War Footing
The Secretary of War's speech was a rallying cry. Reformers must heed it.
I was in the audience last week for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “Arsenal of Freedom” speech at National Defense University. It was a rallying cry from a leader who is fully sold on the need for action and change—and who needs our help now to get the job done. The heroes and heretics left the room fired up and ready to go. The enemies of change left in a cold sweat: the Defense Reformation is happening, and the call is coming from inside the house.
Briefly, here are some thoughts on Secretary Hegseth’s speech, what it got right, and what we need to do to execute on the vision.
The Pentagon Is Hitting the Accelerator
The speech’s overarching theme is that the Pentagon and America’s defense industrial base are moving too slowly to rebuild our military and restore deterrence. This won’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog, but it is refreshing to hear the problem discussed so bluntly from Pentagon leaders.
“At times, we’ve been too damn slow to respond” to modern threats, Secretary Hegseth said. The reforms he announced during his speech, contained in three new memos, are aimed at putting America’s military on a “wartime footing” and making speed the yardstick of success. “Speed to delivery is now our organizing principle,” he declared. Eliminating JCIDS and reforming the joint requirements process is a part of that effort. Shaking up program offices and enforcing commercial buying are other key ingredients.
The tempo of an organization is set at the top. Hegseth is setting a brisk pace for other reformers in the building to follow.
With Great Opportunity Comes Great Responsibility
I was also heartened by Secretary Hegseth’s charge to defense contractors and private industry: “you are our only hope,” and the Pentagon is open for business—for companies that can actually deliver.
He listed all the ways the Pentagon has been a bad customer (I would say, a monopsonist) through “limited competition, vendor lock, cost-plus contracts, stressed budgets, and frustrating protests,” all of which have made the defense sector “unlike any other market.” Hegseth aims to fix these problems by buying commercial and giving companies of all sizes predictability and opportunities to profit.
But with great opportunity comes great responsibility. This wasn’t a love-in for the primes, and Hegseth warned that contractors will be accountable for results. Contractors must clean their own houses: invest their own money in R&D and industrial capacity, “hire based on merit, not some garbage ideological standard,” win by fielding the best technology, not the best teams of lobbyists. The primes have to transform, or else “fade away.”
Opportunity plus accountability. That’s the golden mean between a Pentagon that’s too miserly and too chummy with industry to get the best technology.
Empowering the Heretical Heroes
What impressed me most, though, was Hegseth’s recognition of what I call the primacy of people. If there’s one lesson I’ve been hammering on this blog, it’s that moving boxes around on an org chart means little if you don’t identify and empower leaders who actually want to see things change.
The secretary announced two changes that address this imperative. The first is the creation of “Portfolio Acquisition Executives,” or PAEs, who “will be the single accountable official for portfolio outcomes, and will have the authority to act without running through months or even years of approval chains.” The Pentagon is putting the pebble in the right shoe, ensuring that authority and accountability for program success flow to a single person with a face and a nameplate on the door. The second is the creation of “four-year minimum terms with two year extensions” for key program and portfolio leaders, with “incentives to competition, capability delivery time, and mission outcomes.” No more two-years-and-out. No more musical chairs. Leaders should stay with a program long enough for their career—and yes, their reputation—to be linked to the success or failure of that program.
Secretary Hegseth’s speech was a battle cry for the heretical heroes in defense. And as he stressed, “These are not just words. We’ve already done a lot of the work.” He’s right. This blog has covered the avalanche of paper coming out of the White House and OSD.
Paper is a precondition for success in a bureaucratic war, but paper cuts aren’t deadly enough to win one. As the secretary knows, the hard work of execution and implementation are still ahead of us. He opened his speech by paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, who believed many of the same things about defense reform 25 years ago. Rumsfeld couldn’t get it done, and he’s not alone. History books are littered with would-be reformers who went into the belly of the beast—and got chewed up and spit out. (You can read about that in my forthcoming book with Madeline Hart, Mobilize.)
But the fact that this is a hard problem isn’t an excuse for inaction, cynicism, and despair. Secretary Hegseth deserves praise for accepting the challenge and hoisting the Jolly Roger of reform.
The heretical heroes will have to hang together in order to succeed. Enemies of change, in the building and out, will try every trick in the book to bog down reforms in bureaucratic trench warfare. Reformers need to treat the secretary’s speech as a rallying cry for the tough road ahead. Heretical public servants in the Department of War need to link up with like-minded builders, scholars, and policy experts on the outside. We need to share what we’re seeing, coordinate our actions, and fight to keep the initiative. This needs to stay as a war of maneuver, not a war of attrition.
The secretary said our actions will determine whether we’re living in 1939 or 1981. I’d add that they will determine whether this moment is The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi.
Whether or not we heed this rallying cry, unite, and push for real change will determine whether dreams of reform get frozen in carbonite for another quarter-century, or whether the rebels blow up the Death Star and build something better in its place.