Acquisition
Image via Proceedings Magazine, USNI
Competitive by Design: Reforming Defense Procurement for Speed
Lieutenant Commander Adam Pierce, U.S. Navy, Proceedings
This article from an NPS alumn argues that the United States must modernize its rigid defense procurement system by adopting variable portfolio contracts (VPC) to maintain a military advantage.
- Continuous Competition: The VPC employs a single umbrella contract that forces multiple qualified vendors to compete constantly on cost, schedule, and performance to earn a larger share of production.
- Industrial Resilience: By engaging multiple producers simultaneously, the military creates redundancy and avoids single points of failure, ensuring the industrial base can surge and absorb attrition during high-intensity conflict.
- Incentivized Innovation: This model transfers the risk and opportunity of innovation to industry, rewarding contractors who introduce cost-saving methods or improved designs with immediate market share advantages.
- Analytical Validation: Research performed by the author at the Naval Postgraduate School confirmed the model increases production capacity by 14% and improves product performance while maintaining cost stability.
The $75 Radio: Why US Special Operations Command Needs to Buy Off the Shelf for the Next War
Logan Birchfield, Small Wars Journal
To maintain communication resilience against peer adversaries, U.S. Special Operations Command must supplement its expensive, high-signature radio systems with disposable, low-power commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies that can effectively "hide in plain sight."
- Catastrophic Signature Liabilities: Traditional military radios, often costing tens of thousands of dollars, are "signature-heavy" and easily targeted by peer competitors like China or Russia. In contract, commercial LoRa technology pushes signals below the ambient noise floor, allowing operators to remain invisible to standard electronic warfare receivers.
- Disposable Tactical Edge: While high-end military systems are often too valuable to lose, COTS devices are small, lightweight, and cost as little as $75, allowing for a "disposable mindset" where mission success is prioritized over asset retention.
- Secure Domestic Production: Although many commercial chips are currently fabricated offshore, the underlying intellectual property is American-owned, and domestic foundries could be retooled to stabilize the supply chain and bypass security concerns.
- Streamlined Acquisition Strategy: Special Operations Command should leverage its unique authority to bypass "systemic friction" and rigid military specifications to immediately field these low-power wide-area network technologies to every team.
The diminished state of Defense IT acquisition and how to fix it
John Weiler, NextGov
Despite a mission-critical reliance on commercial information technology, the Department of Defense faces an 80% failure rate in major IT programs due to structural flaws, misaligned incentives, and a lack of accountability. To break this cycle, the department must shift its focus from creating new policies to enforcing existing ones through empowered CIOs and a professionally certified acquisition workforce.
- Workforce Competency Gaps: A significant portion of personnel driving critical acquisition decisions are not part of the designated acquisition workforce and therefore lack formal training, leading to risk-averse strategies that stifle competition and prioritize compliance milestones over operational outcomes.
- Contractor Conflict Risks: Persistent in-house talent gaps force the government to rely excessively on contractors for technical judgment, often resulting in scenarios where vendors effectively design, justify, and evaluate their own work without independent oversight.
- Regulatory Arbitrage: While authorities like "Other Transaction Authority" (OTA) were designed to attract innovative small businesses, they are increasingly exploited by large, incumbent contractors to secure noncompetitive contracts with limited transparency.
- Enforcement Over Policy: Meaningful reform requires actionable accountability, including tying CIO authority to mission outcomes, mandating that only certified acquisition professionals manage IT programs, and ensuring technical oversight remains free from contractor influence.
Innovation
Chinese “Soaring Dragon” unmanned aerial system. (Wiki commons via author ‘Infinty 0’)
EMERGING TECHNOLOGY HORIZONS: U.S. Needs an Innovation Flywheel to Outpace China
Michael Kuiken and Arun Sankaran, National Defense
The United States must develop a coordinated "innovation flywheel" to counter China’s hyper-charged, state-directed manufacturing base. By bridging the gap between foundational research and scaled production through strategic investment and public-private partnerships, the U.S. can ensure its technological superiority remains a primary tool of deterrence.
- Interlocking Flywheels: China utilizes a state-directed manufacturing base fused with emerging sectors like AI and synthetic biology, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where state subsidies fund R&D that feeds massive-scale production.
- Public Investment Anchor: Sustainable innovation relies on robust public funding for foundational research rather than just platform procurement, providing the necessary groundwork for private capital to eventually commercialize new technologies.
- Strategic Scaling Tools: By leveraging the Office of Strategic Capital and the Industrial Base Fund, the government can employ market-shaping mechanisms like purchase guarantees and offtake agreements to drive emerging tech to scale.
AI Is Being Misunderstood as a Breakthrough in Planning. It’s Not.
Christopher Denzel, War on the Rocks
While artificial intelligence can rapidly synthesize information and "raise the floor" of military planning, it remains a dangerous substitute for human judgment. AI excels at creating internally coherent and exhaustive constructs, yet these polished outputs often obscure the critical trade-offs and prioritizations that define true operational art. Optimization - at which AI excels - cannot replace choice. The ease of generating balanced AI plans must not be allowed to hide the essential, human responsibility of imposing priority in uncertain environments.
The Commanding Officer’s Innovation Imperative
Lieutenant Commander Jordan Spector, U.S. Navy
To maintain a strategic advantage over China’s expanding naval capacity, the U.S. Navy must pivot from a reliance on centralized technological infrastructure to a decentralized "culture of warfighter innovation" led by individual commanding officers. By empowering O-5 level commands to rapidly adapt and prototype, the Navy can achieve operational speeds that monolithic, centralized adversaries cannot match.
- The Human Edge: While China has surpassed the U.S. in ship counts and seeks technological parity, its rigid political structure cannot easily replicate American excellence in operational autonomy, tactical creativity, and innovative thinking
- Command-Level Catalyst: O-5 commands sit at the critical intersection of authority and resource management, making them the most effective level to personally foster innovation and manage the talent necessary for systemic change.
- Battlefield Proven: History shows that U.S. victories, such as those in the Pacific during WWII, were driven by individual commanders developing revolutionary tactics under fire rather than sheer technological superiority.
- Asymmetric Speed: Weaponizing the creative potential of every sailor creates an "adaptation gap" that allows the Navy to outpace institutional planning cycles and adapt faster when plans collide with enemy contact.
Defense & Strategy
Image via Small Wars Journal
C-UAS Operations: We Need a Single Pane of Glass
Bill Edwards, Small Wars Journal
Current counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) operations are dangerously fragmented, forcing operators to act as manual data fusion engines across disconnected interfaces. To defeat evolving autonomous threats, the defense community must mandate a unified "single pane of glass" architecture that integrates sensors, artificial intelligence, and policy-aware decision support into a single common operating picture.
- Interface Overload: Operators currently juggle multiple independent screens for RF, radar, and video, leading to cognitive paralysis where the interface itself becomes the adversary rather than the drone.
- Cybersecurity Paradox: Prioritizing network isolation over operational integration creates a security paradox, transferring high risk to the human operator who must manually correlate disconnected data under extreme stress.
- AI Fusion Engine: AI should move beyond narrow sensor classification to serve as a reasoning layer that reconciles geolocation errors and filters noise, enabling humans to focus on accountable, lawful decisions.
- Architectural Discipline: To achieve scalable operations, agencies must move away from "artisanal" bespoke systems toward standardized data models and architectural mandates that ensure system interoperability.
Industry
Image: Airman Paden Henry via U.S. Air Force
The Arsenal Beneath the Arsenal
Michael Cadenazzi and Ryan Evans, War on the Rocks
What does it take to rebuild the foundation of American military power? In this interview, Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy (and NPS alumnus!) talks about the state of the defense industrial base (from new VC-backed entrants to the primes), the race for critical minerals, supply chain vulnerabilities, the unsexy realities of implementation, the role of allies, and the challenges of scaling production.
Dem lawmakers raise questions over Pentagon’s equity deal with rare earth producer
Ashley Roque, Breaking Defense
Senate lawmakers are scrutinizing a landmark $400 million Pentagon equity deal with MP Materials, raising questions regarding its legal validity and its potential to distort market competition.
- Strategic Partnership: In July 2025, the Department of Defense entered a 10-year public-private partnership with MP Materials, committing to purchase $400 million in stock that could eventually make the government the company’s largest shareholder. The investment is designed to accelerate the build-out of a fully integrated, domestic supply chain for rare earth magnets
- Antideficiency Risks: There is concern that the deal may violate the Antideficiency Act because it relies on future appropriations to meet the quarterly payments expected over the life of the agreement.
- Market Failure: Defense officials characterized the equity arrangement as a tool to reconcile a "failed market-based approach," arguing that government intervention is required where no viable free market exists to address national security concerns.
Government Reports
Dr. Henry Gibbons, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center, monitors the growth of a microbial culture in a 20-liter fermenter. (Army photo by Gabriella White
Defense Industrial Base: DOD Efforts to Develop Domestic Biomanufacturing
Government Accountability Office
DOD Joint Bases: Actions Needed to Improve Sustainment of Facilities
Government Accountability Office
The Army’s XM-30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle (Formerly the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle [OMFV])
Congressional Research Service
Research
Navy ships assigned to Carrier Strike Group 5 sail in formation during a live-fire gunnery exercise in the Pacific Ocean, June 29, 2017. (Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Nathan Burke)
Cost Effectiveness Analysis for Capitalizing Unit-Level Ship Inventories
Andrew Tielking, Laura Clarke, & Arianna Corona, Naval Postgraduate School
This thesis evaluates the feasibility, cost implications, and operational impacts of transitioning Navy ship inventories from mission-funds to the Navy Working Capital Fund (NWCF). Using a Cost Effectiveness Analysis via the Multi-Objective Decision-Making framework, the study analyzes 30 months of supply effectiveness data, inventory valuation, and manning data. In addition to quantitative analysis, this thesis also incorporates qualitative analysis of procedural, policy, and cultural factors that influence transition feasibility. The findings show that NWCF platforms consistently outperformed mission-funded counterparts in terms of supply responsiveness and funding availability, particularly during periods of high operational demand. The projected annual transition cost was modest, with no major system or procurement disruptions identified.
Buying Blind: Corruption Risk and the Erosion of Oversight in Federal AI Procurement
Jessica Tillipman, Public Contract Law Journal
The United States is accelerating toward a corruption crisis of its own making.In its race to rapidly acquire artificial intelligence (AI), current policy risks undermining longstanding procurement integrity safeguards. Recent federal AI policies have accelerated adoption while simultaneously narrowing regulatory oversight, effectively leaving “regulation by contract” as the primary — and profoundly inadequate — mechanism for embedding safeguards. The consequence of these policies is that the government is “buying blind,” acquiring AI technologies without adequate transparency, audit rights, or testing requirements. These acquisition-phase deficiencies will translate directly into operational risks as AI deployment expands. This article offers practical recommendations to address these emerging threats, while challenging the assumption driving current federal AI policy: that governance impedes innovation.
AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crises
Kenneth Payne, King's College London
This article presents findings from a crisis simulation in which three frontier large language models (GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 3 Flash) play opposing leaders in a nuclear crisis. Findings both validate and challenge central tenets of strategic theory. There is support for Schelling’s ideas about commitment, Kahn’s escalation framework, and Jervis’s work on misperception, inter alia. Yet the nuclear taboo is no impediment to nuclear escalation by our models; that strategic nuclear attack, while rare, does occur; that threats more often provoke counter-escalation than compliance; that high mutual credibility accelerated rather than deterred conflict; and that no model ever chose accommodation or withdrawal even when under acute pressure, only reduced levels of violence. The article argues that AI simulation represents a powerful tool for strategic analysis, but only if properly calibrated against known patterns of human reasoning. Understanding how frontier models do and do not imitate human strategic logic is essential preparation for a world in which AI increasingly shapes strategic outcomes.
Events
2026 Pacific Operational Science & Technology (POST) Conference
NDIA & US Indo-Pacific Command
9-12 March 2026
Honolulu, HI
Generative And Agentic Artificial Intelligence Workshop
US Marine Corps
9-12 March 2026
Quantico, VA
2026 Defense Software & Data Summit
Govini
10 March 2026
Washington, D.C.
Tectonic Defense Summit
11-12 March 2026
Austin, TX
Naval IT Day 2026
AFCEA NOVA
12 March 2026
Chantilly, VA
2026 Artificial Intelligence Summit
Potomac Officers Club
19 March 2026
Reston, VA
Sea-Air-Space
Navy League of the United States
19-22 April 2026
National Harbor, Maryland
Converge @ NPS
Naval Postgraduate School Foundation
22-24 July 2026
Monterey, CA
2026 Air and Space Summit
Potomac Officers Club
30 July 2026
One more thing...
One of the numerous incarnations of the iconic Lone Sailor statue stands eternal watch along the waterfront in Jacksonville, Florida. (Alamy)
What Is a Sailor . . . and Why Should We Care?
Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired), Proceedings
Unlike doctors, lawyers, police officers, and soldiers - professions that are widely represented in popular media - sailors are largely unfamiliar to and overlooked by American culture and entertainment. Both the general public and policymakers dangerously misunderstand the unique identity and vital importance of the Navy and its sailors.
- Hidden Warriors: While sailors have walked on the moon and pioneered nuclear propulsion, their primary mission remains the projection of American power to deter enemies and protect national interests.
- Invisible Deterrence: The Navy is most effective when it is least noticeable; when sea power is exercised correctly, it appears benign while ensuring that wars occur in faraway places rather than on American soil.
- Respecting the Sea: The ocean is a "raging tyrant" that punishes unpreparedness, requiring sailors to develop a sixth sense to honor its rules and survive its might.
- Every Sailor a Firefighter: Because fire is a constant danger to a ship, every sailor — regardless of their primary job — is trained as a proficient firefighter.
- Deadly Shipmates: The technology that service a sailor is also a danger. Technologies like high-voltage electricity and nuclear reactors are treated with extreme caution, as these "shipmates" can cause death in an instant.
- Dangerous Ignorance: Public and political misunderstanding regarding the unique nature of naval power often leads to misguided cost-cutting measures that invite foreign aggression.
Correction:
Our summary of the article "Meink Lays Out New Vision for Acquisition" in last week's newsletter incorrectly stated that the Air Force has delegated 85% of contracting authority to PAE chiefs. It should have said that the Air Force has delegated 85% of contracting authority to PAE's chief of contracts. The archived version of this newsletter has been updated on the ARP website.
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