“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 stated that the current process, which could take three to eight years, would now be streamlined to happen “within a year.” The changes follow President Trump’s April executive order titled “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base,” which called for delivering “state‐of‐the‐art capabilities at speed and scale.”
“At times we’ve been too damn slow to respond,” Hegseth said. “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.”
Secretary Hegseth has signed three NEW memos:
1) Transforming the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System to Accelerate Fielding of Urgently Needed Capabilities to Our Warriors. pic.twitter.com/Hs2PKDfxLA
— DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse) November 7, 2025
A leaked six-page draft memo titled “Transforming the Warfighting Acquisition System” outlines the reforms and sets a two-year timeline for implementation. “Speed to capability delivery is now our organizing principle,” the draft states. “Every process, board, and review must justify its existence by demonstrating how it accelerates capability delivery to meet warfighter needs.”
The plan includes replacing program executive offices with Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs), who will have direct oversight of weapons programmes and report to a Service Acquisition Executive without intermediate approvals. Hegseth said PAEs will be the “single accountable official” for results and will be empowered to “act without running through months or even years of approval chains and they’ll be held accountable to deliver results.”
To track outcomes, the Pentagon will introduce “portfolio scorecards” focused on how quickly weapons reach service members. Hegseth also announced a “wartime production unit” to “transform how we accelerate the delivery of critical capabilities to our war fighters” and said it will “manage and execute direct support for our top acquisition production priorities to ensure that we have the best minds in the business.”
The Pentagon will move away from being restricted to original contractors, ending “vendor lock” and ensuring competition. “Talking about meaningful choice where quality and speed matter and where prices go down,” Hegseth said.
According to the memo, the department must “maintain at least two qualified sources for critical program content at the appropriate system decomposition level through initial production unless waived by the respective Service Acquisition Executive (SAC).”
The reforms also make commercial products the default option, with new contract incentives rewarding early delivery and penalising delays. “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,” Hegseth said. “It means that we will be open to buying the 85 percent solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100 percent solution.”
He confirmed the Pentagon will eliminate the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), calling it slow and out of touch. “We’re ending a system that was built for paperwork, not mission,” he said. “JCIDS is dead, and it was slow and bloated and disconnected from reality and we will do better.”
Hegseth also committed to speeding up arms sales to allies, saying, “They don’t want to buy Russian, they don’t want to buy Italian, they don’t want to buy French, they want to buy American, but they don’t want to wait a decade for it.”
The Pentagon must act quickly under the plan, with acquisition leaders required to issue implementation guidance within 45 days and each military service expected to submit its plan within 60 days. Hegseth said defence firms must take more responsibility, noting they can no longer “saddle taxpayers with every cost.”
“For those who come along with us, this will be a great growth opportunity, and you will benefit. To industry not willing to assume risk in order to work with the military, we may have to wish you well in your future endeavors, which would probably be outside the Pentagon,” Hegseth said. “We’re going to make defense contracting competitive again, and those who are too comfortable with the status quo to compete are not going to be welcome.”
Source: The Hill.
