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Editor’s Note: The topics covered in this article were discussed further in a recent episode of the War on the Rocks podcast with Gen. (ret.) Brown, Jr. Listen here.

In November 2015, I was five months into commanding the air campaign against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Operation Inherent Resolve was in full swing. Coalition airpower was blocking enemy reinforcements, severing supply lines, choking off illicit oil revenue, and enabling friendly forces to retake key ground. We were taking it to the enemy: The week before Thanksgiving 2015, U.S. Central Command registered the highest seven-day total weapons expenditure since the beginning of the campaign.

The group would be defeated, but I could foresee a major strategic challenge: The United States, its allies, and partners did not have deep inventories of precision weapons on the shelf. The coalition of the willing was short on firepower. Something had to change quickly.

At the Dubai Air Show also in November 2015, I and then-Secretary of the Air Force Deborah James sat down with industry partners to discuss the need for increased weapons production. Yet nearly a decade later, despite countless high level meetings and study after study, not enough has changed. The United States still faces the same munitions constraints, now with the added pressure of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Warfighting was at the center of my military career. From the Middle East to Europe to the Indo-Pacific, I saw how transformation determines whether America can deter wars and, if necessary, win them. But back in the Pentagon, I also saw how slowly that transformation can unfold at the highest level, limiting the flow of capabilities to warfighters. That tension between the pace of battle and the pace of bureaucracy shaped my Accelerate Change or Lose approach as chief of staff of the Air Force that I continued as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In both roles, I sought to trim bureaucracy, modernize faster, and enable the development of servicemembers for the future fight.

As chairman, I reviewed with the Joint Staff the recommendations of four bipartisan commissions: the 2018 Section 809 Panel on acquisition reform; the 2023 Strategic Posture Commission; the 2024 Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform; and the 2024 National Defense Strategy Commission. Across nearly 200 worthy recommendations, the message was remarkably consistent: The Defense Department, Congress, and the defense industrial base need to move together with greater urgency, flexibility, and unity of purpose if they are to deliver capability to warfighters at speed and scale.

More reports and memos are continuing to pile up, offering the same recommendations — things most of us understand need to happen. And yet, we have not seen the implementation our country demands. As one senior leader once said, “Anything we don’t want to do, we continue to study.”

America is far past the era when it had the luxury of time. Xi Jinping has tied China’s ambitions to three years: 2027, 2035, and 2049. The first to be ready to conduct an invasion of Taiwan, the second to transform to an intelligentized force on the path to the third, to have a “world-class military.”

That’s only one adversary’s timeline and future crises around the world can’t be predicted. So time is of the essence. What matters now is urgent execution: building flexibility into budgets and acquisitions, giving industry consistent demand signals it can trust, and cutting through the bureaucracy that slows everything down. Most of all, the Pentagon, Congress, and industry should act as one team focused on execution and capability delivery.

Flexibility in Processes, Contracts, and Funding Is Key

Delivering combat capabilities at the pace of modern warfare requires flexibility. But the defense budget is currently spread across thousands of budget line items and organized into rigid appropriation categories known as “colors of money.” This structure was designed for control, not speed or flexibility. It creates hurdles that make it difficult to shift resources when opportunities or crises arise. To achieve speed and flexibility, Congress and the executive branch need to work together to consolidate programs and line items into portfolios.

Both the Section 809 Panel and the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Commission reports reached the same conclusion: Instead of managing programs individually, they should be combined under portfolios led by executives with the authority to reward high performing programs with additional resources at the expense of the poorer performing ones. Competition within portfolios can motivate companies to go faster rather than just tick boxes. With this approach, the best available capabilities within a portfolio could be delivered to warfighters in weeks or months instead of years.

Since earlier this year, the Army has been taking some promising initial steps in this direction by establishing portfolios for drones, counter-unmanned aerial systems, and electronic warfare. Additional portfolio opportunities are in discussion and a draft memo from the secretary of defense reportedly seeks to institutionalize portfolios and other initiatives across the department The services should move forward with urgency to identify a handful of portfolios and their supporting budget lines to be consolidated and managed by portfolio acquisition executives. And they should empower these executives with clear fiscal guidance to maximize flexibility, allowing the movement of money within a portfolio to programs that are making promising progress on delivering capability at the speed and scale required. Thus far, only the Army has openly discussed moving over to this model.

Not all areas of defense acquisition lend themselves to this approach, but many do. Prime candidates include munition components, cyber and information technology capabilities, autonomous systems, and space launch and services being produced in the private sector or through public-private partnerships where technology moves faster than budget cycles.

Flexibility would have to be matched by transparency. Congress and the Pentagon would share responsibility for maintaining trust through modern data systems, accessible dashboards, and sustained dialogue. With clear visibility into how and why funds are moved, oversight can become an enabler of speed rather than a barrier to it.

Consistency of Effort Across Stakeholders and Investments Needed

Without consistency, it is difficult to have speed in a large bureaucracy like the Department of Defense. At that scale, predictable demand signals and resourcing are the necessary — but on their own, insufficient — conditions for systemic speed. That consistency cannot come from the Pentagon alone. Congress and industry are also critical participants.

The Pentagon demand signals shift too often as the services develop their budgets year by year. For example, between Fiscal Years 2023 and 2025, Joint Direct Attack Munitions procurement decreased by 65 percent in one year and by another 5 percent the next year. During the same time frame, Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range purchases dropped by 30 percent in one year and doubled the following year. Many other munitions show the same pattern: fluctuating Pentagon budget requests and fluctuating orders appropriated from year to year. The fluctuating numbers may not seem like a big deal among all the moving parts associated with delivering a defense budget. However, in my engagement with industry as service chief and chairman, I was often told that inconsistency made it difficult to control costs and maintain a quality workforce.

Even when efforts are authorized and funds are approved, continuing resolutions delay their release. In the 15 years I served as a general officer, only one defense budget arrived on time from Congress. Within those 15 years, a total of five years’ time was under continuing resolutions, which meant the Department of Defense could not start new programs, increase production rates, or sign long-lead contracts. Funding was frozen at the prior year’s levels, even when priorities had shifted. In effect, continuing resolutions — which the Defense Department has been funded under since March of this year until the recent shutdown — put the military into neutral, spending money only to sustain last year’s plans while waiting for permission to move forward on this year’s needs.

The results? Slower modernization and disrupted training and maintenance schedules for the military, as well as difficulties among industry partners that are poised to start new programs, forecast production, manage and maintain supply chains, and keep people employed on existing programs. This is part of the reason why delays and cost overruns have become the norm. An on-time budget from Congress and a steady demand signal from the Pentagon are key steps to achieving consistency.

As I discussed in Congressional testimony, multi-year procurement remains one of the most proven ways to create consistency, allowing the country to buy down risk to national security, in addition to producing some savings. Of note, three of the four commissions mentioned earlier recommended multi-year purchases when possible.

The Fiscal Year 2024 defense appropriation made progress by enabling multi-year procurement for six critical munitions: the Naval Strike Missile, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement, Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, and Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile. But this was after the armed services committees had tried to prod appropriators into multi-year procurement for a broader selection of munitions.

While there is, for good reason, much focus on expanding the usage of multi-year procurement for munitions programs, it can also be applied to programs with long lead-time components, stable requirements, and high annual demand, such as munition components, aircraft propulsion, solid rocket motors, and submarine and nuclear reactor components. These are shared bottlenecks where multi-year block buys could stabilize fragile suppliers, and reduce risk across and strengthen the industrial base.

The Defense Department’s Munitions Acceleration Council, aimed at doubling production across 12 key weapons, is a good start on coordinating the resources required, processes needed, and supply chains that need strengthening.

Consistency builds trust, drives down costs, and improves delivery timelines. This, in turn, secures supply chains, allowing for surge capacity when crises come. By contrast, inconsistent demand and resourcing discourages suppliers, especially sub-vendors, from taking risks to build out the supply chain, hire workers, and construct facilities ahead of a resourced program or contract.

Simplifying the Pentagon’s Purchasing Processes

Acquisition reform is a continuous subject of effort without enough tangible change in the field. While there are plenty of existing authorities available to go faster, they are buried under onerous guidance. This perpetuates a risk-averse culture that does not act with urgency but instead values compliance over accelerated timelines.

The Federal and Defense Acquisition Regulations are over 2,000 pages. Piling on top of these regulations are the nearly 7,400 pages of the department’s Financial Management Regulation. The growth of these regulations in the 1970s nearly doubled acquisition timelines. Navigating through and complying with this amount of guidance has extended acquisition timelines and been barriers to true reform. Both the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Commission and the Section 809 Panel provide ready-made recommendations to streamline by using data tools and workforce training to build trust and change culture. The government-wide initiative to rewrite the Federal Acquisition Regulation in plain language and remove elements not required by statute is sure to provide the opportunity to accelerate capability delivery.

But it will take more than just a rewrite to accelerate procurement. Identifying and highlighting existing and under-utilized authorities not governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation that could facilitate acceleration can complement the rewrite. In parallel, training programs will need to be developed that support both the existing non-Federal Acquisition Regulation authorities and the rewritten Federal Acquisition Regulation authorities. It will be important to identify an initial cadre of personnel to be trained, ensuring they have the appropriate mindset, expertise, and desire to implement change. At the same time, incentive structures need to be put in place to solidify the Federal Acquisition Regulation overhaul processes and procedures. These incentives could include performance-based bonuses, professional development opportunities, awards, recognition, and accelerated career advancement. In addition, AI could play an outsized role in increasing speed and scale while providing the desired oversight and reducing bureaucratic red tape. Properly done, AI could support acquisition and contracting professionals in the execution of their duties and support Pentagon and Congressional leaders with oversight responsibilities as all work through the updated guidance.

Congress is acting with agency on two critical pieces of legislation that will deliver capability to the field faster. The Senate’s FoRGED Act and the House’s SPEED Act shaped elements of the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Both focus on streamlining, but with different approaches. The FoRGED Act provisions included in the NDAA focused on expanding participation of non-traditional defense contractors, easing regulatory burdens, removing outdated laws and regulations, and introducing portfolio management. The SPEED Act provisions address the Pentagon’s requirement process to reduce timelines through a more agile Joint Requirements Council and by testing technologies under operationally relevant conditions. The NDAA provisions driven by the FoRGED and SPEED Acts are definitely a step in the right direction. The real measure of success will be their implementation and results for warfighters. In short, simplifying processes enables a change in culture from one of risk-averse bureaucracy to one of transparency and collaboration.

Execute as a Team

In my final months as chairman, I directed the National Defense University to host a solarium about strengthening the defense industrial base. The intent was to build upon the various commission recommendations and increase collaboration between the Pentagon, Congress, and industry setting the stage for continued work of accelerating capability to the warfighter. The solarium was one of many ways I was seeking to realize progress. It took place a few weeks after my tenure ended and was led by the vice chairman, Adm. Chris Grady. And I know that efforts continue to move forward under Gen. Dan Caine and the current leadership of the Defense Department as evidenced by the draft secretary of defense memo referenced earlier.

There is an opportunity for the Pentagon to work in concert with Congress and industry. And it does have to be in concert. It is more appropriate to think of the Defense Department, Congress, and industry (traditional and non-traditional defense companies) as a single defense industrial enterprise. This conceptualization allows us to focus on the interdependence and need for collaboration among and between each.

Each element brings essential strengths. The Defense Department holds the insight on operational problems that require solutions, Congress wields the authority and funding, and industry commands the innovation and productive power. When any leg of that stool hesitates, the entire enterprise falters. Bureaucratic delay, partisan paralysis, or commercial caution each carry the same cost: lost time. And time is the one commodity America’s adversaries are working hardest to take from us.

If any leg of the stool isn’t there — if inaction or reticence by any one actor stifles progress — that will ultimately worsen our country’s strategic position and fail our warfighters.

Acceleration depends upon collaboration and must become muscle memory. The nation needs a shared roadmap that sets priorities, aligns incentives, and measures progress in months, not years. Selecting one or two major mission areas to serve as proof points — such as integrated air and missile defense — can demonstrate how portfolio management, multi-year procurement, and streamlined oversight work together in practice. The Patriot system, which already relies on multiple primes and sub-vendors across radar, interceptors, and rocket motors, provides a clear opportunity to prove that synchronization across program offices and industry partners can translate directly into faster capability delivery.

From my decades of service, I realize this is all easier said than done. But any steps taken to increase flexibility, consistency, and streamlining will be a plus for warfighters. This is not about recreating the “arsenal of democracy” of the 1940s. That world no longer exists. It is about forging a modern arsenal of agility, one that harnesses private-sector dynamism, transparent governance, and the clarity of a unified mission. The commissions have given us the playbook. The next step is to execute it ruthlessly and relentlessly. Risk will always accompany action, but the far greater danger lies in complacency. The time for more studies has passed. The time to build, together and at speed, is now.

Gen. (ret.) CQ Brown, Jr. served as the 21st chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: Capt. Frank Spatt via DVIDS