Greg Little and Aaron Jaffe
A few years ago, one of us sat in a conference room late in the afternoon as a major weapon system program team debated a marginal performance improvement. Single-digit percentages. Decimal places. Over hours of discussion, what no one talked about was how many of these systems could be built, how fast they could be replaced, or whether the parts could be sustained at scale. That meeting captures a pattern the Department of War knows too well: we design the ideal weapon first and only later ask whether the country can actually produce it in the quantities a prolonged fight would demand.
This is why Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s recent acquisition transformation announcement matters. His focus on speed and scale, on shifting the department to a wartime footing, and on breaking a culture that rewards compliance over execution points us in the right direction. It acknowledges something fundamental: capability delivered late—or in boutique quantities—is not capability at all. But if we really want speed and scale, acquisition reform alone isn’t enough. The deeper problem isn’t how we buy weapons. It’s how we design them and coordinate their production.
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