The Department of War has implemented a sweeping overhaul of its acquisition process, replacing the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) with a new Warfighting Acquisition System designed to accelerate the delivery of technology to soldiers.
This shift represents the most significant change to defense procurement in six decades. By scrapping the JCIDS requirements process—which many argue ossified innovation—and replacing traditional program offices with portfolio executives, the department is attempting to pivot from a compliance-heavy culture to one of operational agility. However, the success of this “faster engine” depends on whether the military can bridge the gap between laboratory development and the tactical edge of the battlefield.
The urgency of this reform is highlighted by the current conflict in Ukraine, where the rapid evolution of First-Person View (FPV) drones has outpaced traditional Western procurement cycles. According to analysis from Pete Newell, the current struggle is not a technology gap but a cycle-time gap, where adversaries update firmware in hours while U.S. countermeasures take months to field.
The Counter-Drone Test Case: Engineering vs. Adaptation
The fight against unmanned aerial systems (UAS) serves as the primary stress test for the new Warfighting Acquisition System. Currently, the U.S. military often relies on expensive legacy systems to counter cheap threats. For example, soldiers have engaged FPV drones costing a few hundred dollars using Stinger missiles, which can cost $400,000 per shot. This disparity underscores a failure to rapidly integrate low-cost interceptors and jammers that have already proven effective in Ukraine.
The technology for a more efficient response exists. Directed-energy weapons and drone-on-drone interceptors—some of which have recorded over a thousand kills in Ukraine—are available. Yet, the process for getting these tools into U.S. formations remains sluggish. The adversary’s development cycle operates in days, utilizing commercial parts and open-source software to defeat jammers via simple firmware updates. In contrast, the U.S. system, even after reform, often operates on a timeline of months.
This pattern mirrors the counter-IED (Improvised Explosive Device) campaign in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. During that period, the U.S. spent $75 billion on counter-IED efforts, yet struggled to keep pace with the rapid tactical adaptations of the enemy. Pete Newell, who led the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force during that era, notes that drones are essentially “IEDs that fly,” presenting the same structural challenge: cheap, dual-use components and knowledge that spreads faster than official countermeasures.
The Six Phases of Innovation and the ‘Ownership Gap’
Effective military innovation requires a continuous loop of six phases: detect, define, develop, deploy, assess, and distribute. Analysis of the current reforms suggests that the department has invested almost exclusively in the middle two phases—develop and deploy. This leaves a critical void in the other four areas.
Currently, there is no single organizational owner responsible for persistently monitoring how threats evolve at the tactical edge or for scoping a specific unit’s problem with enough precision to drive a useful solution. Furthermore, there is a lack of systematic measurement to determine if fielded systems actually work against an adversary who adapts after every single engagement. Without a mechanism to move lessons learned from one unit to every other unit at operational speed, the “faster engine” of acquisition is running without steering.
The missing “steering” mechanism is the process of deciding which problems the acquisition engine should be pointed at and verifying whether the resulting solutions actually solved the problem. Without this, the military risks repeating the mistake of throwing expensive technology at a systems problem without understanding the underlying tactical shift.
Industry’s Role: From Suppliers to Sensors
The Department of War cannot close the cycle-time gap alone; the role of the defense industrial base must evolve. For companies to remain relevant in this new portfolio structure, they must shift their business models from pitching products to discovering problems. Requirements typically originate in headquarters, far from the soldiers observing the problem in context. The most successful firms will be those that embed engineers and business developers with operational units to understand the problem before proposing a solution.
Adaptation must also replace static requirements. If a product cannot be updated in weeks—through modular hardware or software-defined behavior—it is effectively obsolete upon delivery. A requirement frozen at the time of a contract award is merely a snapshot of a threat that may no longer exist by the time the hardware arrives.
Finally, industry must function as a “sensor” rather than just a supplier. The Portfolio Acquisition Executives require “fusion cells” that merge ground truth from the field with the capabilities of labs and industry. Companies that feed data into this system and absorb assessment data back out will define the future portfolios, while those waiting for formal Requests for Proposals (RFPs) will likely trail behind.
Workforce Challenges: The Shift to Warfighting Acquisition University
The technical and structural reforms are only as effective as the people implementing them. To address this, the department is converting the Defense Acquisition University into a Warfighting Acquisition University. The goal is to trade traditional compliance training for scenario-based judgment, emphasizing experiential, problem-first education.
However, this year’s defense authorization offered little else on workforce, which means the authorities changed faster than the people who must wield them. The current pipeline often produces engineers who have never seen the field and “capture teams” fluent in the FAR but not in the mission.
To scale this new model, there is a push for two-way exchanges between government and industry, similar to the “Hacking for Defense” model, which puts university students to work on real national security problems alongside the officials who own them. This approach aims to produce a generation of public servants and founders who know how to interrogate a problem before building a solution.
The department has successfully reformed how it acquires technology, but it has not yet fully reformed what it acquires, whether it worked, or who else needs to know. The risk remains that the U.S. could be out-cycled by an adversary who does not need superior technology, but simply a faster tempo of adaptation.
In this fight, the adversary does not need to out-technology us. He only needs to out-cycle us. We have already paid $75 billion to learn where that leads.
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