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Executive Summary
In a sweeping speech at the National War College on November 7, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the most comprehensive transformation of Pentagon operations in decades, officially rebranding the Department of Defense as the “Department of War” and declaring an end to what he called the Pentagon’s bureaucratic “adversary” that rivals threats from China or Russia. Hegseth canceled the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS)—a requirements process he said took 300 days just to approve documents—and replaced it with three new decision forums focused on speed and results. The transformation establishes a Warfighting Acquisition System that aims to compress procurement timelines from 3-8 years to under one year, reorganizes program executives into empowered Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs) with direct authority over cost and schedule trade-offs, and realigns foreign military sales operations under acquisition leadership to address chronic delivery delays that have left allies waiting over a decade for American weapons. Supported by President Trump’s executive orders and bipartisan congressional legislation, the initiative demands that defense contractors embrace “wartime speed and volume” or face being “gone,” while establishing a new Warfighting Acquisition University and extending acquisition leader tenures to four-year minimum terms to ensure accountability for delivering capabilities to warfighters faster than America’s rapidly advancing adversaries.
Participants and Names Mentioned
- Pete Hegseth – Secretary of Defense (referred to as Secretary of War)
- Steve Feinberg – Deputy Secretary of War (formerly Deputy Secretary of Defense)
- Mike Duffy – Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment (A&S)
- Emil Michael – Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (R&E)
- President Donald Trump – President of the United States (referenced)
- Senator Roger Wicker – Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee (referenced)
- Representative Mike Rogers – Chairman, House Armed Services Committee (referenced)
- Secretary Marco Rubio – Secretary of State (referenced)
- Secretary Howard Lutnick – Secretary of Commerce (referenced)
- Members of Congress (in attendance)
- Chairman and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (in attendance)
- Secretaries of military departments (in attendance)
- Defense industry officials and corporate leaders (in attendance)
- Acquisition professionals (in attendance)
Detailed Analysis
Opening: The Parallel to Donald Rumsfeld’s September 10, 2001 Speech
Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg opened the event by framing the transformation as essential to national survival, thanking President Trump for the opportunity to serve and praising Secretary Hegseth’s leadership in establishing a “warrior ethos” from day one. Feinberg acknowledged that while “the Pentagon is run well” with “solid leadership” and “good culture,” the department operates “in a very old manner, in a slow manner, in a bureaucratic manner, and we must change that.” He warned that contractors who resist change “will be gone,” emphasizing the stakes: “We can’t fail. We can’t make excuses. We must succeed.”
Hegseth then delivered what initially appeared to be a blistering critique of an unnamed adversary—”one of the world’s last bastions of central planning” that “governs by dictating in five-year plans” and “stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.” After building suspense by dismissing the Soviet Union, dictators, and even the Chinese Communist Party as the subject of his criticism, Hegseth revealed: “The adversary I’m talking about is much closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” He clarified: “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 a dramatic reveal, Hegseth disclosed that his opening remarks were “practically verbatim from a speech given by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on September 10th, 2001,” delivered just one day before the 9/11 attacks. He noted that Rumsfeld “never quite had the full opportunity to implement many of his reforms” because “we went to war with the army we had, not the army he or we wanted.” Twenty-four years later, Hegseth argued, the need for transformation is “even more urgent” than when Rumsfeld spoke those words.
The Pentagon Bureaucracy Problem and Defense Industrial Base Culture
Hegseth delivered a comprehensive indictment of Pentagon processes, describing a department “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.” He explained how the institutional culture becomes self-reinforcing: “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.”
The critique extended beyond government to the defense industrial base itself. Hegseth argued that “unstable demand signals, uncertain projections and volatile customer base” have caused the defense industry to “adopt the same entrenched risk averse and lethargic culture that we have in government.” The result: “an absence of urgency, a fear of innovation and a fundamental lack of trust between the military customer and our limited, more limited than it should be defense industrial base.”
More provocatively, he suggested the defense industry “financially benefits from our backwards culture”: “Schedule overruns, huge order backlogs, and two predictable cost increases become the norm.” He challenged large prime contractors directly: “These large defense primes need to change to focus on speed and volume and invest their own capital to get there.” While emphasizing the department is “big time supportive of profits” as capitalists, he warned: “If they do not, those big ones will fade away.”
Describing the transformation effort as “a war of attrition, a war that we intend to win day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year,” Hegseth pledged: “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 Urgency: 1939 or 1981 Moment
Hegseth framed the current moment as historically pivotal, comparing it to key inflection points in American history: “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.” He emphasized that adversaries “are 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.”
The secretary acknowledged the human stakes plainly: “Every dollar squandered on redundancy, bureaucracy and waste is a dollar that could be used to outfit and supply the war fighter.” He declared: “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.”
Presidential and Congressional Support
President Trump’s role featured prominently throughout the speech. Hegseth credited the president with issuing “four executive orders directing transformation to defense acquisition, spurring innovation of the defense industrial base in particular, and the entire federal procurement process and foreign military sales in general.” He emphasized that Trump “recognizes one simple fact. America’s military is the greatest in the world by far, and we must keep it that way.” Critically, the president provides “the top cover to do big, hard, and necessary things quickly.”
Congressional support came from both parties. Hegseth thanked members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees for advancing “proposals to reform Pentagon procurement through the SPEED Act and the FoRGED Act.” He specifically acknowledged Chairman Roger Wicker and Chairman Mike Rogers for their leadership, noting that “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.”
Five Broad Transformations
Hegseth outlined five overarching goals that would guide the transformation:
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.”
Four: “Championing technical excellence and higher risk thresholds to accelerate high performance production.”
Five: “Provoke war speed or warp speed by procuring rapidly and sustaining readily cost effectively as the default, not the exceptions.”
Requirements Transformation: The Death of JCIDS
In one of the speech’s most dramatic announcements, Hegseth declared: “I am canceling JCIDS”—the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System—which he described as having “moved at the speed of paperwork, not war.” He offered devastating statistics: “To validate requirements documents, JCIDS often took over 300 days. Yes, 300 days to 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 warfighters needs had shifted.”
The process complexity was staggering: “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 involved “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.” The result: “over-specified requirements that satisfy everyone and serve no one. A process built to serve the process.”
Hegseth explained how this bureaucracy stifled innovation: “Requirements are unclear or overly prescriptive and even contradict themselves. They’re either so rigid that they strangle innovation or so vague that nobody knows what done actually looks like.” Industry partners waste “time guessing instead of building,” leading to “cost overruns, frustration on both sides, and delayed delivery to the warfighter.” He noted that “innovation groups exist to bypass JCIDS entirely and deliver faster,” adding: “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.”
The fundamental problem was disconnection: “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.” This creates “plans without resources, programs without liftoff and warfighters waving for capabilities that arrive late or never arrive at all. No feedback loop, no shared priorities, and no accountability.”
New Requirements Structure: Three Decision Forums
To replace JCIDS, Hegseth announced he was “standing up three new decision forums”:
Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB): “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 warfighting priorities. We will ensure the joint forces’ top problems are funded.”
Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA): Designed “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.”
Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR): “A funding pool set aside to move promising solutions straight into the fight.”
Additionally, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) would be reoriented. Hegseth directed it “to stop validating service requirements and to kill the paperwork culture that buries ideas before they ever reach the field.” Instead, JROC will “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.”
Each military service would also “review and reform its own requirements process, cutting red tape, engaging industry earlier, and aligning internal priorities to the new joint system.”
Hegseth provided a concrete example: contested logistics. “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.” The new system would “elevate contested logistics as a key prioritized operational problem,” work with industry “through experimentation and rapid prototyping and ensure that it’s properly funded.”
Acquisition Transformation: The Warfighting Acquisition System
Hegseth announced another fundamental shift: “The Defense Acquisition System, as you know it, is dead. It’s now the Warfighting Acquisition System.” This represented more than a name change: “Acquisition is a warfighting function, and it must enable and encourage continuous adaptation and improvement of our warfighting capability. We need acquisition and industry to be as strong and fast as our warfighters.”
The timeline goal was ambitious: “What used to take sometimes when you added up with requirements, three to eight years, we believe can happen within a year.”
The old system had three fatal flaws: “fragmented accountability where no single leader could make trade-offs between speed, performance, and cost, no one to charge”; “broken incentives that reward compliance with rules and regulations, ignoring scheduled delays and cost overruns, resulting in our warfighters operating with old, unreliable legacy systems”; and “a chaotic requirements, budgeting, and contracting environment that disincentivized industry investment, leading to constrained capacity that cannot surge or adapt quickly without government intervention.”
Portfolio Acquisition Executives Replace Program Executive Offices
The organizational restructuring was significant. Hegseth announced that “existing program executive offices or PEOs” would be transformed “into portfolio acquisition executives or PAEs. The acquisition chain of authority will run directly from the program manager to the PAE. Each PAE will be the single accountable official for portfolio outcomes and have the authority to act without running through months or even years of approval chains, and they’ll be held accountable to deliver results.”
These PAEs would have unprecedented authority: “empowered with the authorities to make decisions on cost, schedule, and performance trade-offs that prioritize time-to-field and mission outcomes. That means less time identifying what our war fighters need, releasing solicitations to industry, and finalizing contracts to get production running at scale.”
Within 180 days, the Department would issue guidance for PAEs to implement “game-changing practices”: “adaptable test approaches that enable rapid certification, evaluate multi-track acquisition strategies to allow third-party surge manufacturing capacity, maintain a standard to carry at least two qualified sources through initial production,” and “establish module-level competition through modular open systems approach.”
Modular Open Systems and Rapid Updating
Under Secretary Mike Duffy and Under Secretary Emil Michael would lead implementation of the modular open systems approach. Hegseth explained: “Imagine being able to swap parts or software of a critical munition without needing to, I don’t know, completely redesign the missile. It’s common sense, but we’re not doing it.” He emphasized: “Updating our lethal capabilities in real time should be the norm, not waiting years to redesign, produce, and field the platform just to have it just in time for it to undergo another round of updates. Around the clock software updates should be a given, just like on your smartphone, to improve performance and critically protect our infrastructure against rapidly evolving cyber threats.”
The approach would leverage commercial practices: “computer-aided design, digital processes, building virtual models, and 3D printing. We will break down monolithic systems and build a future where our technology adapts to the threat in real near time.”
Contracting Officers Embedded in Teams
Contracting officers would be fundamentally repositioned. They would be “embedded within program teams and accountable to program leaders, shoulder to shoulder with our engineers, operators, and war fighters, the ultimate end users who can provide critical real-world user feedback to the engineers.” Their performance would be “judged not on mindless compliance with thousands of pages of regulations, but on mission outcomes.”
Hegseth emphasized accountability: “The portfolio chain of command are the ones in charge. They’re responsible for mission success. If the mission is not successful, there will be real consequences.”
Extended Tenure and Career Paths
To ensure continuity and accountability, the department would “extend PAE tenure to be longer than the current PEO service times.” The secretary explained a common problem: “Portfolios and programs can’t succeed when leaders rotate out every two years. Greater stability ensures deeper insights into technology, relationships with companies, personnel development, and accountability to deliver outcomes.”
The solution: “developing policies to create blended career paths of key portfolio and program officials, extending their tenure by requiring four year minimum terms with two year extensions and tying their incentives to competition, capability delivery time, and mission outcomes. This will ensure accountability for strategies and decisions with continuous improvement throughout execution phases.”
Warfighting Acquisition University
In a bold move, Hegseth declared: “The Defense Acquisition University is obsolete. It must become an incubator of acquisition excellence and urgency.” He announced its immediate transformation “into a competency-based educational institution named the Warfighting Acquisition University. It will be the launching pad of our acquisition workforce imbued with a transformative and warrior mindset.”
The new institution would “prioritize cohort-based programs, combining experimental and project-based learning on real portfolio challenges, industry government exchanges, and case method instruction that develops critical thinking and rapid decision making. No more sitting in classrooms learning about failed processes of the past.”
Message to Industry: Adapt or Be Gone
Hegseth issued both an invitation and a warning to the defense industrial base. He welcomed non-traditional participants: “If you’re a non-traditional player in space, cyber, AI, drones, long range fires, communications, think you can help us, and you want to take on risk as a small, mid, or large business, the Department of War wants any and all of you to be in part of our industrial base. We want all comers who are prepared to go at wartime speed.”
But the expectations were clear: large defense primes “need to change to focus on speed and volume and invest their own capital to get there.” He added: “We are capitalists after all. But if they do not, those big ones will fade away.”
Acknowledging Deputy Secretary Feinberg’s business expertise, Hegseth noted: “We’ve never had a deputy like this man who has the business background and experience that he has, and we’re leveraging the hell out of it.” He encouraged industry: “The deputy secretary of war has already reached out to many of you to gauge your interest. I’ve talked to a lot of folks… On behalf of the department and our country, I encourage you to answer his call when it comes.”
Foreign Military Sales: Realignment Under A&S
The final major announcement addressed foreign military sales (FMS), which Hegseth called “a top priority for my team in partnership with Secretary Marco Rubio and Secretary Howard Lutnick.” He noted that President Trump has “reached an all time high in our foreign military sales… securing deal after deal to bring cold, hard cash to American manufacturers, but our processes are too slow and our industrial base is too inefficient to keep up and deliver on time to our allies and partners.”
The frustration from allies was palpable: “Believe me, I hear about this on every foreign trip and every conversation I have with every president, prime minister, and minister of defense is what is wrong with your foreign military sales. We ordered it in 2014. It’s 2025 and it’s scheduled to deliver in 2032. And I sit there going, ‘I don’t know. What the hell.’ We didn’t break it, but we’re going to fix it.”
The strategic importance extended beyond sales: “Not only are foreign military sales and defense commercial sales important to our American industrial base, but they’re also critical to our strategic vision on the global landscape. Burden sharing has been a key pillar of President Trump’s and the Department of War’s agenda.” The goal: allies “armed with the best and most interoperable weapons systems in the world” so warfighters can “stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies to face dangerous global challenges.”
The economic benefits were substantial: “Hundreds of billions of dollars annually in foreign military sales and defense commercial sales, for American-made weapon systems will provide our companies with the fuel to invest in new manufacturing plants, hire engineers, and source components and materials from thousands of subcontractors and suppliers.” This would “revitalize the industrial base, create tens, if not hundreds of thousands of American jobs, lower the cost of deterrence to the U.S. taxpayer and accelerate capability delivery to our partners that want to buy American-made. 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.”
DSCA and DTSA Move to A&S
To fix the problem, Hegseth announced: “I’m directing the realignment of operational control of Defense Security Cooperation Agency, DSCA, and the Defense Technology Security Administration, DTSA, removing it from under the Secretary of War for policy to the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment. So from policy to A&S.”
He explained the significance: “In delivering defense articles and services to our allies and partners, it’s a complex process and success demands a unified approach across the entire acquisition lifecycle. From the first dollars invested in research and development, all the way through maintenance and delivery of spare parts.”
The integration problem was stark: “It was staggering when we tried to get our arms around just one particular system and who we were giving it to, how many we were giving it to them and when we were giving it to them. It was a multi-week exercise just to understand that system, that was not a complex system. That system, who it was going to, how long it would take, how it traded off of ours, we had no idea. So half of this is just totally understanding that process top to bottom.”
The new structure would provide “a single integrated vision from initial planning to contract execution to delivery,” ensuring “that we aren’t making promises that we can’t keep and that our allies receive the capabilities they need when they need them.”
Implementation: Not Just Words
Hegseth emphasized the immediacy of implementation: “These are not just words, we’ve already done a great deal of the work. In fact, the new acquisition transformation strategy is being released today, and for many of you in this room, it’s hitting your inboxes right now, as are all of the directives that we’re announcing today, you will have them before you leave this room.”
He defined the organizing principle: “Speed to delivery is now our organizing principle. It is the decisive factor in maintaining deterrence and war fighting advantage. If our war fighters die or our country loses because we took too long to get them what we needed, we have failed. It is that simple. That is the business we are in.”
The stakes could not be clearer: “We’re not just building a stronger military today. We are laying the foundation for continued dominance in the decades to come… ensuring that future generations of war fighters have the tools and the capabilities to defend our nation. The War Department will be ready when the time comes. We will have and we will be the arsenal for freedom.”
Closing: Building the Arsenal of Freedom
Hegseth closed by acknowledging America’s current military strength while emphasizing the transformation’s necessity: “The 2.1 million Americans who wear our nation’s cloth, active guard and reserve, and the hundreds of thousands who support them in suits, in coveralls, in welding helmets, they comprise the finest military in the history of the world. No doubt. They stand ready to face down any threat, anytime, anywhere. President Trump says it all the time and he’s completely right. We have the best, strongest, most lethal military in the world.”
But the mission was to liberate them: “Our job is to liberate them from any antiquated systems and incentives of the past, delivering them the military of the future at speed. We know the threat, I know the threat, you know the threat. We know the environment. This is our moment.”
Returning to the Donald Rumsfeld parallel, he concluded: “If we must, we will go to war with the military and equipment we have and we will win. We have the best and the strongest. But today let’s build on the vision of what Secretary Rumsfeld aspired to in his September 10th, 2001 speech. Building the military we want and the military we need, the arsenal of freedom. That, my friends, is what we owe our warriors, present and future.”
His final words: “So thank you all for what you do. May God bless you and may God continue to bless our great republic. Thank you.”
Source Citation
Hegseth, Pete. “Speech by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at National War College.” National War College, Washington, D.C., 7 Nov. 2025. Rev, www.rev.com/transcripts/hegseth-at-national-war-college. Accessed 12 Nov. 2025.