Copyright The New York Times
Nearly every new defense secretary since the end of the Cold War has at some point declared war on the Pentagon’s sclerotic bureaucracy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took a page from that proud tradition on Friday, promising in a speech to blow up the Pentagon’s ingrained processes and speed the delivery of new weapons to the American war fighter. Mr. Hegseth vowed that, unlike his predecessors, he would not lose focus, describing his push alternatively as a “war of attrition” and “an unrelenting onslaught to change the way we do business and to change the way that bureaucracy responds.” In the course of a 70-minute speech, delivered to a crowd of about 200 defense industry executives, senior military officers and congressional staff members at the National War College in Washington, Mr. Hegseth used the word “speed” 25 times. “The Department of War will only do business with industry partners that share our priority of speed and volume above all else,” he said, using the Trump administration’s preferred term for the Defense Department. A few seconds later he called on American weapons makers to surge “at the speed of ingenuity.” Even as he promised to rebuild the American “arsenal of freedom,” he acknowledged the difficulty of the task and the failures of the Pentagon chiefs who preceded him. Mr. Hegseth began his address by reading an excerpt from a speech delivered by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Sept. 10, 2001, in which he likened the Pentagon bureaucracy to an “implacable” adversary. “The modernization of the Department of Defense is a matter of immense urgency,” Mr. Rumsfeld said 24 years earlier. “In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s a matter of life and death, ultimately, of every American.” Mr. Hegseth’s tenure as defense secretary has largely been defined by his inexperience and his focus on culture war issues, such as eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the department and banning transgender troops. “Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading and we lost our way,” he said in a late September speech to hundreds of general officers and senior enlisted advisers near Washington. “We became the woke department.” His speech on Friday dived deep into the arcane details of the military’s system for procuring weapons. He promised to replace the Pentagon’s process for determining weapons specifications — which takes as long as 300 days to approve a requirements document — with something faster and more agile. And he pressed the defense industry executives in the room to invest more of their own money — rather than taxpayer dollars — in the development of new technology. In exchange, he vowed to give them a clearer sense of the military’s needs. “We will award companies bigger, longer contracts for proven systems,” he said. “So those companies will be confident in investing more to grow the industrial base.” Mr. Hegseth, an Iraq war veteran and former television commentator, seemed to acknowledge that his speech was a wonky departure from his usual fare. “Folks who are watching this on Fox — their eyes are rolling over,” he joked at one point. “But everyone in this room knows what I am talking about.” In changing the Pentagon’s processes, Mr. Hegseth may have one big advantage over his predecessors. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the pressing need for cheap drones and other systems that are built around commercially available technology and software that can be updated rapidly on the battlefield. Dozens, if not hundreds, of new defense companies have sprung up in the past couple of years to fill this need, and billions of dollars in venture capital have followed. In his speech, Mr. Hegseth referred to this change. “Our war fighter, as you know, can’t wait decades for the tools they need to deter and fight our wars,” he said. “The current pace of technological innovation is unprecedented.”
