Acquisition
Image via Defense Tech and Acquisition
The 20-Year Machine: How the Legacy Acquisition System Works
Pete Modigliani and Matt MacGregor, Defense Tech and Acquisition
The U.S. defense acquisition system is a "20-year machine" originally designed for Cold War stability that now struggles to keep pace with rapid technological advancements and modern adversaries. While successful for complex, long-lived platforms like nuclear submarines, this legacy model creates significant strategic disadvantages when applied to fast-evolving domains like software and autonomous systems.
- Historical Roots: The legacy acquisition model was intentionally built to solve past issues like cost overruns and contractor failures, creating a "bargain" where the government provides stability and cost recovery to a few large firms in exchange for complex military capabilities.
- Requirements Bloat: The process often starts with years of requirements generation, where officials attempt to predict needs two decades out, resulting in overly complex documents that demand multiple "technology miracles" to succeed.
- High-Stakes Marriage: The "Milestone B" development award is a high-stakes, winner-take-all commitment that grants prime contractors a long-term revenue stream for sustainment and upgrades, often leading companies to underbid initially to secure 30-plus years of work.
- Financial Rigidity: The 1960s-era Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process creates a rigid financial architecture that forces funding to be planned years in advance, making it difficult to pivot toward faster-moving commercial tech or innovative startups.
Catalytic Contracting: Bridging the Foxhole-to-Factory Divide Through Life Cycle Business Leadership
Aliyah Harrison, United States Army Acquisition Support Center (USAASC)
The U.S. Army is transitioning to a new contracting model that replaces legacy, linear processes with a proactive leadership approach to link battlefield innovations directly to industrial production. By integrating "wrap-around contracting" within a portfolio-based structure, the Army aims to eliminate bureaucratic delays and ensure technological overmatch.
- Proactive Leadership: Contracting officers are evolving from passive, compliance-driven gatekeepers to active mission owners who embed with warfighters to help shape technical requirements during the earliest research and development phases.
- Wrap-Around Architecture: This 360-degree wrap-around contracting framework provides continuous support throughout a system’s entire life cycle, linking the Soldier in the foxhole directly to the manufacturing line.
- Real-World Innovation: Tactical successes, such as the 82nd Airborne’s development of a lightweight equipment cushion kit, demonstrate how embedding contracting professionals with tactical units can rapidly turn Soldier-conceived prototypes into field-proven realities.
Defense & Strategy
The Afloat Forward Staging Base (Interim) USS Ponce (ASB(I) 15) conducts an operational demonstration of the Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored Laser Weapon System (LaWS) while deployed to the Arabian Gulf. [Photo: U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams/Released]
How the U.S. military is preparing for laser attacks on drones
Jared Keller, Fast Company
The U.S. military is shifting focus toward counter-directed energy weapons (CDEW) to protect unmanned aerial vehicles from increasingly prevalent global laser threats. Research conducted at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) demonstrates that a layered defense strategy—combining sensor technology, advanced materials, and swarm tactics—is required to ensure drone survivability in contested environments.
- Extreme Lethality: In NPS simulations involving a 100-kilowatt laser, three out of four drone archetypes were destroyed within seconds. The fourth survived due to distance alone.
- Advanced Passive Shielding: Bragg mirrors, which reflect up to 99.99% of specific laser wavelengths, were the most effective countermeasure tested, though they require prior intelligence on the adversary’s specific laser frequency.
- Integrated Requirements: NPS research demonstratxperts argue that CDEW solutions, including warning receivers and ablative coatings, must be built into a platform's initial design rather than being "bolted on" as an afterthought.
Data from ‘half a million hours of Ukraine conflict drone footage’ now available to train AI
Brandi Vincent, DefenseScoop
The Virginia-based startup Enabled Intelligence has released a massive repository of over 500,000 hours of real-world drone footage from the Ukraine conflict to accelerate the training of AI models for military and commercial use. This high-fidelity, pre-labeled dataset provides an unprecedented level of operational authenticity, allowing autonomous systems to navigate complex combat environments and identify targets more effectively than those trained on simulations.
Industry
Photo: Oleh/Adobe Stock
Industrial Athleticism: Calibrating Defense Production to Address Evolving Threats
Alek Jovovic & A.J. Dilts, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
This analysis offers a framework for maintaining a resilient defense industrial base despite limited resources and rapidly shifting global threats.
- Surge Systems: For low-cost, expendable items like drones and software, the military should prioritize rapid innovation networks and production infrastructure rather than large stockpiles to keep pace with breakneck tactical advancements.
- Scale Systems: Medium-complexity assets like missiles should be built as “empty vessels” with modular designs, allowing long-lead components to be manufactured now and customized with sensors or software later as the threat picture clarifies.
- Sustain Systems: High-cost, long-lead platforms like naval ships require consistent funding and production today, with a strategic shift toward readiness and logistics — including spare parts and a skilled workforce — to ensure the fleet remains operational during active conflict.
Government Reports
Aerial photograph of the eastern entrance of the Pentagon. (Getty Images)
Watchdog review sheds new light on DOGE’s downsizing impacts at DOD
Brandi Vincent, DefenseScoop
A new report from the Government Accountability Office reveals that the Department of Defense's civilian workforce contracted by approximately 10.7% during the height of the second Trump administration's efficiency campaign. This reduction of nearly 83,000 employees was largely facilitated by the Deferred Resignation Program, which incentivized staff to resign by offering paid leave. While the initiative aimed to eliminate waste and fiscal redundancy, the scale of these departures—particularly within technical occupational groups—has raised questions regarding the long-term impact on military operations.
Full Report: Federal Agency Workforce Changes: Update for July 2025 to January 2026
Research
Illustration created by NIWC Pacific.
Artificial Intelligence for Unbiased Acquisition Planning: A Case Study in Strategy and Baseline Development
Matthew Last, Naval Postgraduate School
This capstone project examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce cognitive bias in the development of acquisition strategies and acquisition program baselines (APB). Using a comparative case study design, this research administered the Joint Common Missile (JCM) program scenario to eight AI models across 240 runs and compared their outputs against 31 human acquisition professionals using statistical analysis and a five-dimension evaluation rubric. Results indicate AI models triggered optimism bias, anchoring, planning fallacy, and confirmation bias at rates equal to or exceeding humans. Ninety-six percent of AI runs selected the single-step strategy ultimately cancelled in 2004, while 77 percent of humans chose incremental approaches matching the program’s successful successor. AI achieved near-zero strategic diversity compared to humans’ 97 percent of maximum entropy. Despite these shortcomings, AI showed potential as a structured analytical baseline generator when properly constrained. This research recommends employing AI as decision support rather than decision maker, designing structured frameworks that force AI to highlight independent estimate variance, and expanding the field of behavioral acquisition to study AI decision-making behavior.
Dual use innovation systems – building industrial resilience in an era of geopolitical uncertainty
Arpita Chari, Johan Stahre, et al., Defense Studies
This study examines how dual use is conceptualized and operationalized among the three stakeholder groups and how Swedish production research and innovation can enhance manufacturing capacity and resilience during geopolitical uncertainty. The study employed a multi-method approach analyzing twenty-one semi-structured interviews across the three stakeholder groups, a workshop and twenty surveys, culminating in a systems thinking framework to map interdependencies between identified themes. The analysis demonstrates how dual use innovation capabilities create feedback loops (reinforcing and balancing) that strengthen both civil industrial competitiveness and defense preparedness. The interaction between these opposing forces illustrates how resilience in dual use industrial systems emerges not from eliminating trade-offs, but from managing them.
Flagpole to Front Lines: A Warfighter-Driven Requirements Process
Christopher A. Mouton, Hunter Stoll, et al., RAND
RAND researchers have developed the Flagpole to Front Lines (F2FL) concept, a warfighter-centric, strategies-to-tasks (STT) approach to linking national security objectives with operational requirements and acquisition decisions. F2FL provides a vehicle for DOW to realign strategic intent with operational and acquisition realities to ensure that DOW delivers systems to the field when and where they are needed. In this report, the authors describe the conceptual and methodological foundations of the F2FL framework and explain how F2FL provides concise and auditable requirements that can expedite the fielding of warfighting capabilities that are more closely aligned with national strategy.
Events
Capital Hill Modeling and Sim Expo
NTSA
17 July 2026
Washington, DC
Converge @ NPS
Naval Postgraduate School Foundation
22-24 July 2026
Monterey, CA
DIA TECHINT 2026
AFCEA
28-29 July 2026
Chantilly, VA
2026 Air and Space Summit
Potomac Officers Club
30 July 2026
McLean, VA
Space and Missile Defense Symposium
AFCEA
11-13 August 2026
Huntsville, AL
TechNet Augusta 2026
AFCEA
17-20 August 2026
Augusta, GA
MODSIM World 2026
National Training & Simulation Association (NTSA)
18-19 August 2026
Alexandria, VA
Fed Supernova
STATION Austin
18-20 August 2026
Austin, TX
DIB Accelerator 2026
Advanced Technology International (ATI)
25 - 27 August 2026
Philadelphia, PA
Prodacity 2026: Uncharted
Rise8
25-27 August 2026
Nashville, TN
One more thing...
Before he became a strategic data analyst working with Ford Racing’s NASCAR teams, Bill Evans spent 24 years in the United States Navy. Photo via Ford From the Road
He Flew F-14s Off This Base. Now He's Helping Ford Take on the Track Around It
Dan Zacharias, Ford From the Road
Former Navy fighter pilot and NPS graduate Bill Evans leveraged his extensive military data expertise to help Ford Racing compete in NASCAR’s race at Naval Base Coronado, a center-piece event celebrating America’s 250th birthday. This unique "homecoming" highlights the deep technological and physical parallels between high-performance aviation and professional motorsports.
- NASCAR Birthday Celebration: On the weekend of June 19-21, NASCAR commemorates America's 250th birthday with a high-speed race around a makeshift course constructed at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego.
- Analyst with Wings: Bill Evans, a strategic data analyst for Ford Racing, provides a one-of-a-kind perspective on the 250th event, having served 24 years in the Navy flying F-14 and F/A-18 fighter jets in combat zones like Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Data-Driven Strategy: Applying his master's in operations research from the Naval Postgraduate School, Evans interprets high-frequency telemetry data to guide Ford’s macro strategies regarding drafting and pit stops.
- Tarmac Homecoming: For Evans, the race is a nostalgic return to the tarmac and hangars where he once worked.
- Navy Insight: The celebration offers a rare chance for civilians to visit an active 1,000-acre military island, providing a fresh view of the Navy's operational environment during the race festivities.
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