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One number buried in the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request reveals a decade of acquisition decisions in a data point: The U.S. Navy is requesting 785 Tomahawk cruise missiles. In 2025, Congress funded 55. That 1,200 percent jump is the cost of choices never stress-tested against the scenario unfolding today — a sustained air campaign against Iran while China watches the magazine drain.
As a congressional staffer, I watch acquisition reform proposals grind through the legislative machinery every day. A proposal usually arrives with a clean rationale: streamline this contracting mechanism, expand multi-year purchasing authority for this munitions line, lower an “other transaction authority” threshold so a nontraditional vendor can clear the so-called valley of death, and so on. The technical case is often sound, but the proposals lack projected operational impact in the following numerical form: “Under this reform, U.S. strike capacity at the start of a major contingency is X, and under the current process, it is Y.”
Without that number, every reform proposal arrives on a staffer’s desk as an assertion, and in an environment where the Pentagon and all the military services are simultaneously promoting competing packages, assertion is not enough. Defense committees already know the defense industrial base needs expansion, and demand signals need consistency. The gap is simpler than awareness. They need a number they can put in a markup document: a projected battlefield outcome tied to a specific statutory change that a member can defend in conference.
A reasonably skeptical Congress needs some means of comparing what the change would actually produce in strike capacity or production rate against the baseline of doing nothing. The tool that would produce the data does not exist. Building it is the most consequential near-term contribution Washington’s defense analysis community — the think-tanks and federally funded research and development centers with the wargaming infrastructure — could make to the current reform debate.
Wargame results do reach Congress, and when they do, they shape legislation. When Rep. Mike Gallagher convened a Taiwan tabletop exercise for the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in April 2023, the game’s findings were translated into defense authorization language within weeks. This meant multiyear purchasing authority for long-range anti-ship missiles, accelerated arms transfers to Taiwan, and expanded munitions production. The distance from game table to statutory text was weeks.
Congressional debates about defense investment routinely invoke wargames and conflict simulations as evidence that the United States could exhaust critical equipment early in a major war. Service chiefs cite operational risk findings from gaming in posture hearings, annual appearances before the armed services committees, where senior military leaders justify their budget requests and characterize threats. Budget justification books, known as J-books, draw on consumption estimates derived from operational plans and modeling to justify capability requests. Wargaming is already inside the machine.
However, what those games show is operational consequence. A series of two dozen Taiwan invasion wargames found that the United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers, with U.S.-represented forces exhausting long-range missiles within weeks of the opening shots. What no game in the public record has been designed to show is whether acquisition decisions or policy changes made years prior could have changed any of those outcomes. Wargames take the world as it is on day one and ask what happens next. They rarely ask what the world would look like if different acquisition decisions had been made earlier.
A recent campaign analysis of a future conflict over Taiwan reveals the severity of this missing variable. The game’s simulations found that even if the Air Force were given substantially more money to expand its present inventory, it would still likely lose. More money would not have changed the outcome. The game’s finding was starker: the force design itself was wrong. What the analysis cannot show is whether a multiyear procurement commitment for long-range anti-ship missiles initiated in FY2021 — or an other transaction authority contract that brought a nontraditional drone manufacturer into the supply chain two years earlier — would have produced the winning force design in time.
Those are acquisition variables that never appear in the model. Even then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Paul Selva’s call a decade ago to revitalize Pentagon wargaming said nothing about acquisition decisions or policies as a variable. Their absence is most costly precisely now, when Congress is primed to act on reform and lacks the analytical product that would tell it which reforms to choose. Analysts have noted for years that acquisition policies and decisions are almost never variables in wargame design.
The operational cost of that omission is now playing out in real time. The United States fired more than 375 Tomahawks in the first 96 hours of Operation Epic Fury. By the ceasefire, the total exceeded 1,000, a figure that may represent nearly the entirety of available in-theater stocks. The Williams International turbofan engine that powers the Tomahawk and other long-range strike missiles is a sole-source production bottleneck that additional funding alone cannot immediately widen. The Pentagon knew this before the war, awarding Williams a $253.7 million no-bid contract under the Defense Production Act in December 2024 to begin expanding capacity. Knowing about a bottleneck and having modeled what it costs during sustained combat operations are different things, and giving Congress an analytical basis to act on that knowledge before the fighting started would have required a tool that did not exist.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s own record captures the failure in miniature. When reviewing multiyear purchasing authority for munitions in the FY2023 Defense Authorization Act, the committee found that the authority had gone largely unused — because buying in bulk over multiple years did not produce enough cost savings compared to annual purchases to justify the commitment. Cost savings were the only metric available, and it was not a compelling enough reason to pull the trigger. The committee was asking the wrong question. The right one: If the military had actually bought these weapons in bulk starting in 2023, how many additional missiles would have been loaded and ready on the first day of a conflict that began in February 2026? That number did not exist, and no institution in Washington had been asked to build the tool that would produce it.
The failure to connect acquisition variables to battlefield outcomes is not inevitable. Two partial precedents prove that the components of the needed tool already exist. The Space Force’s Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, a program that contracts with commercial satellite companies in peacetime, locking in pre-negotiated terms for wartime delivery, is the most operationally complete proof of concept. When the reserve held its first industry wargame in mid-2024, the exercise simulated a wartime activation in which the military demanded those contracted services under conflict conditions. The acquisition contracts themselves were live variables: what companies had agreed to deliver, and at what cost. Where the contracts created gaps, that friction showed up as operational problems in real time, before any actual conflict. The Space Force program director described the result as “a complete success because it wasn’t 100 percent successful.”
The Center for Naval Analyses ran a wargame whose findings are the closest public analogue to what this paper proposes. The Arsenal of Policy series, commissioned by the Pentagon’s office responsible for defense manufacturing and supply chains and completed in early 2025, used a structured wargame to pit competing policy recommendations for strengthening munitions production against each other — testing which interventions would actually work before committing to them. RAND demonstrated the same methodology on the procurement side in 2020, simulating a congressional acquisition pathway to surface implementation problems before the policy went live. Both efforts proved that wargames can evaluate policy choices before they are made. Yet neither connected those choices to a direct, scoreable comparison of what each reform would have put in the magazine on day one.
The Arsenal of Policy series produced ranked policy recommendations on the interventions that would work best. The game proposed here produces something categorically different: a scoreable battlefield number tied to a specific legislative choice. Not merely “expand the defense industrial base,” but “under multi-year purchasing authority for Tomahawk engines authorized in FY2023, available strike capacity on day one of a Taiwan contingency is X percent higher than the baseline.”
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the Center for Naval Analyses are the two best-positioned institutions to close the gap between acquisition decisions and their battlefield consequences. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s core methodology already combines wargaming with budget analysis across the Future Years Defense Program in a way that no other institution in the Washington defense policy community has replicated. The Center for Naval Analyses just demonstrated acquisition policy wargame design at the Pentagon’s direct request. A joint effort between them would produce something that has not existed in unclassified form: an operationally grounded comparison of how specific, congressionally-controlled acquisition policy decisions shape battlefield outcomes under a realistic adversary scenario.
The design requirements are specific. The game should model at least two acquisition scenarios against a common starting point, with results expressed in terms a staffer or appropriator can use — how many days of combat operations remaining stockpiles could sustain, how many missiles are loaded and ready to fire at the start of a conflict, and how quickly a needed weapon can actually be delivered to the field. The variables should be the levers Congress actually controls: multi-year purchasing commitments, contract competition thresholds, flexibility in how money moves between accounts mid-cycle, and investments in specific industrial chokepoints under the Defense Production Act’s industrial capacity expansion provisions.
For example, raising the head of contracting activity’s sole-source authority from $500 million to $1 billion, for instance, is exactly the kind of statutory change the game could model: a contract that previously required higher-level review now stays at the service level and reaches award faster. How many additional Tomahawks does that faster timeline put in the field by the first day of a conflict? The answers are what Congress needs to move proposals that currently die without numbers. While munitions deliveries are the most legible link between acquisition decisions and battlefield outcomes, the methodology applies to every aspect of warfighting affected by acquisition decisions and policies, from satellites to base infrastructure to next-generation weaponry.
The most direct path runs through the next defense authorization bill, directing the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Center for Naval Analyses to design and execute a joint acquisition-reform wargame series. Findings would be delivered to the armed services committees alongside the president’s annual budget request, providing a structured, adversarial-tested comparison of what specific acquisition reforms would have put in the magazine before the shooting started. As someone who has watched reform proposals stall in committee, not because they were wrong but because they arrived without numbers, I can say with some confidence that a wargame product formatted to answer that question would move proposals that currently do not move.
The political moment for this will not arrive again for a generation. The Pentagon has redesignated its entire acquisition enterprise as the warfighting acquisition system, reordering its priorities from cost and compliance to speed and battlefield outcomes. The Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery Act in the House and the Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense Act in the Senate together formed the backbone of the FY2026 Defense Authorization Act, representing the most ambitious acquisition reform legislation in decades. The executive branch has made acquisition reform a stated first-order priority. The analytical foundation, however, does not exist. No tool tells a reformer which specific changes to contract structure, to multiyear authorities, to industrial investment, would have altered the battlefield position of U.S. forces on day one.
Gallagher proved that wargame results formatted for the legislative process produce legislation, and the pipeline from game table to authorization text is well-worn. The proposed game would also serve as a benchmarking tool. Neither Congressional act produced a baseline against which its effects can be measured. A recurring wargame series tied to the annual budget submission would give Congress an empirical scorecard for reforms already on the books, not only guidance for reforms not yet written. The missing piece is running a game in which acquisition choices and policy changes shape what forces have available when the shooting starts, so the next reform proposal lands on a staffer’s desk with a number rather than an assertion.
Maj. Stephen Bittner is an Air Force contracting officer currently serving as a Department of the Air Force Legislative Fellow in the Office of Speaker Mike Johnson. He previously commanded the 39th Contracting Squadron at Incirlik Air Base and directed acquisition programs at the National Reconnaissance Office. The views expressed are his own and do not represent the Department of the Air Force or the Department of Defense.
Image: Midjourney
