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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth criticized the Pentagon's entrenched acquisition bureaucracy in a fiery speech Friday, comparing the department's planning culture to Soviet-style central planning that he says has crippled innovation, risk-taking and the nation's ability to prepare for war.
Speaking before a group of defense industry executives, Hegseth began by invoking the specter of a familiar enemy, but quickly turned his criticism inward.
“Today I would like to talk to you about an adversary that poses a threat, a very serious threat, to the United States of America,” Hegseth said. “This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning. It rules by dictating five-year plans from a single capital, attempting to impose its demands across time zones, continents upon continents, oceans and beyond, with brutal consistency, stifling free thought and crushing new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and puts the lives of our men and women in uniform at risk.”
After drawing comparisons to the former Soviet Union and even the Chinese Communist Party, Hegseth delivered his punch line: “The adversary I speak of is much closer to home. It is the Pentagon bureaucracy, not the people, but the process.”
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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth lashed out at the Pentagon's entrenched acquisition bureaucracy in a fiery speech this week, comparing the department's planning culture to Soviet-style central planning that he says has crippled innovation, risk-taking and the nation's ability to prepare for war. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Hegseth accused decades of War Department policy of being hamstrung by “impossible risk thresholds” and “onerous, inefficient processes” that have turned the Pentagon into a self-reinforcing machine where “process, not results, matter.”
He argued that previous administrations only made things worse by trying to “circumvent the process rather than confront it head-on,” leaving both the U.S. military and defense industrial base weaker and slower to adapt. “The institution shapes the individuals as much as the individuals shape the institution,” Hegseth said. “Over time, the predominant pattern becomes increasingly entrenched, risk-averse, and immovable.”
Hegseth said this bureaucratic inertia has spilled over into the defense industry itself, creating a system in which contractors benefit from inefficiency rather than performance. “The defense industry benefits financially from our backward culture,” he said. “Delay delays, huge order delays and overly predictable cost increases become the norm.”
The secretary warned that the result is “a lack of urgency, a fear of innovation and a fundamental lack of trust” between the Pentagon and its suppliers; precisely the kind of dysfunction, he argued, that America's adversaries exploit.
“Our military and our taxpayers need a defense industrial base they can count on to scale up urgently in a crisis, not one that is content to wait for money before taking action,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth's comments are part of a broader push within the administration to accelerate defense acquisition reform, streamline contracts and restore what he has called “wartime urgency” to the Pentagon's daily operations.
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“The defense industry benefits financially from our backward culture,” he said. “Deadline delays, huge order delays and overly predictable cost increases are becoming the norm,” Hegseth said. (SAKIS MITROLIDIS/AFP via Getty Images)
The Army has become the Pentagon's test bed for acquisition reform, deploying some of the most aggressive efforts to speed up weapons procurement and eliminate the bureaucracy that Hegseth criticized in his comments. Over the past year, the service has begun dismantling decades-old program structures that officials say are too rigid, too slow and too far from the battlefield.
Top leaders have unveiled what they call a “transformation strategy”: a plan to streamline the Army's force structure, reduce redundant oversight and reform hiring practices that have prevented modern systems from reaching Soldiers on time.
“The Army is running as fast as it can to try to reinvent itself and be ready for modern warfare,” Sec. Dan Driscoll previously told Fox News Digital. “They will do a lot of that outside of the traditional acquisition process. That flexibility allows them to innovate and test at a speed that is really difficult to achieve in the conventional force.”
The Army has become the Pentagon's test bed for acquisition reform, deploying some of the most aggressive efforts to speed up weapons procurement and eliminate the bureaucracy that Hegseth criticized in his comments. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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The Army and the War Department generally are emphasizing a “commercial-first” approach: using commercial technologies and industrial models rather than highly customized, proprietary defense systems when possible.
“They will do a lot of that outside of the traditional acquisition process. That flexibility allows them to innovate and test at a speed that is really difficult to do in the conventional force,” Driscoll said. “They basically just use their corporate credit card to go online and buy things to try, and they'll find what works.”
