OPINION — When Steve Clean and I sat down over espresso a decade in the past and realized that the client discovery course of in Lean was an identical to what I might been doing with the Fast Equipping Power in Afghanistan, neither of us imagined we might nonetheless be making the identical argument in 2026. However right here we’re.
The Division of Conflict has simply executed essentially the most bold acquisition reform in 60 years. Portfolio Acquisition Executives have changed PEOs. JCIDS is useless. The Warfighting Acquisition System rewards pace to supply. These are actual reforms, they usually implement practically each advice the protection innovation neighborhood has made for the final decade.
And they’re about to repeat the most costly mistake of the post-9/11 wars.
This is why.
The Counter-Drone Struggle Is Not a Expertise Drawback
Everybody in Washington is speaking concerning the counter-UAS problem as if it is an engineering puzzle. Construct a greater jammer. Subject a less expensive interceptor. Develop AI-enabled goal recognition. The know-how shelf is full: directed-energy weapons at $12 per shot, drone-on-drone interceptors with over 1,000 kills in Ukraine at $14,500 every, digital warfare methods that may defeat business flight controllers.
The know-how works. The method for getting it to the warfighter doesn’t.
A brand new drone variant seems on the battlefield each week — constructed from business elements, open-source flight software program, and elements accessible on Amazon and Alibaba. A firmware replace that defeats your jammer prices nothing and takes hours. Your counter to that replace, via even the reformed acquisition system, takes months.
This isn’t a know-how hole. It is a cycle-time hole.
And I’ve seen this precise hole earlier than.
I Had This Drawback. It Was Known as the IED.
From 2010 to 2013, I led the Military’s Fast Equipping Power through the peak of the counter-IED marketing campaign in Afghanistan. The structural parallels between that combat and the present counter-drone combat usually are not approximate. They’re precise.
Each threats share 5 traits that make them resistant to traditional acquisition:
Low-cost, dual-use elements. IED elements have been globally accessible business merchandise. Drone elements are an identical — flight controllers, autopilot software program, motors, all commercially sourced. A Shahed-pattern drone prices ~$20,000. An FPV kamikaze prices just a few hundred {dollars}. We interact them with $400,000 Stingers.
Information that proliferates sooner than countermeasures. IED development methods unfold via casual networks sooner than JIEDDO might discipline counters. Drone designs unfold even sooner — via open-source repositories, business provide chains, and state-sponsored proliferation from Iran to the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Russia.
Modular adaptation at near-zero value. Each time we fielded a jammer, the adversary swapped set off mechanisms inside weeks. Drones are modular the identical means. New radio, new software program, new flight profile — all exterior any formal course of. The adversary’s improvement cycle runs in days. Ours runs in years.
Tactical variation that defeats one-size-fits-all options. On the REF, we realized that the pressure-plate IED in Helmand Province was a basically completely different downside from the explosively fashioned penetrator in Baghdad. Totally different triggers, completely different emplacement, completely different defeat mechanisms. The C-UAS menace has an identical variation. A Houthi one-way assault drone flying 1,500 km is nothing like an FPV kamikaze on the platoon degree, which is nothing like a Chinese language autonomous swarm. Washington needs a consolidated resolution. We made the identical mistake with IEDs.
5. The institutional reflex to throw know-how at a methods downside. We spent over $75 billion on counter-IED. We stood up JIEDDO. We misplaced that combat anyway. As Conflict on the Rocks concluded final November: drones are “IEDs that fly now.” The failed counter-IED framework shouldn’t be replicated. However that’s exactly what is occurring.
The Actual Drawback: No one Owns the Entrance Finish or the Again Finish
Steve and I’ve spent the final decade educating the identical lesson: the standard of your resolution is decided by the standard of the issue you select to resolve. Or as Einstein reportedly mentioned, if given one hour to avoid wasting the world, spend fifty-five minutes understanding the issue and 5 minutes on the answer.
The Pentagon’s C-UAS response addresses the final 5 minutes of the equation, not the primary 55.
The Division has invested closely within the develop and deploy phases. JIATF-401 was stood up final August to proliferate counter-drone capabilities. The Military runs biennial business competitions. DIU scouts business know-how. The PAE reform consolidates necessities, contracting, testing, and sustainment underneath a single portfolio chief. These are the center phases of the innovation cycle, and they’re getting actual funding and actual consideration.
However no one is doing the opposite 4 issues:
Detect — No one is persistently monitoring how the drone menace evolves on the tactical edge. There aren’t any forward-deployed downside discovery groups embedded with operational items, scanning for the way the adversary tailored since final week. The REF & AWG had these groups. They not exist.
Outline — No one is scoping the precise downside every unit faces with sufficient precision to drive helpful options. A PAE chief at headquarters, regardless of how empowered by the brand new reforms, can’t see the distinctions that matter with out floor fact from the combat. Necessities nonetheless originate from throughout the institutional system — headquarters staffs, Service-level assessments — not from troopers and Marines observing the issue in context.
Lacking is also a Fusion Cell that collects the inputs from the operational power, business and the labs and executes the invention required to verify we’re engaged on precise issues (not signs) and the required pace to resolve them.
Assess — No one is systematically measuring whether or not fielded C-UAS methods truly work towards an adversary who adapts after each engagement. We discipline methods and declare victory. With out evaluation, there is no such thing as a suggestions loop. With out a suggestions loop that anticipates adaptation, you can not out-cycle the adversary.
Distribute — No one is guaranteeing that what one unit learns reaches each different unit dealing with the identical menace at operational pace a lot much less delivers that very same evaluation to business. The Uneven Warfare Group used to do that with ahead deployed embeds, rolling assessments again into TRADOC schoolhouses. That perform was absorbed by the Middle for Military Classes Realized, which operates at institutional tempo — months — not operational tempo.
Three of six phases of the innovation concentrating on cycle don’t have any organizational proprietor. The reforms constructed a sooner engine. No one constructed the steering.
The PAE Reforms Are Crucial however Inadequate
Let me be clear: the PAE restructuring is real progress. Consolidating authority underneath a single portfolio chief eliminates the handoff delays between necessities writers, program managers, and testers that killed tempo underneath the previous PEO construction. The brand new Functionality Commerce Councils could make real-time tradeoffs. Killing JCIDS removes essentially the most ossified layer. These are severe reforms.
However they widen the scope of who writes necessities with out altering the place the inputs come from.
On the REF, we did not simply have streamlined necessities authority — although we had that. I might validate a requirement and commit funds on the spot. The REF’s actual benefit was one thing else fully: forward-deployed groups producing necessities from direct statement of the combat. Any soldier, from non-public to four-star, might submit an issue through a one-page 10-Liner. We aimed for 90-day options and generally delivered in 72 hours. We transitioned 170 packages into manufacturing and leveraged $150 million into ten occasions that via partnerships. Our Expeditionary Lab at Bagram fabricated prototypes in days.
That wasn’t simply quick acquisition. That was downside curation at operational pace — sourcing issues from the sector, validating them via direct statement, and changing them into actionable downside statements earlier than committing sources to options.
The Military disbanded the REF and the Uneven Warfare Group in 2021. It has not changed both. We eradicated our only problem-detection and solution-distribution capabilities simply because the drone menace was accelerating.
What Must Occur: The Innovation Concentrating on Cycle
The answer will not be recreating the REF or AWG. It’s guaranteeing that each one six phases of the innovation cycle have organizational homeowners, devoted sources, and a shared operational tempo.
I name this the Innovation Concentrating on Cycle[1] [2] [3] , modeled on the F3EAD course of — Discover, Repair, End, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate — that JSOC used to dismantle terrorist networks in Iraq. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Joint Particular Operations activity power went from one raid a month to 10 raids an evening not as a result of it acquired higher know-how, however as a result of it collapsed the cycle time between intelligence and motion. Each raid generated the intelligence for the subsequent one. Each accomplished cycle made the subsequent cycle sooner.
The identical logic applies to innovation. Six phases — Detect, Outline, Develop, Deploy, Assess, Distribute — run constantly by a fusion cell, every rotation producing the enter for the subsequent. A 70% resolution fielded in weeks, assessed towards operational actuality, with findings distributed throughout the power and fed again into detection of the subsequent downside.
The PAE reforms present the authorities and organizational buildings for Develop and Deploy. The Innovation Concentrating on Cycle offers the entrance finish and again finish that join the warfighter’s actuality to these authorities.
Every PAE wants 4 issues the present reforms do not present
Ahead-deployed Drawback Discovery Groups — small, cross-functional groups embedded with operational items, sourcing and curating issues from direct statement. Not know-how scouts. Drawback scouts. These don’t should be natural to the PAE.
Fusion Cells — that acquire all of the sensor knowledge from the sector, business and labs and do the due diligence to make sure we’re engaged on the best issues on the proper tempo with the best anticipated outcomes.
Fast operational evaluation — constructed into the cycle, not performed as a autopsy months after fielding. Each deployment of a C-UAS functionality ought to generate knowledge: did it work? Did operators undertake it? Did the adversary adapt? That knowledge feeds the subsequent rotation.
Lateral distribution at operational pace — what one unit learns should attain each different unit dealing with the identical menace earlier than the subsequent engagement, not the subsequent rotation. Our institutional schoolhouses function at institutional tempo. The drone menace operates at business tempo.
The Backside Line
The Division has reformed the way it acquires. It has not reformed what it acquires, whether or not it labored, or who else must know.
Within the counter-drone combat, that hole will not be educational. The adversary would not have to out-technology us. He solely must out-cycle us.
We proved with IEDs the place that leads. $75 billion. Twenty years. We misplaced.
The identical combat is right here once more. The know-how is healthier this time. The method failure is an identical. You do not beat an adaptive menace by constructing a greater mousetrap. You beat it by operating a sooner, smarter cycle — one which begins with understanding the issue, not constructing the answer.
That is the lesson of Lean. That is the lesson of the REF. And if the Pentagon would not be taught it this time, the drones will educate it the onerous means.
Pete Newell is the previous director of the U.S. Military’s Fast Equipping Power and CEO of BMNT. He co-created Hacking for Protection with Steve Clean and is the writer of “The Innovation Concentrating on Cycle: Time-Delicate Innovation Fires Contained in the Steady Innovation Cycle”
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