Acting Army Secretary Touts Service’s ‘Symbiotic’ Relationship with Industry

Adam Telle left no doubt about the future of the Army’s current quest for commercial technology Monday — it’s decidedly here to stay.

“When someone tells you the Army’s biggest acquisition program is this tank or that helicopter or this missile system, tell them they’re wrong,” said Telle, the acting Army secretary at the Association of the U.S. Army conference. “The largest acquisition program in the Army is building a system of seamless, frictionless, symbiotic relationship with American ingenuity.”

Hailing the War Department’s recent acquisition reform policies, Telle said the Army’s path to innovating with speed now runs through the commercial sector, adding the Pentagon is moving away from what he dubbed the bureaucratic “compound self-interest” of the legacy acquisition system toward an acquisition partnership that can ramp to meet demand.

“The idea here is when faced with a 50-50 decision, well-meaning bureaucrats choose the side of the coin that reduces their own risk, that benefits themselves or their organization. That’s human nature,” he said. “But the problem comes in over the course of a thousand such 50-50 decisions, that self-interest compounds in each decision. Pretty soon, bureaucracies mutating into self-serving shadows of their former selves. Their mission becomes mission creep.”

To speed up acquisition cycles, the DOW in 2025 overhauled acquisition policies away from program-specific leadership and toward portfolio account executives (PAE) that oversee a range of interconnected capabilities.

The Pentagon has opened new avenues of communication to better engage commercial and non-traditional contractors, with Telle touting the Army’s FUZE innovation engine and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) marketplace as examples of its fast and iterative prototyping practices.

Next year, Telle said, the service will be testing some of those acquisition practices, launching in 2027 what he called a “manufacturing rodeo” that will serve “as a race between our industrial base partners” as part of an effort to have greater control over the defense supply chain by onshoring more of it in the U.S.

“Take a basic attack drone, we need to make millions of these. It may look simple, but it’s a flying supply chain. A supply chain we don’t control enough of,” he said. “If somebody else controls one part, they can break the whole thing. If we control the parts, we control the pace.”

Telle did not offer much detail on what the initiative would entail, but said it is meant to “strain” both the defense and national industrial base in an effort to find the weak links.

“We’re going to stress test the supply chain, the manufacturing processes and see where it breaks,” he said. “We’re going to learn by doing, not by sitting around postulating at the Pentagon. We’re going to find the weak links, make them stronger and we’re going to keep iterating.”

Citing the World War II development of the Jeep, which first emerged as a military vehicle before becoming a commercial one, Telle said the polarities of innovation have since reversed toward the commercial sector.

He cited the Army’s M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle as an example. The ISV is made by GM Defense and derives its design from a modified Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 truck, which Telle said typifies the advantages of engaging commercial industry.

“Sure, we had to adapt it for Army use, but it was acquired around Army volume, speed, manufacturability. It’s supply chain realities,” he said. “Could the Army have developed a more capable vehicle, starting with a blank piece of paper? Maybe, but it would have costs more than $1 million a copy, it would take more than a decade to field, we’d have to build a bespoke assembly line full of bespoke tooling, and I guarantee you that soldier couldn’t access its supply chain by simply stopping into a local AutoZone or its equivalent overseas.”

Telle said that the pivot toward embracing more commercial technology has allowed the Army to develop new tools quickly, whether they be low-cost interceptor missiles or UAS systems, and the interoperability afforded by designing them using open architecture reflects a new contracting reality for the service.

“Because if we are sitting at the Pentagon, trying to guess what to buy to address the next evolution of warfare, that’s a really nice thing to do,” he said. “But if we are acquiring a partnership that can adapt and iterate to any future, that’s permanent strategic advantage.”