‘Speed to Capability’: Hegseth’s Plan to Change How the Pentagon Buys Tech

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Friday touted a new “commercial-first” acquisition model designed to accelerate delivery of emerging technology to warfighters. The overhaul, he outlined in a speech at the National War College in Washington, D.C., emphasizes speed, competition and accountability across the Defense Industrial Base.

“The Department of War will only do business with industry partners that share our priority of speed and volume above all else and who are willing to surge American manufacturing at the speed of ingenuity to deliver rapidly and reliably for our war fighters,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth told defense industry leaders and top military brass that “speed to capability delivery is now our organizing principle” in an urgent push to modernize the U.S. military and inject cutting-edge technology into the hands of warfighters.

At the center of the reforms is the disestablishment of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) — a 20-year-old framework for defining military requirements that has long been criticized for moving “at the speed of paperwork, not war.”

In its place, the department will adopt a Key Operational Problems (KOPs) approach, empowering the services to identify and prioritize their most urgent capability needs while the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) focuses on a short list of joint operational priorities.

The plan’s focus areas include:

• Disestablish the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS): Eliminates the decades-old system for setting requirements.
• Shift to Key Operational Problems (KOPs): Replaces the old requirements process, focusing the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) on prioritizing the most pressing operational problems for the Joint Force.
• Create Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs): Replaces traditional PEOs with new executives who have direct, streamlined authority over mission-based program portfolios to accelerate decision-making.
• “Commercial-First” Mandate: Requires adopting commercial practices and defaults to agile contracting methods to rapidly integrate non-traditional tech firms.
• “Two-to-Production” Standard: Mandates that acquisition programs maintain at least two qualified sources for critical content until initial production to increase industrial capacity and supply chain resilience.
• Portfolio Scorecards and Time-Indexed Incentives: Introduces new metrics to track delivery schedules and initial operational capability, rewarding companies for early delivery and penalizing delays proportionally.
• Accredited Test Pipelines: Establishes a system for continuous, iterative updates to hardware and software without having to revalidate the entire system, crucial for AI and cyber integration.

Hegseth said the new plan would pivot the Pentagon away from a compliance-driven culture toward decisive, technology modernization where urgency is the default.

He framed his speech around a concept outlined in a 2001 Donald Rumsfeld speech: That the American military’s greatest adversary is the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.

“This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning,” Hegseth said. “It attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of our men and women in uniform at risk.”

The End of JCIDS

Defense experts and industry leaders have said that disestablishing JCIDS has been long overdue.

“We had a system that essentially penalized speed, rewarded complexity and institutionalized inefficiency,” Hegseth said. “When we look back at the decades of delays and cost overruns, it forces us to ask a painful but necessary question, one that a great warrior once posed: ‘Who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?’ We were the fool who followed a broken process for too long. Today, that following ends.”

In place of JCIDS, the Pentagon is implementing a streamlined governance model that pushes requirements-setting authority back to the individual military services. The Joint JROC will no longer validate detailed component-level requirements. Instead, it will focus on identifying and ranking a small, prioritized number of KOPs facing the joint force annually. This shift empowers each service to drive its own technological needs.

The plan establishes two new entities to ensure technology and funding align with these problems. A new Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB), led by the vice chairman and the deputy secretary of defense, will tie operational priorities directly to budget decisions, granting critical fiscal flexibility to address urgent capability needs.

Furthermore, a new Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA) will work directly with industry, refining requirements through rapid experimentation and ensuring integrated solutions are delivered at scale.

New Portfolio Acquisition Executive Model

At the core of the modernization effort is a new structure to rapidly integrate emerging technology, including AI, drones, cyber effects and advanced counter-UAS systems. The reforms will reorganize existing program executive offices (PEOs) into portfolio acquisition executives, or PAEs, he said.

“The acquisition chain of authority will run directly from the program manager to the PAE. Each PAE will be the single accountable official for portfolio outcomes and have the authority to act without months or even years of approval chains,” he said.

These PAEs will oversee consolidated program offices based on mission types, receiving delegated authority to make cost and performance trade-offs that directly favor rapid fielding and on-time delivery, Hegseth said. The acquisition chain will run directly from program managers to these portfolio heads to the service acquisition executive.

Hegseth added that the PAE model is central to the Trump administration’s “commercial-first” contracting mandate, which seeks to mimic the speed of the private sector. Further guidance will significantly expand the use of agile contracting vehicles, specifically other transaction authorities (OTAs) and commercial solutions openings (CSOs). The policy encourages faster partnerships with tech startups and enables the department to leverage private-sector R&D and investment, Hegseth added.

“We will bring in a wide variety of the nation’s most talented experts to advise on industrial production optimization,” Hegseth said.

To further promote competition and secure the supply chain for critical technology, the new system will require a “two-to-production standard,” mandating that acquisition programs maintain at least two qualified sources for all “critical program content” until initial production. This initiative reduces single-source bottlenecks, increases industrial base capacity and secures the scalability necessary for fielding thousands of American-made systems, such as low-cost drones.

Accountability and Incentives

The new plan will focus on accountability to institutionalize a culture of speed. This means tracking programs using “portfolio scorecards” with primary metrics focused on prototyping, delivery schedules, and initial operational capability.

Contracting will include “time-indexed incentives” that reward companies for early delivery while proportionally penalizing delays.

“Far too many of our systems are not available to fight right now as they languish in depots and shipyards for repairs and maintenance or wait years for parts in the prime contractor to repair the system,” Hegseth said. “Results will be clear and drive improvement, and everyone is responsible for raising opportunities for improvement.”

Hegseth underscored the urgency of the moment, noting that the rapidly accelerating pace of China’s military modernization, combined with lessons from the war in Ukraine, demands an immediate overhaul.

“If we must, we will go to war with the military and equipment we have, and we will win,” Hegseth said. “Our warfighters are depending on us, and we cannot fail.”