Transcription
Hey everybody, please be seated. Thanks for coming. I used to do things like this without this, but at 65, I'm getting a little forgetful, so I got it here.
Anyway, um, I'm here to give an introduction, um, for Secretary Hexath, who today is going to talk about, um, how he's going to lead us in the transformation of the Pentagon, how we, how we do things there.
Um, I'd also, um, uh, like to thank our great president, President Trump, for giving me the opportunity to serve our great nation. I mean, he's an incredible change agent, all the amazing things he's doing so quickly. And, uh, in that spirit, um, he has set the tone for all of us. And our secretary, from day one, uh, has set such a great tone, a tone of warrior ethos, um, launching our goals to transform our department from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, to really substantially improve our readiness, our fighting capabilities, our culture, all of our capabilities, and to really be exceptional.
Now, servicemen under the secretary's leadership are really driving towards that goal. But now, it's time for the Pentagon, for our civilian employees, and for our contractors to do the same, to take on this fight with a wartime philosophy, with the same culture and urgency, both on acquisition, programming, and capabilities. It's super really important for our success. We're in the fight of our lives. We're against competition that's never been stronger, who are advancing rapidly, who are advancing urgently, and already have possessed great capabilities. We simply got to do better on our side of it.
Secretary will talk today about this transformation. Um, he has set the tone of a change culture in the Pentagon. It's through his, quite frankly, inspirational leadership that's enabled us civilians to really be able to do something different, to change, to be better, and that's our job. It has to come from the Pentagon, our people, as well as the contractors.
Um, the Pentagon is run well. Leadership is solid. The culture is good. The teamwork and partnership is is exceptional. But we do things in a very old manner, in a slow manner, and a bureaucratic manner. And we must change that. Similarly, our contractors often mirror us with some of the same issues and problems. Um, our contractors need to change and do better. The contracts that contractors are willing to change with us will prosper and grow. Those who don't and resist it will be gone.
I think that, um, I can't emphasize how much and how important it is for us not to fall behind. I'm 65 years old, so I've seen a few things, and I can tell you, after that experience, it's an absolute honor to serve underneath, working for the secretary. It's an honor to serve under his command, and I think he's setting the tone, as you'll hear today, for the changes that we need to make, and that we will make, and will succeed with.
Our military, all of our service people, everyone around it. Americans need us at the Pentagon, and our civilians and our contractors, to do better. We can't fail. We can't make excuses. We must succeed. Let's get at it.
With that, Mr. Secretary, can you please come and speak to us? Thank you, sir. Please take your seats.
Well, members of Congress, Deputy Secretary Fineberg, this would not happen without you, without him, without what he's led. Today is not possible, and the reforms you're going to hear about today are not possible. Mr. Chairman, members of the Joint Chiefs, secretaries of our military departments, Under Secretary Duffy, as well, without what h has happened at ANS, this is not possible either. Acquisition professionals, corporate leaders, distinguished officials from the Department of War, defense industry officials. Good afternoon and welcome. A lot of you came a long way for this, uh, and we are grateful that you took the time to be here with us right now. We think this topic is that important for the future of our nation.
Today, I'd like to talk to you about an adversary that poses a threat, a very serious threat to the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating in five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continent, 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.
Perhaps this sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is long gone. The foe I'm talking about is more subtle and implacable. You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world, but their day too is almost certainly passed. And they cannot match the size and strength of this adversary. Nor am I talking about the Chinese Communist Party. The adversary I'm talking about is much closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the process. Not the civilians, but the system. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that is too often imposed on them.
In the Pentagon, despite this era of scarce resources taxed by mounting threats, money disappears into duplicative duties and bloated bureaucracy. Not because of greed, but because of gridlock. Innovation is stifled not by ill intent, but by institutional inertia. Just as we must transform America's military capability to meet changing threats, we must transform the way department works and what it works on. We must build a department where each of the dedicated people here, especially the true entrepreneurs and innovators from our industrial base, can apply their immense talents to defend America, where they have the resources, access, information, and freedom to perform. Our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business.
The modernization of the Department of Defense is a matter of immense urgency. In fact, it's not an exaggeration to say that it's a matter of life and death, ultimately of every American.
Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. The speech so far is not my own. Those words are practically verbatim from a speech given by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on September 10th, 2001. A near carbon copy, 24 years later. Now, the world changed the day after he gave that speech on 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. As a result, Secretary Rumsfeld never quite had the full opportunity to implement many of his reforms. To quote him or paraphrase him again, "We went to war with the army we had, not the army he or we wanted."
Today, the need for Pentagon transformation, not just reform, is even more urgent than it was when Secretary Rumsfeld spoke those words nearly a quarter century ago. And his words are just as true now as they were then. The threat environment we face is advanced and multifaceted. Technologies evolving at an accelerated pace. The information landscape has become increasingly segmented and personal and exploited by our enemies. Many of our adversaries, as you know, don't wear uniforms and use civilians as human shields. Our enemies often activate under the threshold of armed conflict, the gray zone, and intend to destroy us from within. The world seems smaller and more familiar, yet at the same time more complex.
As I alluded to in my Quantico speech a few weeks ago, today we're undertaking a department-wide transformation of requirements, acquisition, and foreign military sales. Addressing a core function of what we do at the War Department, identifying what our war fighters need, how we buy those capabilities, and then how we share those capabilities with our allies and partners, all in service of decisively winning any war that we must wage.
For too long, our department has been hampered by a bureaucracy bogged down by burdensome and inefficient processes, paralyzed by impossible risk thresholds, and distracted by agendas that have nothing to do with war fighting. Naturally, such a system gives rise to a certain culture within the organization, and people adapt to that culture in order to thrive within it. The institution shapes the individuals as much as the individuals shape the institution. It becomes mutually reinforcing, and over time, the prevailing pattern becomes more and more entrenched, risk-averse, and immovable to the point that the whole psychology of the department is stuck in a system in which process, not outcomes, matter the most.
Previous administrations have tried and failed to address these issues, seeking to go around the process rather than confront it head-on, leaving our military and our industrial base weaker as a result. The department's perverted process has in turn fostered a culture in today's defense industrial base that makes it unlike any other American market, uniquely tailored to the Pentagon in the worst way. Unstable demand signals, uncertain projections, and volatile customer base has caused the defense industry to adapt, adopt, excuse me, the same entrenched, risk-averse, and lethargic culture that we have in government. The result: an absence of urgency, a fear in of innovation, and a fundamental lack of trust between the military customer and our limited, more limited than it should be, defense industrial base.
What's worse, the defense industry financially benefits from our backwards culture. Schedule overruns, huge order backlogs, and too predictable cost increases become the norm. Our military and our taxpayers need a defense industrial base that it can count on to scale with urgency in a crisis, not one that is content to wait for money before taking urgent action. This relates to the whole industrial base and most importantly to the large primes that we do business with today. These large defense primes need to change to focus on speed and volume and invest their own capital to get there. If we do that, the Department of War is of course big-time supportive of profits. We are capitalists after all. But if they do not, those big ones will fade away.
We've all heard this sort of talk before. Transformation of our acquisition process is a war of attrition. A war that we intend to win day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. I'm telling you, Fineberg and Duffy won't stop. It is, it's been the department's fault for far too long that we're in this predicament. And it will take a focused and sustained effort to succeed. And succeed we must. We will no longer ignore the plank in our own eye.
The goal of this speech is not to name and shame people or companies or departments. Many of you have done important and patriotic work for our nation and this department for years. Many for decades. But rather, I wanted the opportunity to look you, my fellow patriots, straight in the eye and tell you how important you are. You will determine whether we deliver for our war fighters. You will determine whether we win our next war. Either you, our companies, our industries, our defense industrial base, deliver. It is literally life or death.
Every dollar squandered on redundancy, bureaucracy, and waste is a dollar that could be used to outfit and supply the war fighter. We must wage an all-out campaign to streamline the Pentagon's process, to unshackle our people from unproductive work, and to shift our resources from the bureaucracy to the battlefield. Our objective is simple: transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing, to rapidly accelerate the fielding of capabilities, and focus on results. Our objective is to build, rebuild the arsenal of freedom.
American industry and its innovative spirit are begging to be unleashed to solve our most complex and dangerous warfighting problems. We need to get out of our own way, out of your way, and enter into real partnership with you rather than overprescribe and decelerate your natural progress. In turn, industry needs to perceive business with the Department of War from the perspective of growth and assume risk to partner with the United States. Speed and a focus on outcomes are fundamental to successful deterrence. Our war fighters require the depth of capabilities to deter any aggression and, if necessary, decisively defeat any enemy that challenges, dares to challenge America. We are not, we're talking here about transformation, not toothless reform, and we're seeking it fast.
Now, some will say that any effort to reform the Pentagon bureaucracy is punishment for real or perceived slights. We think that's nonsense. I'm not here to punish. We're here to liberate. I'm not here to reform, but to transform and empower. We mean to save the bureaucracy from itself because the chairman and I talk about this all the time. This is a 1939 moment, or hopefully a 1981 moment, a moment of mounting urgency. Enemies gather, threats grow. You feel it. I feel it. If we are going to prevent and avoid war, which is what we all want, we must prepare now. Our adversaries are not sitting idly by. They're moving fast. They're developing and delivering new capabilities at a rate that should be sobering to every American, especially those who work in the Pentagon and in the defense industrial base. Their ambitions and intentions are bold. Their actions speak volumes. And frankly, at times, we've been too damn slow to respond.
But before we get too far along, when it comes to transformation, let me give some credit where credit is due. President Trump has led on this, issued four executive orders directing transformation of defense acquisition, spurring innovation of the defense industrial base in particular, and the entire federal procurement process and foreign military sales in general. That's because the president recognizes one simple fact: America's military is the greatest in the world by far, and we must keep it that way. Our commander-in-chief is leading the way, affording us, this is what is so key in any effort like this, affording us the top cover to do big, hard, and necessary things quickly.
Members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee, on a bipartisan basis, have advanced proposals to reform Pentagon procurement through the Speed Act and the Forged Act, through their close collaboration and extensive exchanges with Congress. Much of what we are planning and announcing directly reflects the insights and reform ideas that have emerged from those ongoing partnerships. Many of the changes we're implementing today are the direct result of those congressional engagements, and we look forward to continuing this vital collaboration as we transform the department. So I want to thank Chairman Wicker and Chairman Rogers, especially, for their leadership on these issues.
Together, these executive orders, the congressional reforms, and the efforts by the services and department leadership, many of which are already underway, will enable five broad transformations:
One, inspire American industry to become a wartime industrial base that focuses on speed and volume through reliable demand and adaptable business practices for current partners and new entrants alike.
Two, unleash the defense industrial and government workforces by incentivizing progress over process.
Three, bias new acquisition and requirements processes for speed, flexibility, and efficiency.
And four, champion technical excellence and higher risk thresholds to accelerate high-performance production.
And five, provoke war speed or warp speed by procuring rapidly and sustaining readily, cost-effectively, as the default, not the exception.
So, in short, those are broad principles. We mean to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk. Let me say that again: We mean to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk. By taking greater calculated risk in how we build, buy, and maintain our systems, we will gain speed to more quickly provide capabilities to the battlefield. An 85% solution in the hands of our armed forces today is infinitely better than an unachievable 100% solution, endlessly undergoing testing or awaiting additional technological development. These are of no use to troops in harm's way.
So, to the men and women of this department, both military and civilian, who work on acquisition, and our industry partners, let me say this: You are not our enemies in this effort, but you are our allies. You are Obi-Wan Kenobi. You are our only hope. I hear this. I hear the frustrations of the senseless bureaucracy, the constraints. I hear it every day. You know, there is waste. You know, there is abuse. You know, there are outdated, useless, and silly regulations that squander taxpayer money. You also have have ideas to help us defend the United States better, to reform our processes for the better, to make our processes more responsive to the needs of the war fighter. As we move forward, we need your help, and your help as we transform this effort.
As I said at Quantico, consider yourself hereby liberated in transforming the acquisitions process within the Pentagon. We will build on the tenants of restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding the military, and reestablishing deterrence. We cannot achieve the last two without infusing the first throughout the acquisition's ecosystem, including the boardrooms, the labs, and the factories of our indispensable industry partners. The first step in achieving the warrior ethos, as I emphasized at Quantico, requires that we expect the same from our partners. It's imperative that industry focus on hiring and promoting individuals based on merit and not on some garbage ideological standard. DEI has failed at every level of every organization.
In our system of acquisition, we all serve the men and women in uniform and are accountable to the American taxpayer, but we all have a specific role. The Pentagon establishes expectations and outcomes and accountability. Industry provides the talent, the innovation, and the agility and the capacity that allows us to meet our goals. As with our warriors, the performance standards that industry needs to meet must be high and unwavering, tolerance for underperformance and failure low, and the imperative for continuous improvement relentless. To achieve these goals, it's paramount that human capital decisions across the entire war fighting acquisitions enterprise are predicated upon merit and optimally enable the recruitment, retention, and mobility of America's, our nation's best talent. Just as I told the uniform ranks, personnel is policy. So too in acquisition, human capital decisions focused on hiring, promoting, rewarding, and accountability will directly determine the success of acquisition's reform. And more importantly, whether or not we save our republic. That's how important it is. The time for half measures is over for decades.
As Secretary Rumsfeld's speech reminds us, we're taking bold and swift action to transform requirements development, overhaul our acquisitions process, and enhance foreign military sales. But we're not just doing this in silos. The development of this transformation has prioritized civil-military collaboration at every step, ensuring both our civilian and military leaders across the services and the joint staff directly contributed to the development of the coordination of this overhaul. This was not OSW sitting in a room thinking up ideas. This was collaborative across the Pentagon with the services and the joint staff to figure out how we can make this happen. This is a team effort at the Pentagon, not a hostile takeover.
Here are the five overarching transformative pillars that form the foundation on the procurement process:
First, we will stabilize demand signals. We will award companies bigger, longer contracts for proven systems. So, those companies will be confident in investing more to grow the industrial base that supplies our weapon systems more and faster.
Second, we will prioritize the purchase of industry-driven solutions, commercial solutions first that meet our needs faster, even if that means bids do not meet every requirement. It means that we will be open to buying the 85% solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100% solution. It also means there will be no non-compliant bids.
Third, we will empower our program leaders with the control, expertise, and authority to direct program outcomes, to move money, and quickly adjust the priority of required system performance to deliver on time and under budget.
Fourth, we will inject urgency and excellence into the DIB. The Department of War will only do business with industry partners that share our priority of speed and volume above all else, who are willing to surge American manufacturing at the speed of ingenuity to deliver rapidly and reliably for our war fighters.
And fifth, regulatory reform. We will remove excessive and burdensome FAR and DEFARS rules, reporting requirements, accounting standards, excessive testing oversight, excessively long studies and analysis. Anything that unnecessarily slows down government contracts will be eliminated.
So the bottom line is this: These changes will move us from the current prime contractor-dominated system defined by limited competition, vendor lock, cost-plus contracts, stressed budgets, and frustrating protests to a future powered by a dynamic vendor space that accelerates production by combining investment at a commercial pace with the uniquely American ability to scale quickly. Taken together, we will rebuild the defense industrial base into a new arsenal of freedom.
What we're doing today marks a new horizon for how we acquire and deliver war fighting capabilities. We are prioritizing speed, flexibility, competition, and calculated risk-taking. We will buy commercial solutions to the maximum extent possible, practicable, and will ensure our systems can produce at scale and relentlessly focus on delivering modern, lethal weapons to our war fighters. End of story.
To fix this entire process, we need to fix the heart of it all, which is requirements. For decades, our requirements process under the name, and you know it well, Joint Capabilities Integration Development System, or JCIDS, has become an inefficient bureaucratic system in need of a complete overhaul. Which is why today, at my direction, we are transforming the department's process for joint requirements determination. Revisioning, reinvisioning the requirements process is a decisive step in rebuilding the nation that once led the world in turning ideas into combat power, thoughts into lethality.
I am canceling JCIDS, which moved at the speed of paperwork, not war. To put it plainly, JCIDS became a years-long bureaucratic anchor that dragged us, dragged us down while our adversaries surged ahead with purpose and precision. JCIDS was focused on defining systems requirements, staffing them through countless oversight boards, and then locking them down while threats and technologies continued to evolve. To validate requirements documents, JCIDS often took over 300 days. Yes, 300 days, close to one whole year, just to approve a single document. By the time it got stamped, and it probably was stamped, the threat had changed, and the war fighter's needs had shifted. The process was so complicated that there is a 400-page manual, instruction manual, just to understand it, imposing endless templates and layers for review. JCIDS had dozens of reviewers and sign-offs and hundreds of comments to approve a single document. It's its own ecosystem, most of which added little to no value. We tried to please everyone, so we chase consensus instead of clarity. It became a go-along to get-along process. The result: over-specified requirements that satisfy everyone and serve no one. A process built to serve the process.
Our industry partners know the biggest obstacle isn't technology, it's our processes. Requirements are unclear or overly prescriptive, and even contradict themselves. Like that last sentence. They're either so rigid that they strangle innovation, or so vague that nobody knows what done actually looks like. Contractors waste time guessing instead of building. The result: cost overruns, frustration on both sides, and delayed delivery to the war fighter. What industry is asking for is simple: clear, stable problem statements provided early enough to plan, hire, and train the workforce, and then invest in capital modernization. We rarely engage innovators early, and when we do, the process tries to retrofit their ideas into outdated formats. Existing industry partners who understand the cumbersome process don't even bother to innovate. They know there is no upside to innovation. Rigid standards and archaic templates choke the agility that we need. That's why innovation groups exist to bypass JCIDS entirely and deliver faster. The lesson is obvious: If we want innovation, and we desperately do, we must build a requirement system that welcomes it instead of smothers it.
You can catch a glimpse of where we're moving when it comes to our commitment to acquiring critical munitions and the Golden Dome. Secretary Gates, for example, circumvented the Pentagon process to quickly develop and field the MRAP. Now, we are already moving at wartime speed on both of those, Golden Dome and munitions, working outside the slow bureaucratic process. But we shouldn't have to go outside the process to make it work. Urgent needs are met by circumventing it. We can't rely on that. Instead, the entire process must move at the speed of critical munitions, Golden Dome, and the MRAP. In short, we can't continue making big promises we can't keep. The people who define what we need aren't linked to the people who control the money or build the systems. So requirements move forward on paper, but the funding and execution don't follow. By the way, if folks are watching this on Fox, their eyes are rolling over, but everyone in this room understands exactly what I'm talking about. The result: plans without resources, programs without liftoff, and war fighters waiting for capabilities that arrive late or never arrive at all. No feedback loop, no shared priorities, and no accountability. Until we connect need, money, and delivery under one roof, we keep producing wish lists instead of weapons.
President Trump recognized the reality and challenged our department to adopt a wartime mindset to confront the bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. And that is why today, at my direction, we are undertaking a series of actions that immediately and fundamentally change how we develop requirements to get capabilities into the hands of our war fighters at speed. We're ending a system that was built for paperwork, not mission. JCIDS is dead, and it was slow and bloated and disconnected from reality. And we will do better.
I'm directing the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, or JROC, to stop validating service requirements and to kill the paperwork culture that buries ideas before they ever reach the field. In its place, we're building a new model focused on speed, alignment, and action. We're also reorienting the JROC to start identifying and ranking the joint forces' toughest problems, what we call joint operational problems. The problems will drive the priorities for the entire department. That is why today, at my direction, we're standing up three new decision forums in place of JCIDS.
The first is the Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board, or RAB, a new decision forum co-led by the Deputy Secretary of War and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to tie money directly to those top war fighting priorities. We will ensure the joint forces' top problems are funded.
We're also creating the Mission Engineering and Integration Activity, or MEIA, to bring the best minds, government, industry, and labs together early to experiment, integrate, iterate, and prototype solutions instead of watching good ideas die at the hands of a worthless process.
And to make sure good ideas don't die in the infamous valley of death, we're establishing the Joint Acceleration Reserve, or JAR, a funding pool set aside to move promising solutions straight into the fight.
Finally, each military service will review and reform its own requirements process, cutting red tape, engaging industry earlier, and aligning internal priorities to the new joint system.
So, what do we believe this new process will achieve? Speed replaces process. Money follows need. Joint problems drive action. Experimentation accelerates delivery. And the services move faster and smarter.
Take contested logistics, for example. When we fight, our ability to move weapons, supplies, and reinforcements to the front lines and back. It's critical. We can stay in the fight only as long as our logistics sustain us. Our adversaries know this, and they will attack our supply routes, ports, airfields, depots, and information systems in order to disrupt us. We must be able to fight in this contested environment, and these reforms will ensure that we can. We'll start by elevating contested logistics as a key prioritized operational problem. We're going to work side by side with our industry partners to come up with innovative solutions through experimentation and rapid prototyping and ensure that it's properly funded. Logistics will be prioritized, integrated, and delivered as long, quickly, and as long as our war fighters need it. See, we're moving from process to purpose, and from paper to power projection. And this is not a minor requirements reform. It is a transformation, a change that allows us to outpace our adversaries and restore deterrence, field capabilities quickly, and welcome new entrants. A chance to achieve President Trump's vision of peace through strength. Every leader, every program, and every dollar will face.