Got an idea for reforming defense acquisition? The Pentagon’s all ears.

HONOLULU—As the Defense Department works to overhaul its antiquated and clunky acquisition system, it wants to hear from you.

“Bring us your most disruptive, most unconstrained ideas,” Mike Cadenazzi, assistant defense secretary for industrial base policy, said during a keynote speech at the Honolulu Defense Forum last week. “We need radically different outcomes in the defense industrial base. So we need radically different ideas on how to get there.”

Lt. Gen. James Glynn, commander of Marine Forces Pacific, offered one: Printing munitions on the battlefield.

“If we all have a need for, say, a type of munition, then why make it in the states and have to ship it where it’s going to be utilized? Why not make it right there?” Glynn said during a media roundtable, adding that he’s interested in the possibility of a unit or company in a partner nation using additive manufacturing “to make parts or equipment or munitions or food.”

“How are we going to sustain the [NASA] Mars mission? We’re very interested, because how do you sustain forces that are under duress for longer, protracted periods of time?”

Cadenazzi’s take? “I don’t think it’s a stretch at all.”

Looking at the current state of additive manufacturing, “you’re not going to manufacture, you know, THAAD” on an additive tool, he said. But what the military really needs now is things like drones, smaller munitions, tools, parts, components, things that actually break when you use a howitzer… There are very reasonable expectations for increasing those capabilities forward.”

Cadenazzi’s comments came amid a major effort formally unveiled in November to remake the way the military buys things—in part by convincing companies to move faster while also investing more of their own money into developing new systems.

Mike Brown, who led the Defense Innovation Unit from 2018 to 2022 and is now a partner at Shield Capital, said technologies proven on the battlefield in Ukraine have shown that new companies can participate in the defense space without having to build a satellite or designing an airplane. And the growing interest in defense tech has boosted venture capital by “an order of magnitude” in just a few years—which means that technologies are developed without any taxpayer dollars.

Companies are looking at what the Pentagon is buying “besides ships, tanks, and planes,” Brown said. “We need ships, tanks, and planes, but we also, what we’ve seen in Ukraine, we need other things. We need space-based sensors… we need autonomous systems.”

The extra venture capital has allowed more companies to compete in areas like the rocket motor industrial base, Cadenazzi said, alluding to the Pentagon’s Jan. 13 announcement that it would invest $1 billion in L3Harris’s new rocket motor business.

More companies in the space is a good thing, Brown said, because “a lot of things get solved when there’s more competition.”

And that competition does not necessarily need to stay within U.S. borders. Working more closely with allies and partners, and establishing manufacturing and maintenance facilities forward, is also necessary to produce “expeditionary manufacturing resilience,” Cadenazzi said.

“I can imagine a diffuse system that can produce parts and even complete systems like drones locally, offering new options for sustained operation,” he said. “And the beauty of a distributed, decentralized system is that innovation ensues.”

“Often we hear about how large China’s manufacturing capacity is. Creating a distributed and decentralized on-demand capability will help close gaps in ways they don’t yet anticipate.”

Heather Fortuna Bush, senior vice president and leader of Indo-Pacific businesses for Booz Allen, told Defense One the reforms take “an agile mindset: If you’re going to fail, fail fast, but innovate. Don’t be afraid of failure. And you don’t have to be perfect. You have to be good enough.”  

It’s a concept Fortuna Bush appreciates. “The desire to enable acquisition at the speed of warfare and not be crippled at times, or have the bureaucracy slow down the ability to procure what is needed to advance the fight, she said. “And also the opening up of the window so that all of industry can participate. That’s something we’re really passionate about, too.”

The idea of overhauling the Pentagon’s acquisition process is not new. But Cadenazzi said the difference now is that the current administration is actually doing it—with strong support from the White House and Capitol Hill.

“There’s commitment from the leadership, from the president down,” he said. “The idea of defense manufacturing is a topic that’s active in the White House. We’re getting calls from the [National Security Council]… There’s a new focus from Secretary [Pete] Hegseth on down, to go ahead and do this.”

The level of attention and expertise brought to the issue “has provided new energy,” he said, but the “geopolitical situation in the Pacific, but also elsewhere, other events happening in Europe and the Middle East have highlighted the gaps we have.”

Brown agreed.

“I have to give this administration credit,” he said. “We’ve never had alignment like we’ve had now…the president, I mean, he writes a lot of [executive orders], but there’s been four on defense acquisition. I mean, we haven’t had a president that’s shown any interest in that topic, probably since Eisenhower.”

Steve Escaravage, defense technology group president for Booz Allen, said he appreciates the “top-down direction” of the reforms and the clear prioritization of changes, “but then, actually, the follow through is the thing that I think has been most impressive, of putting the new policy and the new priorities into action.”