Procurement Driving Strategy
Against the backdrop of a major U.S. naval deployment to the South Atlantic and a dramatic name change from the Department of Defense to the Department of War; most Americans would think the technical documents and processes are largely irrelevant to U.S. power. Yet they matter a great deal, as the frameworks that channel strategy and policy. Wars are won and lost by choices made years, or decades, before the first shot is fired.
The Pentagon’s forthcoming National Defense Strategy and its reforms to procurement seem to be disconnected elements in a disjointed administration. In fact, they are part of the same process. Typically, budgetary constraints drive strategy, hamstringing American power. In today’s Pentagon, such procurement objectives as submarines and selected Air Force projects drive strategy. Weapons are essential to strategy but are not of themselves strategy. The consequence is that the United States has no strategy at all. The result will be a hard course correction in the face of threats from China and Russia later in the Trump administration, or worse, a major war that the United States loses.
The U.S. military is the most sophisticated force in human history. Across the five Services and Coast Guard 1.3 million men and women serve on active duty, with another 800,000 reservists behind them. The U.S. fields a fully mature triad of air, land, and sea-launched nuclear weapons. Each U.S. aircraft carrier has more combat power than most national air forces. American stealth bombers can evade all but the most sophisticated modern radars and deploy weapons that strike within feet, or even inches, of their intended targets. Alongside these uniformed personnel serve hundreds of thousands of civilian analysts, contractors, and bureaucrats, and tens of thousands more intelligence officers.
It is understandable that such a complex organization requires a careful procurement process. There is no silver bullet technology, no war-winning weapon that transforms war. Military organizations instead struggle to identify technological developments and coherently integrate them into future force structure, given there is so little hard data to predict how specific weapons will perform, and what data exists is contextual.
Historically, the U.S. military has sought to organize procurement across the Services through a coordinated process that identifies requirements, digests them into each Service, and then translates these into procurement plans. Initially, the Army, Navy, and Air Force did their own internal assessments, a sensible approach since the military services know their own capabilities best. This shifted after the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act created a more powerful Joint Staff and Combatant Command system. In the early 2000s, the U.S. created the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process to synthesize Service and Combatant Command insights. Although well-conceived, JCIDS degenerated into a paper-pushing bureaucracy substituting for coherent analysis.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg eliminated the JCIDS process in late August. Theoretically, this should devolve procurement back to the Services. But the Army, Navy, and Air Force staffs have not had force design responsibility and accountability concurrently since the 1990s. Instead, the Deputy Secretary is poised to lead force design and procurement for practical purposes. He has access to a pot of cash, the aptly named Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR), to purchase high-impact technologies and defense articles.
All these steps seem like reasonable moves to revitalize the Pentagon’s sclerotic procurement model. The issue comes with context.
The Pentagon’s leadership differs quite radically from its predecessors.
Feinberg’s procurement reforms allow him to literally pick winners and losers. This comes just as the defense tech community in the U.S. faces a boom-or-bust moment. Private defense tech firms making aerial drones, low-cost munitions, unmanned ships and underwater vehicles, and space-based and aerial communications technology have experienced an enormous investment glut. Some of their products are excellent, many are largely irrelevant, as their poor performance in Ukraine has demonstrated. But like any venture-backed enterprise, they must “cash out,” gaining a financial contract line that justifies the venture investment and incentivizes acquisition.
Some of these technologies are extremely promising. Ukraine has demonstrated the value of drones, enabled by localized mesh networks for command-and-control, and integrated with such traditional weapons as large-bore howitzers. Indeed, Ukrainian drones do their best work by making artillery significantly more accurate and covering gaps for the country’s badly overstretched infantry. Like most military technology, unmanned systems deployed at scale provide evolutionary benefits to the force they amplify. These benefits may be enormous, but they do not totally obviate the previous force structure.
The danger is that the Pentagon is considering a significant shift in force structure well beyond what the evidence indicates. By making direct bets, Feinberg can transform U.S. procurement with little resistance from the Services – whose experience has been set aside – or from the Joint Staff – which is equally under political threat.
A lighter force employing unmanned systems at scale would lack the capability and reach to deploy to the Western Pacific and deter or defeat China. The same can be said of its ability to meet demands in the Middle East and Europe. For example, traditional F-16 and F-35 strike aircraft and Patriot missiles were used to shoot down Russian drones that had violated Polish airspace on September 9th. The most conceivable mission for a venture-transformed force, centering on light drones and cheap missiles, is deployments to Latin America, executing border enforcement, and counter-narcotics missions, alongside operations against organized crime.
This mission set is conveniently identical to the forthcoming National Defense Strategy’s priorities. The NDS provides high-level guidance to the Pentagon, identifying the Secretary’s strategic objectives and general goals. Subsequently, the Joint Staff will produce a classified National military Strategy that matches ends and means. The forthcoming NDS, per public leaks, places Hemispheric Security as the Pentagon’s top mission. This includes both missile defense and, critically, operations on the border and against drug cartels. Subordinated is a focus on the China deterrence issue, let alone Middle Eastern and European policy problems.
Perhaps the provisionally renamed Department of War will not embrace a Hemispheric Defense paradigm fully. But the forthcoming NDS, along with ongoing fights over the defense budget, imply a direction of travel radically different from, and largely antithetical to, a coherent ends-ways-means strategic linkage. Instead, the Department now favors procurement to drive strategy.
A sole arbiter of procurement decisions is as antithetical to wise strategy as the national government’s expanding interests in, and influence over, large U.S. corporations is corrosive of market-based investment decisions.
Congress can still stop this dangerous drift by appropriating the necessary cash for the Pentagon to buy new defense articles, ensuring traditional tools of American power are maintained, and insisting that the experience of the military services be reinserted into the making of national strategy.
Seth Cropsey is president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as a deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”