The Pentagon has a well-earned reputation for acquisition boondoggles, weapons programs that cost too much, deliver too little, and take too long to make.
“There are so many DOD programs that are plagued by cost overruns, design delays, and performance issues,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) lamented as he chaired a House oversight hearing in July. “Sadly, this subcommittee has had no shortage of programs to examine when it comes to oversight of DOD.”
One recent example is the Air Force’s replacement for the Cold War -era Minuteman III nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile , the land leg of America’s nuclear triad . The total cost for the LGM-35A Sentinel program , which includes some 400 new launch sites, thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, and land acquisition, has ballooned to more than $140 billion, an increase of 81%. Under a law known as Nunn-McCurdy, the cost overrun is deemed “critical,” which required the Pentagon to declare Sentinel vital to national security and state that no cheaper option is available, in order to avoid its cancellation.
The Sentinel is just the latest poster child in a long line of overbudget, underperforming, not-ready-for-prime-time weapons that are increasingly the rule, not the exception.
“Our defense acquisition system takes too long to deliver capability, costs more than it should, and often does not access or fails to adopt the most cutting-edge capabilities industry has to offer,” Moshe Schwartz, an expert in acquisition policy with the National Defense Industrial Association, testified at the House hearing. “In addition, our defense industrial base is shrinking. This is a problem.”
A recent Government Accountability Office report that reviewed 31 major defense acquisition programs found that the average time from drawing board to “delivered capability” has increased from eight years to 11. “What used to take the government five years to buy now takes 25 years, from senior leader idea to product execution at full rate production,” said MacKenzie Eaglen, defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “From characterizations of effort ranging from, quote, 'unbelievably slow' to, quote, 'too late,' the Pentagon cannot seem to break out of neutral and stop playing catch up, even as military balance is shifting away from America, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.”
Meanwhile, China , unencumbered by a free market capitalist system or a politically divided Congress, is able to outproduce the United States in a variety of weapons, including warships and missiles. “The military faces peer competitors who don't have these same handcuffs of purchasing and an acquisition system that's of the Soviet-style management and is increasingly falling behind our one pacing threat competitor in China,” Eaglen told Congress.
A briefing slide from the Office of Naval Intelligence leaked to the media last year put China’s shipbuilding capacity at more than 230 times greater than that of the U.S. “I would tell you anecdotally that China is still, after gains we've made in the last five years or so, about five to six times faster than us in acquisition and in purchasing power parity. They spend about $1 to our $20 to get to the same capability,” Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt, the then-deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, told a gathering of government contract agents in 2022.
“It's math, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to lose if we can't figure out how to drop the cost and increase the speed in our defense supply chains,” he said at the Government Contract Pricing Summit.
While there are many factors that account for why the U.S. is not nearly as nimble as China in weapons, Holt pointed to what he called “a very centrally and micromanaged system of appropriations” that “served the Cold War well” but in today’s environment “is absolutely going to kill us.”
“I believe congressional oversight is necessary, but we've got to modernize it,” Holt argued. “Instead of an oversight process that happens once per year, maybe there's insight we can give them quarterly but we don't stop decisions that need to be made on the fly.”
“Congressional oversight, alas, is a misnomer. ‘Congressional oversights’ is the term you want,” said Mark Thompson, a national security analyst at POGO, the Project On Government Oversight. “When it comes to a new weapon, its backers disproportionately come from the states in which it is built — and its opponents likewise are overrepresented among the states where the legacy systems they are slated to replace are located.”
Thompson, a former Time magazine reporter who has covered the Pentagon since 1979, has developed a deep skepticism about the ability of Congress to fix what ails the acquisition. “The Pentagon has got to stop developing bejeweled platforms designed to last for a half-century or more. U.S. weapons have gotten so expensive and take so long to develop that there’s little chance for real competition and the innovation it can generate.”
Thompson cited the Pentagon’s most expensive program ever, the fifth-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has different models for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.
“The F-35 is slated to cost $442 billion. Keeping it flying will cost $1.58 trillion — 79% of the program’s total price tag,” Thompson noted. “Building a plane to fly that long bakes in obsolescence. The F-35, which flew for the first time in 2006, is slated to remain airborne until 2088 — 82 years. Whether you’re a plane with upgrades or a person with a teleprompter, it’s tough to stay state-of-the-art for that long.”
Almost every major weapons program is behind schedule, including the next Ford-class aircraft carrier, which is 18 to 26 months late, and the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, which is 12 to 16 months late.
The long lead time it takes to bring weapons online leads to another big problem: It prevents the Pentagon from shifting funds from weapons that have outlived their useful life or never reached their potential to new, more promising technology.
“We gotta get rid of irrelevant technology there. We're spending money to do service life extension programs on airplanes that really need to be in a museum somewhere,” Holt said. “We have F-15s that are coming apart in the air, so we had to build the F-15EX because we can't afford more fifth-generation fighters. And how long has the B-52 been around? I mean, yes, it's still relevant, but at what cost?”
When the Navy wanted to decommission the early versions of the infamous littoral combat ship, dubbed the “ Little Crappy Ship ,” after only a few years of service because costs soared from $200 million per ship to $600 million, all while experiencing structural defects and engine failures , Congress fought to keep them in order to make the size of the U.S. fleet look bigger on paper. Similarly, when the Air Force wanted to retire the A-10 ground attack plane that first saw combat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, its plans met stiff resistance from the congressional delegation from Arizona, where many of the aging planes were based.
First as a House member and then as a senator, Martha McSally (R-AZ), a former A-10 squadron commander, and later Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a former astronaut, fought to keep the plane, which though beloved by pilots and ground troops lacked stealth and therefore could only operate when the U.S. enjoyed air superiority, not in contested airspace such as over Ukraine.
“We do keep funding these various programs that are legacy programs,” said Sen. Angus King (I-ME), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. “I think it’s a question of, what did you train on? What are the weapons that were crucial in your experience as a military officer? But whatever it is, we're really making a big mistake.”
“Yes,” King said, members of Congress fight to keep programs in their states, but the bigger problem, he argued, is simply bureaucratic inertia that underfunds new technologies that will dominate the battlefield of the future.
“In my view, the problem is not a failure to kill weapon systems. It's a failure to invest in the development of new weapon systems based upon different principles,” King emphasized. “It's a failure of imagination.”
“We are, in my opinion, drastically missing the boat on the two most important technologies of the 21st century in terms of warfare: directed energy and hypersonics,” King argued.
“Directed energy is the prime example. We are currently shooting down $20,000 Houthi missiles with $4 million SM-6s," he said, referring to the Standard Missile 6. "That's just inexcusable. In some cases, we're shooting down $2,000 drones with $2 [million] to $4 million missiles. Just from an economic point of view, it makes no sense. Directed energy should have been the first line of defense.”
“And believe it or not, the budget for directed energy in the Department of Defense has been cut in half in the last three years,” King added. “It's one of the most egregious failures of foresight that I've ever seen.”
If the war in Ukraine has proven anything, it’s that artificial intelligence-enabled drones, not heavy armor and tank-killing planes or giant supercarriers , will dominate future warfare. “All of our strategy in the Pacific is forward projection of power based upon aircraft carriers, and we’re just making assumptions about their invulnerability that I don't think are valid in light of developments in hypersonics,” King said.
“Warfare in this age is changing constantly. What gives us the advantage to deter our adversaries, frankly, right now, increased drone and missile defense and drone defense capability. If you get there first on those things, it’s going to give you an enormous deterrent capability,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), ranking member and former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at an American Enterprise Institute event in May.
Smith said his colleagues are often too fixated on numbers, worried too much about the size of China’s navy rather than its capability. “The obsession with the number of ships is idiotic. I mean, you could have 5,000 rowboats — would you have a better Navy than someone with 100 destroyers? I don’t think so,” Smith argued. “Let’s focus on capability, which is why the submarines are so important. … We need to be smart about those things.”
“Another fundamental problem with military procurement is the Pentagon’s irrational system of developing requirements for new weapons,” former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien wrote in Foreign Affairs last month. “Requirements are easy to add and hard to remove. The result is highly sophisticated weapons, but ones that are expensive and take years to field.”
The U.S. should take a lesson from allies such as Australia, O’Brien suggested, citing “a lean bureaucracy” that developed aerial and underwater combat drones “at low cost and without the massive delays.”
One bright spot, an example of more forward-thinking defense spending, is the Pentagon’s Replicator program, which draws on the lessons from Ukraine by aiming to mass-produce thousands of low-cost and attritable, or “disposable,” drones using commercially available technology.
“They can help a determined defender stop a larger aggressor from achieving its objectives, put fewer people in the line of fire, and be made, fielded, and upgraded at the speed warfighters need, without long maintenance tails,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said when she unveiled the Replicator program last year.
“Not all problems need new money. We are problem-solvers, and we intend to self-solve. So, Replicator will use existing funding, existing programming lines,” Hicks boasted.
When Congress stands aside, some Pentagon leaders have proven remarkably adept at effecting radical change. For instance, when Gen. David Berger took over as Marine Corps commandant, he took a look at his force that was supposed to be light and agile and fight from the sea and decided it was overloaded with heavy armor. In a bold move that sent shock waves through the ranks of retired Marine Corps generals, Berger sent all the tanks and many of its artillery pieces to the Army or to be mothballed and redesigned the Marines into a lean, mean, fighting machine of the future.
“Amphibious landings, amphibious assault, forcible entry, those things which Marines are known for for 70 years, we'll continue to do, but we'll do them in a very different way. And why? Because the character of war is changing. We need to change with it,” Berger said at a Washington Post forum in 2022.
Berger’s visionary plan, which some in the Pentagon thought should have qualified him to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was vindicated by the experience in Ukraine, where tanks proved all too vulnerable to top-down attacks from cheap drones dropping small explosives from overhead. “In some cases, we've let go of things that were very successful in the past in order to move toward things that we are going to need in the future,” Berger said.
“Mastery of new technology is what ultimately wins wars,” said King, who likes to cite the lessons of history. “What did Genghis Khan, Henry V, and Harry Truman have in common? The answer is they all won significant military battles because of mastery of the newest technology. In the case of Genghis Khan, it was the metal stirrup, Henry V at Agincourt was the longbow, and Harry Truman it was the atomic bomb that effectively ended World War II.”
In his lecture to government contract professionals two years ago, Holt had an even more sobering message about the need for change to meet the threat China poses. “People have to wrap their minds around the idea that it is an existential threat to our way of life to the freedoms that our kids may or may not enjoy,” Holt warned. “This is not a sitcom, where at the end, after the last commercial, all of the situations resolved themselves and the good guys win. If you look back in history, it is possible that you could have another Dark Ages, and so there is a lot at stake.”
“The war in Ukraine is transforming the character of war in ways that will affect all future wars,” Fred and Kimberly Kagan wrote in a report for the Institute for the Study of War, in which they argue the Ukraine experience, including the rapid adoption of AI and new drone technology, is driving the next great innovation cycle, in much the same way the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was a harbinger of the tank and aircraft warfare that would dominate World War II.
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“American military thinkers often imagine that future wars will be too short to generate much innovation during conflict. … But most large wars are both long enough and challenging enough to both sides to drive intense innovation and adaptation cycles iterating much faster than such cycles run during peacetime.”
“The United States and its allies and partners must understand and internalize the lessons of this war and rapidly adapt,” they concluded.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com .
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