There is free-riding among the US military services, too
By Maximilian K. Bremer and Kelly A. Grieco
Mar 10, 2025, 06:52 AM
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has vowed to serve as the Pentagon’s “change agent,” reforming the acquisition process and placing emerging capabilities in the hands of warfighters faster.
This is a tall task.
Truly disrupting the Pentagon will require starting at the top, specifically adopting a comprehensive joint force design, in which capabilities are developed and integrated cohesively across all military services, domains and functions.
This approach is especially critical for identifying capabilities vital to the joint force, but which no single service has a major interest in funding, because they are “common pool” assets.
By the Joint Staff’s own admission, joint force design is “necessary to produce a unifying vision for the future of the Joint Force.” Yet the U.S. military lacks such a future-oriented framework for guiding joint modernization priorities and timelines. While the Joint Warfighting Concept outlines a broad approach for how the Joint Force should fight in a future conflict, it lacks specificity about which services are expected to provide what future capabilities and on what timelines. As the Marine Corps commandant lamented in 2023, the services lack “a common aimpoint … that says this is where the Joint Force needs to be 5, 6, or 7 years into the future.”
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2025/03/10/there-is-free-riding-among-the-us-military-services-too/
