Happy Hegseth Lecture Day to all who celebrate!
Everyone’s favorite new monthly tradition—SecDef Pete Hegseth gathering a bunch of super important people for a stern talking-to—is back for its November rendition, but with a bit of a twist this time.
Instead of calling his audience fat, Hegseth is set to deliver an “Arsenal of Freedom” address to defense industry leaders at the National War College today that will lay out some pretty significant changes to how the Pentagon does business—both with contractors and with its foreign customers.
Safe to say there might be more smiles in the crowd this time around.
It’s a party: According to an invite list seen by Defense One, the audience will include DoD acquisition officials and execs from a wide range of companies that do business with them. That includes:
- Startups: Anduril, Castelion, Epirus, Hermeus, Palantir, Saronic, Ursa Major, Shield AI, Rivet, SpaceX, and Karman Space & Defense.
- Consumer tech: Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, Google Cloud and Public Sector, Meta, and Microsoft.
- Primes: Boeing, General Dynamics, BAE, Huntington Ingalls, Honeywell, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Leidos, RTX, Textron, and SNC.
A draft memo circulating indicates that the reforms Hegseth is expected to announce focus on speeding up acquisitions, cracking down on delivery timelines, and overhauling the foreign military sales process.
Naturally, it also renames the “defense acquisition system” as the much sexier “warfighting acquisition system” because, ya know, defense is woke, and woke is dead.
All about speed: On the acquisitions front, it’s looking like the opposite of the infamous Last Supper speech in 1993. Proposed reforms include:
- Mandating commercial-first procurement, flexible testing methods, and “scalable production strategies.”
- A consolidation of the program executive offices into broader “portfolios” managed by “portfolio acquisition executives,” with greater autonomy over program decisions and reporting to the Army secretary and chief of staff.
- Implementing “time-indexed incentives” to make sure contractors deliver on time and on budget, with the portfolio acquisition executives using “scorecards” to keep tabs on how each portfolio is doing.
The time-indexed incentives part is a bit of a mixed bag. Everyone knows that major programs tend to blow through timelines and budgets, and stricter enforcement could help keep companies on schedule. But this kind of system may also “incentivize companies to deliver poor-quality products before they are ready for prime time just to stay on schedule and not be penalized for being late,” as AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison told Defense One.
The Pentagon sees it differently. “The core principle of this transformation is simple: place accountable decision-makers as close as possible to program execution, eliminate non-value-added layers of bureaucracy, and prioritize flexible trades and timely delivery at the speed of relevance,” a draft memo obtained by Air & Space Forces says.
“Every process, board, and review must justify its existence by demonstrating how it accelerates capability delivery to meet warfighter needs.”
Arms bazaar: On the foreign military sales front, the Pentagon is pushing to make the US—already the world’s biggest arms exporter by a long shot, raking in over $845B last year—even more open for business. Business is booming, but it could always be more booming.
Hegseth is expected to move the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which administers foreign military sales and sits in the Pentagon’s policy shop led by Elbridge Colby, over to the acquisition and sustainment office led by the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael Duffey.
The goal is to cut red tape and speed up foreign arms sales, but also “give greater weight to what allies want to buy and make American offerings more competitive,” according to a draft memo viewed by Politico.
Bottom line: This talk is gonna be all about speed. Speeding up deliveries, acquisitions, sales, testing, and, who knows, maybe even defense execs’ mile time. Anything can happen on Hegseth Lecture Day. Get your popcorn ready.