SecDef Hegseth’s message to defense-industry executives: Move faster and invest more, or we just might make you. President Trump’s Pentagon chief spoke for more than an hour to a packed auditorium at the National War College on Friday, a gathering Hegseth himself described as an opportunity to look those very executives “in the eye.”
Chief takeaways: Hegseth unveiled a slew of policy changes intended to replace his department’s Cold War-era acquisition processes with ones that value speed over rigid requirements. But perhaps most notably, he told defense companies to put more of their own money into developing military technology, or take their business elsewhere, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported from Fort McNair in southwest Washington, D.C.
SecDef: “We commit to doing our part, but industry also needs to be willing to invest their own dollars to meet the long-term demand signals provided to them. Industry must use capital expenditures to upgrade facilities, upskill their workforce, and expand capacity. If they don’t, we are prepared to fully employ and leverage the many authorities provided to the president which ensure that the department can secure from industry anything and everything that is required to fight and win our nation’s wars,” Hegseth said, and vowed to his audience, “We’re going to make defense contracting competitive again.”
The speech drew largely from a draft memo about the changes that circulated last week. More about that, here.
Expert reax: “Their first response is going to be hiring a whole ton of K Street people to lobby Congress to point out the problems with this process, which is, we’re going to take a lot more risk and a lot more things will fail,” said Steve Blank, a professor and co-founder of Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.
Professor Blank called the speech a death knell for the Pentagon’s existing acquisition system. “The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed,” he said, and added that he expects major defense contractors to push back against the new efforts.
However, the speech seemed well received among defense tech founders, executives, and investors, Williams reports. “It is a vindication of our thesis that America needs an acquisition system focused on meritocracy and transparency,” one attendee said. Read more, here.
Related reading: Sen. Elizabeth Warren “challenges [the] defense industry on right-to-repair opposition as funding talks continue,” Reuters reported Monday.
And more broadly across the Defense Department, “Hegseth Is Purging Military Leaders With Little Explanation,” three New York Times correspondents reported Friday. That includes about two dozen generals and admirals in just nine months. “The utter unpredictability of Mr. Hegseth’s moves, as described in interviews with 20 current and former military officials, has created an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust that has forced senior officers to take sides and, at times, pitted them against one another,” the reporters write.
Coverage continues below…
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. The Associated Press reports that on this day in 1898, an estimated “2,000 white supremacists killed dozens of African Americans, burned Black-owned businesses and forced the mayor, police chief and aldermen to resign at gunpoint, before installing their own mayor and city council in what became known as the ‘Wilmington Coup.’”
Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll wants the service to buy one million small drones over a two- to three-year period, Reuters reported Friday, calling the development a “major ramp-up” for the Army’s acquisition plans.
Notable: The Army “acquires only about 50,000 drones annually today,” which helps indicate the scale of Driscoll’s challenge. For some added perspective, “Ukraine and Russia each produce roughly 4 million drones a year,” Reuters writes.
Driscoll: “We expect to purchase at least a million drones within the next two to three years. And we expect that at the end of one or two years from today, we will know that in a moment of conflict, we will be able to activate a supply chain that is robust enough and deep enough” to expand based on the threat.
ICYMI: The Army launched a drone-centric pilot program called “SkyFoundry,” which is intended to accelerate work with private industry. “This concept will stimulate the U.S. drone industry, support American manufacturing, increase access to rare earth materials, produce low-cost components and ultimately deliver drones for immediate needs to the Army,” a service spokesman told Military Times, reporting Friday as well.
“Some drones will be expendable as if they’re munitions, others will be durable, but not meant to last forever,” the spokesman said. Read more, here.
Analysis: As drones proliferate across the Army, Defense One’s Tom Novelly asks, will a new approach to flight school help the service’s pilots transition?
Background: The Army has said it will will cut 6,500 of its 30,000 active-duty aviation-community soldiers over the next two years, mostly by removing one aerial cavalry squadron from each active-duty combat aviation brigade, as part of the effort to build “a leaner, more lethal force.”
The rub: Current Army aviators are trying their best to stay optimistic, but fear that decades-worth of experience will be lost in the culling. But the Army doesn’t just want fewer pilots, it wants better-qualified ones; and it’s looking to the defense industry for a solution.
That includes turning its longtime entry-level helicopter education into a new contractor-owned and -operated model called Flight School Next. Officials and contractors said the new model will offer a simplified approach to training, develop better aviator skills, and save money by taking helicopters, instructors, and maintenance out of the service’s hands. Continue reading, here.
Related reading: “UK sends defence equipment to help Belgium deal with disruptive drones,” Reuters reported Sunday from London.
In the Pacific region, the U.S. Army is amid a rapid modernization effort called Transformation in Contact, and several of the units created or chosen to test new technology and concepts are part of U.S. Army Pacific, Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad reported Friday from the AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Honolulu.
According to USARPAC’s commander, the greatest risk the Army has in the Indo-Pacific region is “being late” when a crisis or conflict emerges, out of position, not fast enough, “or even worse, doing nothing at all,” Gen. Ronald Clark told the conference audience. “So as leaders, we have to become comfortable with failing fast, iterating quickly, and developing better solutions,” he said. Read the rest, here.
And in new podcasts, a former senior director at the National Security Council joined us to discuss what the new film “A House of Dynamite” got right and wrong on U.S. missile defense and nuclear command and control. Jon Wolfsthal, director of Global Risk at the Federation of American Scientists, shared some of his experiences as special assistant to President Obama, where he was responsible for things like nuclear arms control and policy at the NSC. Find that conversation on our website, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And ICYMI ahead of Veterans Day, we recently spoke with historian David Nasaw who just published a new history of American World War II veterans and their often tortured journeys back to normalcy in his book, “The Wounded Generation.” You can find that conversation on our website as well, here.
Trump 2.0
Developing: The Senate on Sunday took a first step toward ending the longest-ever government shutdown, clearing a procedural hurdle to approve a package that would keep agencies funded through at least January and walk back thousands of federal employee layoffs.
The agreement would approve full-year appropriations for the Veterans Affairs Department, Agriculture Department and the legislative branch. All other agencies would operate at their fiscal 2025 levels under a continuing resolution that would expire after Jan. 30, Eric Katz of Government Executive reports.
Next: The Senate must still take additional votes to send the measure to the House, though the bill could wind up on President Trump’s desk later this week. Read more, here.
Happening today: A federal judge is set to hear a legal challenge to West Virginia National Guard troops’ deployment to Washington, D.C., in August. That deployment came in response to the president’s orders when he offered false and exaggerated crime statistics to justify soldiers on the streets amid his takeover of the D.C. police force.
Quick summary of the case: “A civic organization called the West Virginia Citizen Action Group says in a lawsuit that Gov. Patrick Morrisey exceeded his authority by deploying up to 300 Guard members to Washington, D.C.,” AP reports. “Under state law, the group argues, the governor may deploy the National Guard out of state only for certain purposes, such as responding to a natural disaster or another state’s emergency request.” For his part, “Morrisey’s office has argued the deployment was authorized under federal law.”
Related: “In an encrypted group chat, National Guard members question Trump deployments,” NPR reported Monday.
And lastly: A federal judge is stepping down after warning this Trump administration poses an “existential threat to democracy” because, in part, he warns the president is “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment,” District Court Judge Mark Wolf wrote in an op-ed published Sunday at The Atlantic.
Why speak out? “I hope to be a spokesperson for embattled judges who, consistent with the code of conduct, feel they cannot speak candidly to the American people,” he told the New York Times this weekend.
“The White House’s assault on the rule of law is so deeply disturbing to me that I feel compelled to speak out,” Wolf wrote in his essay, stressing for his readers, “Silence, for me, is now intolerable.” He added in a warning to Times readers, “Americans proudly say that we live in the longest-lived democracy in the world. But that should teach us that all the others failed.” Read more in his essay (gift link), here.
Additional reading:
Reminder: Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and we tip our hat to those who served. So enjoy the federal holiday for those marking the occasion. And we’ll see you again on Wednesday!
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