By Peter A. Newell
Passing the SPEED and FORGED Acts would provide a significant moment for the Department of Defense. These pieces of legislation would reform the DoD’s acquisition system, making it easier, faster and more cost-effective to get critical solutions into warfighters’ hands.
But they represent a starting point only.
Enacting these measures would mark a vital legislative step, providing us with crucial new authorities to cut through the bureaucratic inertia that has long plagued our ability to deliver technology to the warfighter. As someone who has spent years at the tactical edge with the Rapid Equipping Force and now at BMNT, I know firsthand the urgency of getting cutting-edge solutions into the hands of those who need them most. In an increasingly complex and competitive global landscape, our ability to innovate and adapt at speed is not just an advantage; it's a national security imperative.
However, legislation alone is not a silver bullet. The Acts give us the "what"—the legal framework. But the more profound challenge lies in the "how"—how we fundamentally change our culture, our processes, and our mindsets to operationalize these new authorities. This isn't just about faster paperwork; it's about transforming how we define problems, how we engage with the commercial sector, and how we empower our people.
This four-part series is designed to unpack that "how."
Part 1: The Foundation and Unseen Hurdles will dive into the critical challenges the SPEED and FORGED Acts don't inherently solve, particularly our struggle to define problems in a language commercial companies understand and the deep-seated cultural resistance to change.
Part 2: Lessons from the Battlefield – Palantir vs. The U.S. Army will take you through a real-world case study that vividly illustrates these very disconnects and the profound friction that arises when superior commercial solutions clash with entrenched bureaucracy.
Part 3: The Path Forward for Lean Innovation will outline concrete, actionable steps for integrating lean and agile methodologies into our acquisition processes, drawing on the principles of "Hacking for Defense" and my experiences with the REF.
Part 4: Strategic Imperatives for Enduring Advantage will then broaden our view, discussing the need for parallel acquisition systems, leveraging private capital, and ultimately, the critical importance of codifying an innovation doctrine to ensure lasting transformation.
Each part of this series builds upon the last, offering a comprehensive look at the challenges and, more importantly, the solutions necessary for true mission acceleration. You'll see how the issues are interconnected, how past failures offer invaluable lessons, and how a holistic approach is essential for moving beyond legislative intent to real-world impact. To fully grasp the scope of the transformation required and the strategic opportunities before us, I urge you to read all four parts. It's about understanding not just that we need to change, but how we can actually achieve it.
Part 1: The Foundation and Unseen Hurdles
The Unaddressed Challenges: Why Legislation Alone Falls Short
The Acts provide a foundation but not a finish line. By their very nature, these Acts don’t solve some of the deeper, systemic issues that continue to impede rapid technology delivery.
For one, they don’t automatically help us define our complex battlefield problems faster, or in a language that commercial companies—especially those outside the traditional defense industrial base—can actually understand. Secondly, they don’t guarantee that our people will actually know how to use these new authorities they've been given. The cultural and behavioral shifts necessary for genuine, sustained innovation aren't simply legislated into existence.
The ‘Demand Signal’ Dilemma: Bridging the Language Gap
One of the most frustrating impediments to getting cutting-edge technology into the hands of our warfighters is how the DoD articulates their needs. Their demand signal is far too often anything but clear, concise, and understandable to a wider range of partners, especially commercial companies. This lack of clarity is a fundamental barrier. Military requirements are frequently written in highly technical, jargon-filled language that doesn't align with the product development cycles or capabilities of the commercial sector. This creates a profound disconnect, a conceptual chasm between urgent military problems and the innovative solutions readily available in the commercial world.
Because of this specialized language, commercial companies—particularly agile startups or those unfamiliar with the defense sector—may not realize that their existing, potentially game-changing technology could solve a critical military problem. This severely limits the pool of innovators we can draw from, restricting access to the full spectrum of commercial capabilities and leading missed opportunities for rapid adoption of potentially game-changing, dual-use technologies
The key to engaging Silicon Valley isn't just government funding, which is often limited and hard to access. It's about challenging these entrepreneurs and visionaries with DoD and other government agencies' problems. Getting here requires the DoD to articulate problems in a way that resonates with entrepreneurs’ problem-solving ethos, focusing on desired operational outcomes rather than prescriptive technical specifications.
Without that framing from DoD, the formidable burden of translation often falls on the company, which can be a barrier to entry. This disproportionately impacts smaller, more agile commercial firms that lack the extensive resources, internal expertise, and dedicated government relations teams that traditional defense primes possess to navigate this labyrinth. It creates an uneven playing field, favoring entrenched incumbents over potentially more innovative new entrants.
Furthermore, if only a select few large, established defense contractors possess the internal expertise, historical context, and dedicated resources—like former military personnel and specialized legal teams—to effectively "translate" DoD’s arcane, jargon-filled requirements, this inadvertently reinforces their incumbency. New entrants are effectively locked out. This structural barrier reduces genuine competition, potentially leading to less innovative and more expensive solutions being delivered to the warfighter much more slowly, directly contradicting the spirit of both Acts. This dynamic also explains why DoD often struggles to adopt commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions; their requirements are frequently written so prescriptively that only a custom, developmental solution can purportedly meet them, even when superior commercial alternatives are readily available.
Focusing on problems instead of forcing solutions is the fix for this. However, it represents a fundamental and necessary paradigm shift for defense acquisition. Instead of the traditional approach of defining a rigid, often pre-conceived solution within requirements documents, DoD must learn to articulate the underlying problem in a clear, concise, and outcome-oriented manner. This will empower the commercial sector to propose a diverse array of innovative solutions, fostering true market-driven innovation rather than merely fulfilling prescriptive development contracts. This "problem-first" approach directly addresses the core disconnect, opening the door to a wider range of partners and unforeseen technological breakthroughs.
The Cultural Chasm: From Bureaucracy to Battlefield Agility
A lot of attention gets focused on military requirements, but they are just part of the innovation adoption problem. Another issue is the DoD's deeply ingrained traditional waterfall approach to technology development, with its emphasis on rigid requirements and long development cycles. This approach is inherently ill-suited for the pace of modern technological change and can actively stifle innovation. The waterfall methodology is strictly sequential, demanding that each phase be completed before the next can begin. This makes changes difficult and limits continuous customer involvement throughout the development process. While it offers theoretical benefits such as clear frameworks and extensive documentation, these come at the cost of agility and responsiveness, rendering it profoundly inadequate for rapidly changing operational environments or software products that require continuous adaptation. Yet in contrast, Steve Blank's pioneering work, particularly his Lean Startup methodology, does the opposite, fundamentally emphasizing iterative development, continuous learning, and adaptability.
Innovation isn't just about increasing speed; it fundamentally requires a cultural transformation within the DoD that embraces collaboration, risk-taking, and a willingness to embrace new ideas by actively seeking out and integrating diverse perspectives and capabilities from across the innovation landscape.
After all, passage of the Acts doesn't guarantee that people will actually know how to use the authorities they are given. There is a critical gap in human capital development, training, and institutional confidence that will inhibit execution. Change requires a cultural shift that entails rewarding collaboration, accepting good enough solutions that can be improved over time, and empowering individuals to make decisions faster.
The Acts provide the legal latitude for greater flexibility, but if the underlying culture remains deeply risk-averse, personnel will hesitate to fully utilize these new authorities, rendering the Acts largely ineffective. The paradox is that the very mechanisms designed to ensure accountability and efficiency have become the primary inhibitors of speed and innovation.
Innovation Doctrine: A blueprint for lasting change
Lasting change will only come if these new ways of working are codified in doctrine, policy, and everyday language.
The concept of accepting good-enough solutions that can be improved over time represents a radical and necessary departure from the DoD's traditional, often unattainable, pursuit of perfection and exhaustive upfront requirements. In a rapidly evolving and contested threat landscape, a good-enough solution delivered quickly and iteratively improved can provide a decisive battlefield advantage far superior to a perfect solution that arrives too late to matter.
My observation that the military does not have a doctrine that connects the output of innovation to war fighting is significant. Military doctrine guides how forces fight, organize, and equip themselves. Without a corresponding, codified doctrine for innovation, new practices and initiatives, no matter how promising, remain ad-hoc activities that are prone to die over time because they're not part of the system.
Both Acts provide critical new authorities, but without a robust doctrinal framework that explicitly codifies how these authorities are to be used within a lean, agile, and user-centric innovation process, their adoption will be inconsistent, fragmented, and ultimately unsustainable. This implies that legislative changes, while vital, must be accompanied by a top-down, systemic re-education, training, and formal codification of new operational norms for innovation to ensure long-term impact.
Stay tuned for the next in the series, coming on Thursday, August 28, which can also be found here.
Great, reasoned discussion and appreciate you taking the task to pull this all together. As an Intel guy and fan of evolving military frameworks, I think we need a corresponding azimuth on threat and technology directions. With Quantum around the corner, many of the cybersecurity or AI issues we are evaluating today will be blips on the evolutionary scope. I don’t believe in predicting the future, but what kind of anticipatory threat model can we devise to measure this dimension of our national defense efforts?