To commemorate the second anniversary of The Defense Reformation, I’m giving away 180 copies of my book with Madeline Hart, Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III. Claim yours here.
Two years ago this week, I published the eighteen theses of The Defense Reformation. While I didn’t literally nail them to the entrance of the Pentagon Metro, the manifesto still caused a stir. The sorry state of America’s defense industrial base and weapons procurement was an open secret; anyone who was paying attention knew the cupboard was bare, the arsenal was empty, and the acquisition process was beyond bad—it was FUBAR. All of this amounted, as I wrote, to “an undeclared state of emergency” for America.
Today, America is still in a state of emergency—but the hard work to fix it has begun. America’s limited magazine depth has gone from an obscure think tank topic to a weekly mainstream news story and an urgent political priority. If the strategic picture is still stormy, the action and progress inside the Pentagon and across America is a source of light.
To mark this Reformaversary, I want to highlight some of the wins that heretical heroes in the defense industry and at the Department of War have notched so far. I also want to talk about how to capitalize on our momentum so we have even more to celebrate next year.
The heretical heroes are just getting warmed up.
The Last Supper is Over
Two years ago, the West was scrambling to rearm after decades of deindustrialization and decline—and discovering our defense sectors were not up to the task. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had stalemated in bloody, drone-driven trench warfare, giving the world a chilling window into the future. Hamas had carried out a pogrom inside Israel and the Middle East had erupted yet again in violence. Communist China was modernizing its military, tightening the noose around Taiwan, and weaponizing its control of critical supply chains.
These events made clear that the “Last Supper” of defense consolidation was over and a new era had begun. Call it the First Breakfast.
It’s clear the trend has only accelerated. There’s no going back to the bare-bones before times, when a handful of mega-contractors dominated contracts for pretty much everything, with little competition. Where clear vulnerabilities exist, like solid rocket motors and rare earths, capital and founders are flooding the space to build new solutions. It’s not just that unprecedented levels of venture capital continue to flow into defense companies (although it’s a strong signal). Startups are delivering and leveling up.
Just a few examples: Saronic’s Corsair performed the first-known military rescue by an unmanned boat this past June—a spectacular start to the age of autonomy in shipbuilding. Hadrian is bringing its advanced manufacturing capabilities directly into Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control facility to accelerate munitions production. Anduril is building Made in USA computers and investing a mammoth $3.7 billion in a Baltimore shipyard that will make components and large-scale assemblies for the Virginia-class submarine. Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced framework agreements to acquire 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles over three years from Anduril, CoAspire, Leidos, and Zone 5, and last month the Army selected five companies, including three new entrants, to create long-range missile prototypes.
This is far from an exhaustive list, because listing all of the recent wins would be impossible. But that’s the point. Where previously there might have been one or two companies competing to deliver solid rocket motors or space launch services or satellite buses, now there’s a constellation of sophisticated new entrants fighting for their place at the table. They’re forcing legacy companies to step up their game. In some cases, they’re already winning big.
The Defense Reformation Is Real, and It’s Here
The funders and founders have shown up to the First Breakfast. Now they are joined by heretical heroes in government who are overseeing the biggest reforms of our military and defense sector in a generation.
The reform agenda starts with talent—what I often call “the primacy of people”: If you don’t have the right people in place—leaders who can inspire their teams, workers with spiky talent who are willing to speak truth to power when necessary—everything falls apart.
The last two years have been an incredibly dynamic environment for talent. Business Operators for National Defense (BOND) has brought the best executives from the private sector to the factory floors of critical weapons systems. The Army Reserve’s Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps—in which I am honored to serve as a lieutenant colonel—is connecting technology executives with the hardest military innovation challenges. Investment bankers are jumping ship from Wall Street to work for the government in new, powerful agencies like the Office of Strategic Capital and Economic Defense Unit. Project Meridian is reimagining the future of war—and it’s being led by the man who literally builds flying cars.
In each case, the Department of War is tapping the private sector’s deep well of expertise and connecting it to the military’s most critical missions. The houses of American business and defense are being reunited for the first time since the Cold War. That’s a huge victory for the country.
The infusion of new talent and new thinking has led to ambitious projects that are changing the way America innovates and fights.
One of the most ambitious is the newly announced Project Agincourt, which is charged with standing up an Autonomous Warfare Command by this time next year. The new four-star Combatant Command will lead the joint force into the future of unmanned and autonomous warfare—a shift as dramatic as any we have seen since the dawn of precision-guided weapons or even the nuclear age. In the right hands, AUTOWARCOM is precisely the sort of entity that could help break the monopsony by approximating market forces in the acquisition of autonomous systems, much as Ukraine has done to stunning effect in its drone war. Early signs are encouraging. According to the Pentagon, Project Agincourt’s leaders are building “a combat-first model that pushes procurement decisions and dollars directly to frontline warfighters.” Tightening the feedback loop for purchase and deployment of autonomous systems is precisely how the United States can stay on the right side of the innovation OODA loop.
Other initiatives are targeting bottlenecks in the defense industrial base so the United States can scale the production of munitions and other key capabilities. Start with the fun one: the Army recently announced its first-ever Manufacturing Rodeo, “a race between our industrial base partners that strains our organic industrial base, stresses the supply chain, pressures manufacturing processes, and shows us exactly where it breaks.” In essence, this is a military exercise that will subject the defense industrial base to the stress of wartime. Oftentimes the supply chain breaks with the second- and third-tier suppliers, the mom-and-pop shop. Cue the Small Business Administration rolling out generous new financing terms for America’s small factories, a critical move to incentivize investment in new technology and make the long tail of the industrial base more competitive.
All across the defense industry, new entrants and legacy contractors are moving at unheard-of speed to ramp production of munitions. Palantir has surged engineers to many of these contractors to bring cutting-edge software and AI to their supply chains and factory floors. Outdated factories are getting big upgrades; new lines are coming online. The trickle of production is becoming a flow—and with sustained commitment the flow will become a flood.
Acquisition strategy is also evolving to place a premium on production. The Drone Dominance program is a first-of-its-kind gauntlet challenge where a company’s ability to mass manufacture its drones is at the heart of the evaluation criteria. You can see the results of each challenge on a leaderboard; the program is on track to procure 200,000 drones by next year. That’s not Ukraine-level production—yet—but it’s a massive improvement on where we were even a few years ago.
The Pentagon is also slowly changing how it pays contractors. The White House has stated the obvious: cost-plus contracting makes the nation number, slower, and poorer (Thesis #2). While President Trump didn’t use those exact words, his May 2026 Executive Order stated that cost-plus “provid[es] little incentive to control costs” and that the default across the government should be fixed-price contracts.
As cost-plus contracts fall out of favor, Other Transaction Authorities (OTAs) have flourished. The department’s use of OTAs for prototyping and production agreements increased by a factor of ten from 2016 to 2024 to exceed $18 billion annually. These flexible contracting vehicles have been a lifeline for many startups that otherwise would have died on the vine waiting for dollars to pass through a years-long acquisition process. OTAs have been so successful, in fact, that there are now cries for Congress to intervene lest the Department of War become too functional.
People. Production. Paying for results. These are the core principles driving the Defense Reformation. In just two years, we’ve made progress on all three.
The Next Two Years
The forces of complacency, entropy, and bureaucracy haven’t vanished. The status quo will re-assert itself if we let up. So we have to keep our foot on the accelerator. These are the next steps reformers should take.
The next hill is the budgeting and appropriations process. The admin took big swings with the abolition of JCIDS, the restructuring of Program Executive Officers to Portfolio Acquisition Executives, and a visionary budget request. But the military still relies on five-year plans and a two-year POM process. Congress still can’t pass a budget on time. Re-programming funds still takes years. And traditional contracts and contractors still claim virtually all of the defense budget. More action is needed to close the cash chain and reward the new entrants that genuinely can compete.
In the world after JCIDS, we should also think about root-and-branch reform of the PPBE process. Bill Greenwalt was among the biggest champions of dropping a bomb on JCIDS. Now he proposes killing the PPBE process in much the same way. Per Bill, “It’s in the authority of the department to do that. They can formulate the way they want to do the budget in any way they want to.” It’s hard to think of a worse way to budget than PPBE, which was the product of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids and which attempts to centrally plan for futures that are fundamentally un-plannable. A new approach that embraces contingency, uncertainty, and flexibility is badly needed.
Most importantly, for all the progress we have made on production: America still needs scale. There are technology challenges and supply chain bottlenecks, but mainly we need more competitive opportunities with real production orders attached to them. Too many of our most important weapons systems are effectively government-sanctioned monopolies on taxpayer-funded designs from the Cold War. If the Department of War broadcasts clear performance requirements, is not prescriptive on the how, and guarantees production orders, we will see well-capitalized new entrants show up with competitive offerings. SpaceX did it with space launch—new entrants can do it with missiles, too, if the right incentives are in place.
Keep Rolling
Two years ago, The Defense Reformation was a voice crying in the wilderness. The enemies of the West were on the march, yet the realization that deterrence had failed and we were unprepared to regain it had not sunk in.
But a lot can change in two years. The most inspiring thing I’ve seen is Americans from across the country, from all walks of life, rising to meet this challenge—as they have from 1776 to today. They’re building workflows, scaling and funding companies, and confronting the many-headed Hydra of the monopsony from inside government.
To all these reformers, patriots, and heretical heroes: your nation thanks you.
Grab your copy of Mobilize, read it, and get back in the fight for your country’s future.
180 free copies of Mobilize, with free shipping to deliverable U.S. addresses only. One per person. The offer begins Thursday, October 29, 2026, at 9am EDT. We may make additional copies available and will update this page if we do.