It took 45 days to rush drone defenses to CENTCOM. That’s no longer good enough: Army vice chief
Agile funding could have cut that down to a few days, Gen. Mingus says.
Meghann Myers | October 14, 2025 02:38 PM ET
Army Acquisition Defense Budget AUSA
In the days after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, U.S. troops in the Middle East began to endure near-daily drone attacks. It took six weeks to get upgraded counter-drone weapons to those far-flung outposts, the Army’s vice chief of staff said Tuesday—and the service’s procurement folks thought that was a win.
To make it happen, Gen. James Mingus said, the service had to reprogram funds destined for the Raytheon Coyote Block 2+ to the Block C variant because each of those variants was a different line of funding in the defense budget.
“It took 45 days, and everybody was patting themselves on the back…because normally that's a multi-month kind of process,” Mingus told an audience at the AUSA annual meeting in Washington, D.C. “If you're a kid at Tower 22, you're looking at your watch. Back here, we're looking at calendars.”
The story illustrated a larger point the Army leaders have been trying to make in their acquisition-reform push: so-called “agile funding” would allow them not only to more rapidly buy new technologies, but immediately get them downrange to protect troops in imminent danger.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/10/it-took-45-days-rush-drone-defenses-centcom-s-no-longer-good-enough-army-vice-chief/408793/?oref=d1-featured-river-secondary
