. They also exist in the realm of the possible. We’re reminded of William Greenwalt’s and Dan Patt’s bold call to abolish JCIDS, the joint requirements process. It probably seemed outlandish to some, but it came to fruition just six months later under Secretary Hegseth. And like the simple proposal to kill the joint requirements process, Hwang’s reforms are legible to the lay person because they address the root causes of the dysfunction. There is no obfuscation by “experts” who propose tinkering with arcane processes at the margins.
Hwang’s reforms, while creative, are not without precedent. They may seem farfetched or too politically fraught to those who are accustomed to incremental adjustments and inaction. But history suggests that we can—and should—think bigger.
Big, Beautiful Reforms
The defense acquisition bureaucracy employs nearly 160,000 individuals across civilian and uniformed personnel. That’s about the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. What do we have to show for this shadow service? A weapons arsenal largely designed during the Cold War. While some think tanks argue that we just need more acquisition personnel, FAI argues for finding the right people via a “Defense Acquisitions Delta Force.” It may be less exciting than the real Delta Force, but it would be no less important. This “crack team of elite military officers whose purpose is to serve as an acquisitions special operations squad . . . would be tasked with the hardest defense procurement missions.” The chosen few would be up against a massive bureaucracy where inertia is the default. Success would be challenging, but possible.
America had a version of the Defense Acquisitions Delta in the late 1970s under Bill Perry, under secretary of defense for research and engineering. Perry and his small team—a delta force in spirit, if not in name—moved with purpose to acquire the capabilities for the Second Offset strategy. Within five years, stealth, GPS, and precision-guided munitions were all operational. Showing the spirit of a special operator, Perry did whatever it took to win. He circumvented the traditional and slow PPBE acquisition process, killed programs that weren’t delivering, and forced through the efforts that were. That he had no formal acquisition background was almost certainly a boon. If the Department of War (DoW) brings in Perry-quality talent, the Defense Acquisitions Delta has a real shot at success.
Adjacent to the massive acquisition bureaucracy are the resource-intensive government labs, warfare centers, FFRDCs, and more. These DoW-supported institutions compete directly with private industry. For Hwang, it’s high time we “eliminate the shadow competition.” The government competing with industry is not a new problem, just one that’s been remarkably resilient to change. Writing in 1995, Jacques Gansler, who would go on to be President Clinton’s under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, complained of the conflict of interest where the government is “both a direct competitor and the possessor of the right to decide who wins and loses.”1 The dynamic is all the more egregious because the robust private sector “offers essentially identical services.”2 Aside from truly unique areas, like nuclear weapons, Gansler generally opposed the duplicative existence of labs and FFRDCs.
Hwang finds the shadow competition least excusable when it comes to shipbuilding. The Naval Sea Command (NAVSEA) is responsible for acquiring ships and combat systems. In many cases, it also architects and builds those same vessels via its government labs and shipyards, disadvantaging a commercial industry hungry for work. Perhaps the only thing more shocking than learning China has over 200 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States is learning that NAVSEA has nearly 90,000 employees.
The shunting aside of the commercial shipbuilding industry recalls the trials and tribulations of Andrew Higgins. The outsider boatbuilder from Louisiana built over 90% of all vessels in the U.S. fleet during World War II. But first, Higgins had to go head-to-head to compete with the Navy’s Bureau of Ships (NAVSEA’s predecessor). As late as 1942, the Bureau of Ships blocked him from competition and stole his designs. It was only when Senator Harry S. Truman directly intervened that Higgins finally got the contracts he deserved. Higgins’ assessment of the shadow competition rings true today: “Nothing could be healthier for the Navy as a whole, and the country that they really desire to serve, than that there be a ‘house cleaning’ in the Bureau of Ships. It would be preferable that quite a number of officers and civilians therein go to other duties.”3 Higgins understood then, as Hwang does now, that commercial shipbuilding is a national imperative.
As a talented civilian innovator, Higgins would have been a fan of another of Hwang’s recommendations: a citizen’s proving ground. The DoW would operate a “nationwide network of munitions proving grounds on underutilized federal land, military training areas, or testing ranges.” After obtaining a license, citizens would then be able to conduct weapons and munitions testing, “particularly against defined priorities and targets set by the Pentagon.” It sounds crazy but is entirely possible and aligned with the American innovator spirit. A citizen’s proving ground is a necessary response to the democratization of weapons development via commodity hardware and commercial software and AI. As we’ve seen in Ukraine and Iran, cheap drones are now a fact of modern warfare. Critical innovation happens on a daily or weekly basis—not according to years-long procurement cycles.
While the barriers to build weapons fell, the United States doubled down on the institutionalization of defense technologies. This yielded formidable advances like stealth and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also crowded out the tinkerers and cowboys who have historically played an important role in developing new tech. Early American rocketry was defined by Robbert Goddard and the Caltech Suicide Squad. Goddard launched the first liquid-propellant rocket at his aunt’s cabbage farm in Massachusetts in 1926; when he could no longer ignore Worcester County’s disgruntled residents, he relocated to spacious New Mexico to continue his experiments. Now NASA’s premier spaceflight center is named after him.
Meanwhile, the Suicide Squad, an inexperienced group of graduate students, were busy testing rocket motors in a “semi-official manner” at Caltech. They operated with no budget and a regard for safety typical of college kids. After they were kicked out of the campus laboratory following an incident involving corrosive nitrogen tetroxide, they moved a few miles to the Arroyo Seco canyon to continue making mayhem. In 1939, General Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, paid the group a visit. He liked what he saw. The Suicide Squad promptly received an Army contract for the first jet-assisted takeoff rockets in 1939. By 1943, the group formally became known as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Today’s buttoned-up JPL belies its rag-tag origins. The early aviation and firearm industries come from similar traditions. We would do well to tap the exceptional—if unusual—talent that can be found far outside the Beltway and national labs.
Hwang provides the historical precedent for his remaining two proposals. There’s “The Billion Dollar OTA,” which would be singularly focused on “whether a company is able to deliver systems meeting defined operational metrics. If a contractor is able to meet these requirements, the government would guarantee a certain purchase volume worth billions.” The United States had such an outcomes-based budget for shipbuilding during World War II. Henry Kaiser had the freedom to innovate on mass production for his Liberty Ships because the government defined what ships it needed and committed to buying them in huge quantities. If government provides a clear demand signal and leaves innovation to industry, we can approximate the healthy dynamics of a commercial market.
The final proposal is the simplest: “The Secretary’s Firing Line.” It’s a bet on people over process. The Secretary of War would “bring together the entirety of top military leadership to directly review all legacy programs and cut ruthlessly where needed.” This is something Army Chief of Staff George Marshall implemented to great effect during World War II. He conducted regular program reviews that forced staff to rank programs and defend them. One of the results was a shift away from tank destroyer units and an expansion of armored divisions and artillery. The firing line is a highly leveraged concept the Secretary can implement today.
Every one of Hwang’s proposals has historical precedent. We know they are feasible. Now we need to discover the will to act.
Jacques S. Gansler, Defense Conversion: Transforming the Arsenal of Democracy (The Twentieth Century Fund, 1995) 116.
Gansler, Defense Conversion: Transforming the Arsenal of Democracy, 114.
Jerry E. Strahan, Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II (Louisiana State University Press, 1994) 85-86.