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“I wanted disciplined but not regimented thinking. Commanders must encourage intellectual risk-taking to preclude a lethargic environment. Leaders must shelter those challenging nonconformists and mavericks who make institutions uncomfortable; otherwise you wash out innovation.”
— James Mattis & Bing West, Call Sign Chaos
For the last decade, the Pentagon has had the authorities to buy commercially derived technologies at speed and scale, but not enough people who know how to use those authorities. Successive senior Pentagon leaders, both military and civilian, have asserted that these technologies will prove decisive in future wars. Panels, commissions, and directives created new pathways and the Pentagon’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy now makes commercial-first buying a top priority.
This article argues that the Defense Innovation Unit should lead the implementation of this transformation by becoming the department’s weapons school for commercial technology acquisition. Like the Navy and Air Force weapons schools, the unit should select promising servicemembers, train them rigorously, credential them visibly, and ultimately send them back to the services to lead and teach others. Two things make this work: training that turns motivated people into experts and incentives that ensure that time at the unit enhances their careers instead of ending them. The mavericks that built the unit had the first without the second, and many paid for it dearly.
Since 2016, the Defense Innovation Unit has executed hundreds of commercial solutions openings using other transaction agreements through partnerships with limited groups of service personnel whose acquisition knowledge has never scaled. The unit’s experience will be the bedrock of the curriculum.
In November 2014, then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that the Department of Defense was implementing a Third Offset Strategy in response to renewed Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and China’s militarization of the South China Sea. The strategy would “start with a clean sheet of paper” to field several commercially derived technologies, including robotics and autonomous systems. As a part of this strategy, Hagel’s successor, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, announced that the Pentagon would be establishing a storefront in Silicon Valley called the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental.
In 2016, the unit’s three-person acquisition pathways team constructed a competitive solicitation process called a commercial solutions opening: a-three phase competition emphasizing speed, flexibility, and collaboration in the contracting process by using other transaction agreements, which played a prodigious role in winning the space race and had been re-invigorated by the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act. Using this process made the Pentagon a more appealing customer and leveled the playing field for startups by driving a commercial-friendly approach that recognized startups and their investors’ expectations by providing buy signals at the speed of business, not typical defense acquisition cycles.
From 2016 to 2024, the unit remained separated and secluded from the rest of the Pentagon. The unit had a modest budget, relying on motivated mission partners to fund projects. Servicemembers at the unit were mavericks whose intrinsic motivation to make an impact took precedence over promotion and advancement. They repeatedly warned the rest of the Pentagon about the threat of small drones to parked aircraft, the outsized role of drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh War, and the rapid proliferation of high-quality commercial satellite imagery. Despite complete alignment with the Third Offset Strategy, their warnings were routinely dismissed. While the unit punched well above its weight, it suffered budget cuts and spurious contract award protests.sustaining of spurious contract award protests In 2021, Director Mike Brown was nominated to be the Pentagon’s top acquisitions official, only to have his nomination derailed by unsubstantiated accusations of abusing hiring authorities. These events led many at the unit to perceive themselves as rebels resisting bloated Pentagon bureaucracy. Many servicemembers were shuffled back to the services where their careers were negatively impacted. One of us served as the unit’s first warfighter-in-residence, arriving ecstatic at the opportunity to make an impact on capabilities for his community. While many projects worked on were successful, it also meant permanently derailing the author’s military career.
Some of the unit’s most successful projects, including Persistent Maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, Construction Scale Additive Manufacturing, and Peacetime Indications and Warning, came from coincidental alignment between funded mission problems and solutions from vendors like SailDrone, ICON Technology, Capella Space, and others whose founders hadn’t imagined the military as a customer.
In February 2022, imagery from Capella’s satellites showed the world that Russia was about to invade Ukraine.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the unit’s mission was gradually legitimized by the prodigious impact of agile software development, small drones, and space-based sensing in the war. While some leaders openly demeaned the unit and commercial technology, others started to recognize the value of the commercial technologies emphasized by the Third Offset Strategy. Under the leadership of House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Chairman Ken Calvert, congressional staffer Nathan Diller, and Calvert’s National Security Advisor, Michael MacKay, the unit’s director was codified as a principal staff assistant to the secretary of defense, appropriated an annual budget of almost $1 billion, and charged with creating “asymmetric advantage to support combatant command operational challenges.”
These new authorities and funding, which one of us strongly advocated for in War on The Rocks, empowered the unit to validate and accelerate privately-funded, commercial solutions to the military’s most urgent problems. In 2024, the unit solicited proposals for small, unmanned surface vessels that could strike enemy forces and low-cost cruise missiles. The first project led to Saronic Technologies receiving a $392 million contract for vessels that have since been used to rescue downed pilots and strike an Iranian submarine. The second project awarded agreements to Zone 5 Technologies and Anduril Industries and is now a program of record with the Air Force.
Since January 2025, the Pentagon has made three announcements marking a new era for the Defense Innovation Unit. In March 2025, the Pentagon released a memo mandating “Commercial Solutions Opening and other transactions as the default solicitation and award approaches for acquiring capabilities under the [Software Acquisition Pathway].” In November 2025, an acquisition transformation strategy designated acquisitions as a warfighting function and the unit’s commercial-first buying practices as “the preferred acquisition approach.” In January, a third memo recognized the unit as “the Department’s center of excellence for commercial technology adoption and product transition, available to Portfolio Acquisition Executives and program offices across the Department.”
Yet the Pentagon’s response to this competency gap places renewed responsibility on the institution that has long been responsible for closing it. The Acquisition Transformation Strategy calls for transforming the Defense Acquisition University into the Warfighting Acquisition University to produce tougher, faster buyers. The ambition is sound, but entrusting transformation to the same institutional training system requires more than a new name. Centralizing acquisition education and certification does not ensure that practitioners can construct and execute a program based on sound mission engineering, negotiate a commercially viable agreement, exercise judgment under uncertainty, or move a promising technology into operational use. Certification establishes a baseline, but it does not demonstrate mastery. The university’s success should be judged by whether graduates apply better buying practices and deliver better outcomes.
The services remain responsible for those outcomes, yet should use their own discretionary resources to address practical training gaps that centralized instruction leaves unresolved. That separates responsibility for workforce preparation from accountability for mission delivery. The answer is to give the services a stronger role in developing acquisition judgment through live work, supported by experienced government and industry practitioners. Other transaction agreements illustrate the need: Knowing the authority exists is different from structuring, negotiating, and executing an agreement that attracts a commercial company and meets a warfighter’s need. The Defense Innovation Unit can connect those two forms of learning by developing practitioners through actual acquisitions and returning them to the services prepared to execute and teach. Centralized education should support that pipeline, not substitute for it.
Instead of operating as a national missions force for innovation, the unit should position itself as the department’s weapons school for commercial technology acquisition. Military weapons schools, such as the U.S. Navy’s Top Gun and the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, are centers of excellence that maintain the highest standards of performance in their respective communities and facilitate disciplined, rigorous training by selecting promising pilots, aircrew, and support personnel from the operational forces and putting them through a comprehensive program that teaches them to be experts in their respective professions. Upon completion, they are given a weapons school patch that they wear for the rest of their career. Graduates are expected to both maintain the highest standards and teach others how to achieve those standards.
This analogy is particularly potent for three reasons. First, while weapons schools maintain their own cultures, standards, and unrivaled appetites for excellence, they are equally eager to teach others to achieve those standards. Second, weapons schools have prerequisites. The elite few students selected to attend arrive with operational experience, leave with a deeper knowledge and understanding of their craft, and return to lead by example and teach what they learned. Third, weapons schools are expected to hold their communities’ leaders accountable, even if that means disagreeing with general and flag officers.
To meet the moment, the unit should undertake a six-step process.
Select for Temperament and Reputation
The unit should seek out mavericks with reputations for challenging status quos and finding novel paths through institutional obstacles while following the law, including contracting officers that have awarded commercial contracts and operators that have shown initiative by identifying and sourcing solutions to their communities’ mission problems, with both commissioned and non-commissioned officers eligible for selection. The unit’s most experienced program managers and agreements officers should conduct candidate interviews and selections.
Run a Course, Not An Onboarding
The unit should establish a formal curriculum that teaches how commercial-first acquisition programs are executed, taught through case studies of the unit’s successes and failures. Candidates would be taught the basic principles of startup formation, venture capital, the authorization and appropriation process, the adaptive acquisition framework, and receive briefings from other innovation organizations, including the Office of Strategic Capital, the Pentagon’s Office for Small Business Innovation, and the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies bridge fund. The unit’s senior contracting official, materiel leader, and a newly minted chief program manager would be responsible for facilitating the course. The chief program manager should be selected, with the director’s approval, by the unit’s corps of program managers, with current and former program managers eligible for selection.
See It, Do It, Teach It
Upon completing the initial course, candidates would serve probationary periods in the same way that weapons school graduates do prior to becoming instructors, working with experienced colleagues and applying their training to a project. After completing probationary periods, program managers would assume responsibility for running projects, and agreements officers would receive warrants empowering them to award other transaction agreements, eventually assuming responsibility for mentoring new candidates.
Credential It
Completion of the assignment should confer a special experience identifier, recognizing the graduate as weapons school graduates are recognized. Additionally, the assignment will be included on the Joint Duty Assignment List, giving Joint Staff credit for time at the unit, making them more competitive for promotion. This is the determinative factor: Time at the unit should enhance specially selected servicemembers’ careers, an incentive the mavericks who built the unit never had.
Sow Seeds of Success
Upon departing the unit, servicemembers would be strategically placed in program offices that would directly benefit from their experience. Program offices charged with delivering commercially derived technologies, including the Air Force’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management, the Navy’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Robotics and Autonomous Systems, the Army’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive Maneuver Ground, Special Operations Command’s Program Executive Office Special Operations Forces Warrior and the services’ rapid capabilities offices would be ideal follow-on assignments. As qualified, seasoned, credentialed mavericks proliferate throughout the services, assignment breadth should expand, increasing adoption of commercial technology acquisition practices, and creating a deeper bench for future leadership of commercial-first organizations throughout the department.
Reconvene Regularly
The unit should host an annual conference that serves the same purpose for the organization that the Air Force’s annual Weapons and Tactics Conference serves for the Air Force Weapons School, providing a professional forum for the warfighting function of commercial technology acquisitions that strengthens the connective tissue between the center of excellence and its alumni.
This approach would benefit the unit and the services in several ways. First, rotating servicemembers through the unit would ensure the organization has personnel with firsthand exposure to the problems it is tasked with fixing. The services, in turn, would benefit from having representation inside the unit. Second, it would help the unit refine and improve its acquisition tradecraft by regularly teaching candidates how to successfully execute programs and award agreements. The services would benefit from receiving experienced program managers and agreements officers from the unit once they rotate back. Third, it would help retention by providing opportunities for servicemembers to help solve their communities’ problems instead of leaving service for industry.
In September, the Defense Innovation Unit’s Principal Deputy Director Matt Shortal testified before the National Commission on the Future of the Navy, citing reports indicating that just four percent of the Navy’s budget is allocated to unmanned vessels.
Statistics like this convey an uncomfortable truth: The United States has failed to reallocate significant resources to procure the commercially derived technologies that the Third Offset Strategy identified as priorities. There are several reasons for this. One of them is that the acquisition and resourcing system incentivizes fear and compliance more than it encourages the sourcing, prototyping, and scaling of commercially derived technologies into the force. The people responsible for buying these technologies have every authority, pathway, and contracting mechanism they need. The Pentagon needs a formal pipeline that teaches specially selected military mavericks how to use these authorities, season them with practical experience, and elevates them with a recognized credential.
Mandating commercial solutions openings and other transactions as the default solicitation and award approaches for acquiring capabilities under the Software Acquisition Pathway, recognizing commercial-first buying practices as the preferred acquisition approach, and designating acquisitions as a warfighting function are all positive steps in the right direction. However, these policies will only make an impact if they are effectively implemented.
The Defense Innovation Unit’s decade of experience in executing transactions with startups and non-traditional defense contractors, recent successes in fielding commercially derived technology solutions, and designation as the Pentagon’s center of excellence for commercial technology adoption and product transition make it the premier organization to implement these policies.
Training should not be the unit’s sole future focus. It should continue to execute programs and experiment with new acquisitions pathways that remove systemic barriers faced by new entrants to the defense industrial base. Since 2016, the unit’s mission has been to “… [pioneer] procurement and acquisition pathways optimized for start-up firms and non-traditional entrants to the defense industry,” not merely focus on commercial solutions openings. To continue to lead, execution, training, and experimentation should be central to the unit’s thesis.
If the Pentagon continues to fail to incentivize the sourcing, prototyping, and scaling of commercially derived technologies into the force, acquisition transformation will not be implemented effectively, and the servicemembers that voluntarily pursue a commercial-first approach to solving the department’s mission problems will continue to do so at real risk to their prospects for career advancement and promotion. While there are fates far worse than the end of one’s time in uniform, there is no good reason why carrying out the mandate of an Acquisition Transformation Strategy that is wholly aligned with the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act and directed by the Pentagon’s seniormost leaders should have to come at the expense of one’s military career.
This article is dedicated to the life and memory of Colonel Michael “Rags” Seltzer. Rags served in the U.S. Air Force as a fighter pilot, graduated from the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, and served as an instructor at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, where he was ranked as the school’s top instructor. From 2020 to 2024, Rags served as a program manager and acting portfolio director at the Defense Innovation Unit. On October 16th, 2024, Rags passed away from cancer. Rags was one of the finest fighter pilots the Air Force ever produced, universally respected and admired by all who served and worked with him, and a living embodiment of the U.S. Air Force Weapons School’s motto of being humble, approachable, and credible.
Ben McNally is a former civilian contractor at the Defense Innovation Unit, where he worked as an analyst and private capital manager. He has worked as a consultant in the defense technology industry and led events, programming, and outreach for the Center for Defense Innovation at the Capital Factory in Austin, Texas. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a fellow at the Clements Center for National Security.
Donald “Chee” Gansberger is a delivery program manager at Second Front, where he works to deliver innovative pathways for companies to achieve success in pushing valuable software to warfighters. He is a retired Air Force Tactical Air Control Party Specialist. During his career, he served with conventional and Special Operations units, was the first warfighter-in-residence at the Defense Innovation Unit, and led autonomy programs at AFWERX.
**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: Lawrence Crespo via Nellis Air Force Base.
