{"id":364561,"date":"2025-11-08T13:02:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T13:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/364561\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T13:02:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T13:02:16","slug":"trumps-secretary-of-defense-takes-on-the-military-industrial-complex-guess-whos-likely-to-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/364561\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s secretary of defense takes on the military industrial complex. (Guess who’s likely to win?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

A battle is brewing between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and big contractors in the military-industrial complex over how the nation buys weapons systems. Some of Hegseth\u2019s notions, which have been circulating in reform circles for a decade, are laudable. But his style of running the Pentagon\u2014including the way he\u2019s put forth his new policy\u2014gravely dims his chances for success.<\/p>\n

His policy\u2014laid out in a six-page memo<\/a>, which he presented to top corporate executives at a meeting on Friday\u2014is meant to cut through the sclerotic bureaucracies, in the Pentagon and at defense contractors, which have slowed the development of weapons programs, boosted their cost, and neglected the needs of the servicemen and -women who would actually use the weapons in training and combat.<\/p>\n

Whether his new policy would actually solve these problems\u2014whether it could create the structures and incentives to override bureaucratic and corporate interests\u2014is another matter.<\/p>\n

Many of Hegseth\u2019s ideas stem from the Defense Innovation Unit<\/a>, a small branch of the Defense Department created in 2015 by then\u2013Defense Secretary Ash Carter, a Harvard-educated physicist and historian who foresaw back in 2000 that commercial industries would soon overtake defense labs at innovation and that, in order to preserve America\u2019s technological edge over adversaries, the Pentagon would have to form new relationships with the private sector. By the time he joined President Barack Obama\u2019s Pentagon, first as undersecretary for acquisition, then as top official, Carter was stunned to learn that nothing had changed. He reached out to Silicon Valley and created DIU.<\/p>\n

For the new unit\u2019s director, he chose Raj Shah, a former Air Force pilot, now a Valley technologist. As an F-16 pilot during the Iraq war, Shah noticed a problem: The display screen in his cockpit had no moving map. The GPS showed him ground coordinates, but there was no overlaid image\u2014no moving dot or icon\u2014that showed where he was in relation to those coordinates. Flying close to the border, he didn\u2019t know whether he was in Iraq\u2019s or Iran\u2019s airspace. During home leave, he bought an iPAQ, one of the early Pocket PCs, and loaded it with a standard aviation-map program. Back in his F-16, he strapped the pad to his lap and relied on it\u2014not the plane\u2019s multimillion-dollar mil-spec software\u2014for navigation.<\/p>\n

In other words, Shah was the ideal person to realize Carter\u2019s vision.<\/p>\n

DIU set up shop in Silicon Valley, seeking out small firms with innovations that could have military applications. At first, the unit\u2019s budget was small\u2014tens of millions of dollars. Its small but specialized staff worked under the radar, employing an obscure statute, known as other transaction authority, that let particularly cheap projects evade normal procurement procedures.<\/p>\n

Shah and his team also used their connections to talk with military commanders in the field, finding out what they needed to improve performance. (Shah told me nobody in the Pentagon or among any of the F-16\u2019s contractors had ever asked Shah about his cockpit navigator in Iraq.)<\/p>\n

In its first quarter of operation, DIU signed 12 contracts worth a total of $136 million. All the products had been designed for the commercial marketplace; no one in the military had known they existed. The average time between the initial proposal and the signed contract was 59 days. This was revolutionary in every way. Under typical Pentagon procedures, the military services write a \u201crequirement,\u201d which bureaucrats translate into a \u201crequest for proposal.\u201d Corporations respond with product designs, which still more bureaucrats evaluate, and on it goes until prototypes are introduced. The officers who wrote the original requirements never speak to the managers who manufacture the resulting hardware or software.<\/p>\n

Hegseth\u2019s policy explicitly aims to broaden the DIU revolution\u2014to apply its techniques and style to the entire realm of weapons-buying, to the extent possible. It\u2019s unclear to what extent this is possible, even if all the actors try to make it so\u2014and it\u2019s a sure bet that some of the crucial actors won\u2019t try.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, as DIU expanded its scope, it met fierce resistance from various actors\u2014the big contractors, the Pentagon managers whose careers and promotions were tied to the contractors\u2019 fortunes, and congressional leaders whose districts won jobs and revenue from those contractors. (Shah and his DIU colleague, Christopher Kirchhoff, now both in private industry, wrote a memoir last year, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War<\/a>, which colorfully detailed their struggles.)<\/p>\n

DIU regained momentum in 2022<\/a>, after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. Silicon Valley firms, many of which had resisted cooperating with the military, eagerly lent their talents to what they conceded was a good cause\u2014helping a democratic country stave off imperial aggression\u2014and sold Ukraine\u2019s suppliers in the Biden administration a variety of wares that they had been developing: autonomous drones, real-time intelligence sensors, new communications devices, etc., and helped Ukrainian firms build their own devices as well.<\/p>\n

The Silicon Valley firms built and supplied a wide range of hardware and software with much greater agility and speed than any of the major contractors could have managed. The military role of commercially developed high technology\u2014and of commercial high-tech firms in providing it\u2014could no longer be disputed, at least for some wartime purposes. But fierce disputes remain over how broadly the lessons of Ukraine should be applied.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Hegseth\u2019s six-page memo. It purports to streamline the process of approving weapons programs; to put one office in charge of specific programs, to create accountability; and to provide more space for commercial firms, even startups, to compete for Pentagon projects.<\/p>\n

Much of the memo looks good on paper, but implementation is another matter<\/a>. Hegseth personally has little experience<\/a> at managing anything, much less multibillion-dollar weapons systems. Budget cuts and Department of Government Efficiency firings have emptied out the Pentagon\u2019s acquisition bureaus; there simply aren\u2019t enough personnel to manage this revolution (and, if the memo were put into place, it would amount to a revolution).<\/p>\n

Nor does the memo provide the personnel with specific guidance on how to do their jobs. For instance, the memo states that in setting deadlines and goals for weapons projects, the new, streamlined, held-accountable program managers will \u201cmake trades between speed, performance and cost.\u201d At least the memo acknowledges that there are trade-offs here; higher speed or lower costs can sometimes mean degraded performance. But on what criteria, using what metrics, should the bedraggled managers\u2014who have never had to do this before\u2014make the trade-offs now? On what basis would managers be judged successes or failures\u2014and thus expect promotion or firing? Those are key questions in motivating a junior officer or civil servant to behave in certain ways. They are not addressed, much less answered, here.<\/p>\n

Finally, Hegseth\u2019s personal style creates a special layer of self-sabotage. He called the executives to a meeting on Friday (just as he called hundreds of generals and admirals<\/a> to hear a speech in September) not to elicit their ideas or feedback to a draft of tentative proposals, but rather to tell them what he\u2019d decided to do, spell out how it will change their livelihoods, and order them to get with the program.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Fred Kaplan
\n What to Make of Trump\u2019s Wild Nuclear Threat
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Generals and admirals at least are duty-bound to obey lawful orders from their civilian overseers (and, at that speech, President Donald Trump, the commander in chief, added his weight to Hegseth\u2019s message). This is not true with defense contractors, which are private companies.<\/p>\n

One former defense and intelligence official, who has worked both sides of the weapons-acquisition business, who asked not to be named because he still does consulting work for the Pentagon and for industry, told me in an email: \u201cThose executives are asking, what &&%%$3$ do you think you\u2019re doing? Who do you think actually makes this stuff?\u201d The consultant added that he thinks several of Hegseth\u2019s proposals would improve the system, theoretically, but, he added, this has \u201clittle bearing on the reality and the reaction inside the Beltway.\u201d<\/p>\n

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    The mainstream press could have helped Hegseth spread the message, but he has locked out all of the experienced reporters. (In advance of Friday\u2019s meeting, only industry websites had even reported on the memo.) Strong legislation would also firm up his case, but the relevant congressional committees are annoyed with him<\/a> for failing to brief them on policy matters of all sorts. Most lawmakers will thus be more receptive than usual to industry lobbyists\u2014and they\u2019re already receptive, given that the major contractors\u2019 weapons systems provide their districts with lots of jobs and revenue. Drones and software improvements do not so much.<\/p>\n

    Which leads to a larger question still. It is not at all clear\u2014it has not been demonstrated, in theory or practice\u2014whether the DIU model, while perfect for drones and software, is well-suited for designing and building combat planes, warships, submarines, missiles, and other major weapons systems. This is what consumes more of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated each year to the Pentagon\u2019s research, development, and procurement accounts.<\/p>\n

    The timing has never been better for the cooperation between the military and high-tech industry that Ash Carter envisioned and that the Defense Innovation Unit did much to jump-start. There has rarely been a more ill-suited crew of senior Pentagon officials to push the clock forward.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

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