Draft list of attendees for Hegseth acquisition-reform speech shows wide industry interest

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth takes the National War College stage to talk about proposed acquisition reforms on Friday, he will have the full attention of many companies aiming to boost their sales to the Pentagon. The list includes both newer and more established defense contractors, as well as notable consumer tech companies like Facebook parent company Meta and consumer AI company Anthropic. 

At least some of Hegseth’s proposed changes are laid out in a six-page draft memo to senior Pentagon leaders, combatant commanders, and defense agency directors. Defense One obtained a copy of the draft memo, which has been circulating in the runup to his Nov. 7 speech. Six of the company invitees, under condition of anonymity, did tell Defense One that they plan to attend the event. An official at one attending company said the expectation among the invitees is that it would be a “listening session,” (similar to the speech Hegseth delivered to a room of reticent general and flag officers in September.)

The memo, which draws attention to “unacceptably slow acquisition fielding times” represents a dramatic restructuring of the way the Pentagon buys and builds things, moving away from the sorts of large-scale, multi-year programs that produce fighter jets, aircraft carriers, tanks, and personnel carriers, toward smaller, faster contracting vehicles, which are more representative of software design and re-design. 

The list includes the so-called prime defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, GDIT, and Boeing. But it also includes a good sampling of the newer defense startups, such as ShieldAI, which specializes in drones as well as autonomy software, and drone-maker Anduril. Both work in an ongoing way with Ukrainians, who are forced to update and change drone designs and tactics at speeds far faster than the typical plodding pace of established defense contractors working with the government. 

Major cloud companies such as Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle are also on the list, and are all part of the Pentagon’s $9 billion dollar Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability cloud contract and data software maker Palantir. Among the other notable invitees are AI company Anthropic, which, along with Google Cloud and others, received $200 million from the Pentagon in July for AI research efforts, and Meta.

Among the invitees: 

1. Anduril Industries
2. Anthropic 
3. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
4. BAE Systems
5. Boeing
6. Castelion
7. Divergent 
8. EaglePicher Technologies 
9. Epirus 
10. General Dynamics 
11. Google Cloud 
12. Google Public Sector
13. HII (Huntington Ingalls Industries) 
14. Honeywell International
15. Hermeus
16. Karman Space & Defense
17. L3Harris Technologies 
18. Leidos
19. Lockheed Martin 
20. Meta (Facebook)
21. Microsoft
22. Nammo Defense Systems
23. Northrop Grumman
24. Oracle
25. Pacific Scientific Energetic Materials
26. Palantir Technologies
27. Rivet Industries
28. RTX (Raytheon Technologies)
29. Saronic Technologies
30. Shield AI
31. Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC)
32. SpaceX 
33. Textron Inc.
34. Ursa Major Technologies

Frank Konkel contributed to this post.