Defense &
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Defense &
National Security

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Hegseth promises faster weapons buying with sweeping reforms

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday unveiled a sweeping overhaul to how the Pentagon buys weapons, a restructuring aimed at having the U.S. military more quickly acquire new technology.

© Jeon Heon-Kyun/Pool Photo via AP

Addressing industry leaders and military officials at the National War College in Washington, D.C., Hegseth detailed his vision for the Defense Acquisition System, which he said is now renamed to the “Warfighting Acquisitions System.”

“We need acquisition and industry to be as strong and fast as our war fighters,” Hegseth said. “The Warfighting Acquisition System will dramatically shorten timelines, improve and expand the defense industrial base, boost competition and empower acquisition officials to take risks and make trade-offs.”

He added: “We’re leaving the old, failed process behind, and will instead embrace a new agile and results-oriented approach that used to take sometimes — when you add it up with requirements — three to eight years, we believe can happen within a year.”

The reforms target what the Trump administration sees as an unacceptably slow procurement process, with officials blaming bureaucracy and misaligned incentives that have hindered the military’s ability to get new technology into the hands of warfighters quickly.

The overhaul follows an executive order signed by President Trump in April, titled “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base,” that argued the U.S. “must deliver state‐of‐the‐art capabilities at speed and scale through a comprehensive overhaul of this system.”

“At times we’ve been too damn slow to respond,” Hegseth said of buying weapons. “What we’re doing today marks a new horizon for how we acquire and deliver warfighting capabilities. We’re prioritizing speed, flexibility, competition and calculated risk taking.”

A six-page draft memo on the changes titled “Transforming the Warfighting Acquisition System,” leaked earlier this week, details the changes, which are on a tight timeline to be completed within two years.

The plan aims to reform existing program executive offices at the Pentagon into new Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs), who will have direct authority over major weapons programs and answer to their “Service Acquisition Executive” with “no intermediate offices or approval layers.”

Hegseth said on Friday that PAEs will be the “single accountable official” for portfolio outcomes and have the authority to “act without running through months or even years of approval chains and they’ll be held accountable to deliver results.”

Hegseth also announced that the Pentagon is establishing a “wartime production unit” that he says will focus on “transforming how we accelerate the delivery of critical capabilities to our war fighters” and the team will “manage and execute direct support for our top acquisition production priorities to ensure that we have the best minds in the business.”

Another major change that the Pentagon chief unveiled is that the department will not have to be jammed by the so-called “vendor lock,” having to use the original contractor.

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