Long-sought goal of better Pentagon buying may finally be within reach
A new executive order seeks to overhaul defense buying. A handful of innovators within the Defense Department are already showing the way.
Patrick Tucker and Jennifer Hlad | April 11, 2025
Calls to overhaul the Pentagon’s buying process go back decades—to the Revolutionary War, one former congressman joked—from defense secretaries from William Perry to Donald Rumsfeld to Robert Gates to Ash Carter. An executive order signed late Wednesday evening is the latest, perhaps the most ambitious—and just maybe, the one with the best chance for success.
President Donald Trump’s order calls upon the Defense Department to “rapidly reform our antiquated defense acquisition processes with an emphasis on speed, flexibility and execution.” It mandates greater use of Other Transaction Authorities (via vehicles such as the Adaptive Acquisition Framework), a review of internal regulations and requirements that slow down buying, better training for acquisitions officials, and a review of major programs.
Many of these measures are not new. They are a recognition of a fact first observed by venture capitalist Marc Andreesen in The Wall Street Journal in 2011: “Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.” That’s the world in which most of us live. But the Pentagon has relied on slow-moving practices and processes to protect itself from wide-scale commercial software adoption, to being devoured. That’s changing. The mandate to prioritize the use of commercially available solutions signals why reform may be closer than ever.
https://www.defenseone.com/business/2025/04/long-sought-goal-better-pentagon-buying-may-finally-be-within-reach/404483/?oref=d1-featured-river-top
