Army Sgt. Nicholas Murphy, of the 3rd Infantry Division’s Combat Aviation Brigade, tinkers with a hexacopter drone he built on July 26, 2024 just before a test flight at a Hinesville, Ga., airfield just outside Fort Stewart. Murphy participated in a first-of-its-kind drone building class run by the division’s Marne Innovation Center at Fort Stewart. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
America stands at a critical inflection point in our national defense posture. After decades of sluggish procurement pipelines and suffocating bureaucratic inertia, we now have a rare opportunity to fundamentally transform our defense acquisition system. This transformation isn’t simply advisable — it’s imperative to gain the speed, scale and innovation our military desperately need to prevail in future conflicts.
A critical moment for national security: Stark risks and sobering implications
President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on modernizing defense acquisitions represents a watershed moment for American preparedness for conflict. His message cuts through the fog of complacency: outdated systems and slow-moving red tape are inadequate to address modern threats. We simply cannot afford to remain mired in Cold War-era thinking and processes while our adversaries aggressively invest in and deploy next-generation capabilities at accelerating speeds.
The evidence of our vulnerability is stark and mounting. In May 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued an alarming assessment: “U.S. military readiness has been degraded over the last two decades due to a variety of challenges, including high operational demands.” Michael DiMino, the newly appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, articulated the problem with even greater clarity in a 2023 op-ed in Stars and Stripes, arguing that our readiness shortfalls are being compounded by systemic sustainment failures and training programs that fundamentally fail to reflect the realities of today’s high-tech battlefield.
The implications are sobering. In a world where adversaries can rapidly field new capabilities, our cumbersome acquisition system has become a strategic vulnerability. The Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) — originally designed to ensure thoroughness in our military acquisitions — has instead become a labyrinthine obstacle course that rewards bureaucratic endurance rather than technical excellence or operational relevance.
Agile tech partners: America’s untapped innovation arsenal
To regain our competitive edge, we must tap into the full spectrum of American ingenuity — not just from within the Pentagon’s walls, but from nimble private-sector innovators who have historically sharpened our military advantage. Our defense industrial base functions most effectively when government and industry operate in synchronization to solve urgent national security challenges.
I witnessed this dynamic firsthand during my service as communications director with U.S. Central Command, where fielding advanced capabilities under intense operational pressure was not an academic exercise but a daily necessity. This experience made clear to me that the government neither does, nor should, hold a monopoly on innovation. In today’s multidomain battlespace — where software has become as strategically consequential as steel — companies that operate with speed and technical sophistication have become indispensable to our national defense.
Consider the example of MetroStar, a veteran-founded technology company that helps the Department of Defense transition from cumbersome acquisition cycles to 21st-century digital operations. Unlike traditional defense contractors, MetroStar brings Silicon Valley-style agility to national security challenges, delivering secure, mission-critical applications with remarkable speed and flexibility. It’s clear the company understands both the technical landscape and the operational imperatives that drive defense requirements.
The public narrative around defense contractors has long been dominated by perceptions of bloat, inefficiency and excess. But this characterization is increasingly obsolete, especially considering the example of MetroStar. Some of today’s most effective defense partners are nimble, tech-savvy and mission-driven. They attract elite technical talent, build sophisticated tools in weeks rather than years, and address crucial capability gaps that our military simply cannot — and should not — attempt to fill alone.
From presidential directive to Pentagon action: Making speed the new standard
Trump’s call for a comprehensive overhaul of JCIDS represents a long-overdue recognition of this problem. For too long, this process has systematically stifled innovation, punished necessary risk-taking, and effectively excluded smaller, high-impact firms from meaningful participation in defense technology development. The president’s 180-day mandate to review JCIDS transcends mere bureaucratic housekeeping; it constitutes an essential step toward revitalizing our entire defense posture.
However, presidential directives alone cannot solve this problem. The Pentagon must follow through with substantive reforms that eliminate acquisition bottlenecks, embrace rapid prototyping methodologies, and shift decisively toward outcome-based contracts that reward tangible results rather than mere compliance with procedural requirements. Speed to field must become the new gold standard by which acquisition success is measured.
America has risen to similar challenges before. During World War II, American industry retooled virtually overnight to become the arsenal of democracy, producing military equipment at a pace that overwhelmed our adversaries. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, rapid innovation delivered intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, counter-IED technologies, and tactical communications systems that saved countless American lives. We now find ourselves entering a new era of strategic competition that demands of us that same urgency and ingenuity.
This is not merely about procurement efficiency — it’s about national survival. Our adversaries have studied our strengths and methodically targeted our vulnerabilities, including our ponderous acquisition system. They recognize what we sometimes forget: that in modern warfare, the advantage often goes not to the side with the most resources, but to the one that can adapt most quickly.
America’s true vulnerability: Fighting tomorrow’s wars with yesterday’s tools
The most dangerous scenario for America isn’t losing a future conflict — it’s entering that conflict with yesterday’s capabilities because we couldn’t navigate our own bureaucracy fast enough to field tomorrow’s technologies. Every day that innovative solutions remain trapped in acquisition purgatory represents an unacceptable strategic risk.
America’s warfighters deserve better. They deserve the most advanced tools our nation can provide, delivered when needed, not years after requirements are identified. Our defense industrial base stands ready to deliver those tools — if only we can clear the bureaucratic obstacles that stand in their way.
The time for incremental reforms has passed. Trump’s executive order opens the door to transformative change in how we equip our military for future conflicts. Now we must summon the courage and determination to walk through that door, embracing a new era of defense acquisition that prioritizes speed, innovation and operational relevance above all else.
America’s security depends on it.
Joe Buccino is the co-founder of Vantage + Vox and a retired U.S. Army colonel who served as communications director for U.S. Central Command from 2022 to 2023. He provides analysis of military operations in the Middle East for Fox News.
