To Win With Speed, the Pentagon Must First Slow Down

Its new Acquisition Transformation Strategy promises speed, flexibility, and a Warfighting Acquisition System to “rebuild the arsenal of freedom” by overhauling how the Department buys, tests, and fields weapons.

The Pentagon’s chronic delays share a simple cause. Kahneman called it the planning fallacy, the belief that we can do things faster, cheaper, and better than experience ever shows. This cognitive bias is not harmless optimism. Inside the defense establishment, it distorts priorities, skews risk assessments, and inflates expectations of what forces and contractors can deliver. The result is predictable: programs that begin with confidence often end in costly delay. 

That record explains the current push for reform. The secretary is right that the department must move faster to maintain deterrence and rebuild the industrial base before competitors surge ahead. His plan to replace the legacy acquisition bureaucracy with a Warfighting Acquisition System reflects that urgency by streamlining oversight, elevating Portfolio Acquisition Executives, expanding the industrial base, and accelerating delivery of critical capabilities.

The Pentagon now faces its own set of hard choices. Speed has become the new watchword, but history shows that speed without structure leads to failure. As the department rewires its acquisition system, including cutting regulations, delegating authority, and betting on rapid pathways, it must balance urgency with discipline across five connected tasks. Together, these tasks define how to move fast and still get it right.

Every major program should start with a realistic view of history, not a blank slate. Portfolio Acquisition Executives, newly empowered under the strategy, can lead this effort by drawing on performance data from past programs within the department, with allies, and across commercial industry. Those records show how long projects actually take, what they really cost, and where they most often fail.

New plans should stay within those proven ranges unless leaders explicitly choose to take and resource additional risk. Portfolios should hold contingency reserves for shocks at the portfolio level, not pretend they will never occur. Before major decisions, teams should run a pre-mortem to test assumptions and invite an outside view to challenge optimism. Progress should be measured against historical baselines, not against slide decks. That is how disciplined speed begins, and how the department can turn talk of a wartime footing into results.

The strategy rightly elevates Mission Engineering and Integration Activity as a core tool for acquisition.  Those capabilities should be used to test options before commitments, not to justify decisions already made. Every major program should run an early design iteration that includes rapid prototypes, digital models, and focused trials, then narrow the field to what works best. Portfolio executives can make this a standard gate before production decisions.

The aim is not to slow progress but to learn fast while change is still affordable. Programs that invest in learning early will move faster later because they will pivot less in production and reduce costly rework. That is how the new acquisition approach turns authority into results.

During World War II, Ford’s Willow Run bomber plant divided the B-24 Liberator into large assemblies built in parallel, producing one bomber every 63 minutes. Eighteen shipyards on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coast applied the same modular logic to Liberty Ships, welding prefabricated sections together in weeks instead of years. Modularity turned complexity into scale.

Today’s strategy talks about fully implementing a Modular Open Systems Approach and expanding competition across the supply chain. Federal law requires a modular open-systems approach in defense acquisition. Enforcing shared standards for hardware, software, and data will let the department build once and reuse often. It will cut cost and delay while keeping innovation focused where it matters most: the mission.

The strategy promises streamlined oversight, more flexible use of the Middle Tier of Acquisition pathway, and faster decisions in Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution. Pending bipartisan legislation in the House and Senate would reinforce those efforts by promoting stable demand and predictable funding. But new authorities will matter only if the department uses its existing ones with rigor.

Digital twins, mission-engineering, and shared test data should be in place before programs scale production so work can continue without interruption once it begins. Streamlining paperwork matters only if it creates clarity through better data, clear accountability, and defined decisions. The goal is continuous delivery with fewer pauses, fewer redesigns, and fewer surprises. When planning is disciplined, execution becomes routine, and speed stops being an aspiration and becomes a habit.

The strategy calls for portfolio scorecards, supply-chain illumination, and lifecycle sustainment plans to improve performance and manage risk across the Defense Industrial Base. The final step in building faster is learning from evidence. Successful programs constantly measure performance and use those findings to improve the next cycle of planning. Portfolios should track time to field, cost variance, reuse rate, and operational availability against clear baselines. Using real performance data instead of estimates keeps decisions grounded and turns speed into a habit rather than a headline.

The department is already building the framework for continuous learning. The new boards that tie priorities to resources, the mission-engineering teams that experiment early, and the funds that scale proven ideas can together form a true feedback loop. Each stage should inform the next round of planning, from requirements to budgeting to production. When evidence drives planning, programs stop repeating the same mistakes and begin compounding what works. That is how speed becomes sustainable.

U.S. Special Operations Forces have a saying: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Kahneman’s work on human decision-making explains why. Deliberate, evidence-based choices create the foundation for true speed. The Pentagon’s task now is to restore urgency without losing discipline, proving that speed and precision can coexist. America has done this before. It can do it again by rebuilding its arsenal and revitalizing its defense industrial base.

Jeffrey M. Voth is an engineering and technology executive focused on strengthening the U.S. defense industrial base and allied cooperation. For over two decades, he has worked across several major defense acquisition programs.