The Pentagon Needs to Both Streamline and Rein In Innovation

U.S. Air Force's F-35 fifth-generation fighter aircraft takes off during a military aviation exhibition at the Yelahanka Air Force Station in Bengaluru, India, on Feb. 12, 2025. Idrees Mohammed/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

A recent report by the Hudson Institute has identified the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) as a bottleneck to innovation and the ability quickly to respond to emerging threats.

The experts who wrote the report are 100 percent correct that the JCIDS is a moribund bureaucracy that has contributed to America’s military decline. But merely replacing the JCIDS with a system that more quickly puts money in the hands of defense contractors to produce “innovations” could end up exacerbating the problem of weapons systems being funded whose success hinges on unvetted, immature technologies that were sold as being innovative or even revolutionary.

The JCIDS was established in 1991 to help the Pentagon figure out what capabilities the military needs and confirm whether an acquisition program will fill those needs. As is often the case with government programs or agencies, it sounds like a good idea. But according the Hudson report and its authors, Dan Patt and Bill Greenwalt, the JCIDS has “evolved from an aspiring solution to meet joint warfighting needs into a bureaucratic impediment that actively impedes military modernization. Analysis reveals a system that consumes more than 800 days to validate requirements—nearly 2.5 years during which technology evolves, threats advance, and opportunities evaporate.”

Patt and Greenwalt further describe the JCIDS as representing “the ultimate perversion of military strategy—a system in which America’s brightest officers spend their days debating section headers and formatting while our adversaries field new capabilities. It transforms strategic thinking into document compliance, measuring success by staffing completion rather than combat advantage.”

Eliminating an agency that stands in the way of improving our warfighting is a good start, but when it comes to apportioning responsibility to the decline our military has been experiencing since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the JCIDS is only part of the problem. Another part of the problem is that highly complex weapons system programs that promise to deliver revolutionary capabilities based on yet-to-be-developed or extremely immature technology are regularly approved with no real chance to vet the still-to-be-created innovative/revolutionary capability.

These programs more often than not come in over budget, behind schedule, and at times don’t deliver any usable military power at all. Indeed, many of these innovative programs approved for development have failed to deliver on their rosy promises and come in billions or even hundreds of billions over budget.

A sampling of programs that incorporated innovative technology that failed to deliver promised capabilities includes the failed DDG-1000 Zumwalt Destroyer program whose design incorporated about a dozen innovative technologies, most of which were immature and unvetted. This led to the Zumwalt costs exploding and resulted in the original program being cut from 32 ships to three ships, that even today are undermanned and will never be able to deliver anywhere near the capabilities they should, given their cost to taxpayers.

The biggest example of innovation gone wild is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program which is hundreds of billions of dollars over budget and decades behind in delivering promised capabilities. As it stands, it will never be a reliable aircraft, and its full mission capability rate, as reported by the Government Accountability Office, could be as low as 15 to 30 percent depending on the model. And this is 30 years after development began on the Joint Strike Fighter in 1994. Many, if not most, of its ongoing problems can be attributed to the large number of innovative, read immature and unvetted, technologies incorporated into the design, including its crazily powerful but highly unreliable F-35 engine.

Another significant example of immature innovation severely impacting a weapons system effectiveness is the Ford Class Carriers’ Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and their Advanced Arresting Gear. They were supposed to allow the Ford to launch and recover larger aircraft while producing less stress on aircraft air frames. But these innovative technologies were inadequately tested before being made central to the Ford Class Carrier, and as result they are many hundreds of times less reliable than the highly effective, robust steam catapults used by the Nimitz class carriers. Add in the fact that when certain types of problems need fixing on one of the four EMALS on the Ford Class, all four have to be taken off line, and you end up with a carrier that over any non-trivial period of time cannot produce as many sorties as the Nimitz Class Carriers, is less survivable, and when forced to take all its catapults down for repairs removes the defensive air cover the ships of its battlegroup rely on.

However, none of the above failures invalidate what the Hudson report concludes, and our military does need to modernize and innovate. But such innovations should be evaluated  in terms of their cost benefit and how reliable they are in real world. The high-level  validation process put forth by the Hudson report advocates “iterative try-and-see efforts in realistic operating environments with actual uniformed operators.” It also advocates for a number of other common-sense approaches to rolling out innovations that actually make our military more lethal and resilient.

This process make sense, and indeed could and should be applied to as many weapons development programs as possible. But there are programs, “revolutionary” programs,  that the Pentagon and defense contractor love, that from the outset incorporate immature or yet-to-be-developed technology, i.e., non-existent technology, for which there is no way to do iterative testing with real-life uniformed operators before approval is given to go ahead with the weapons system. And as noted above, this type of “innovation” has not produced cost-effective results.

The way to avoid weapons systems that fail to deliver on a cost versus benefit basis is to minimize concurrent development by delivering weapons systems designed around mature or very nearly mature technology. That way you don’t have a major weapons program being delayed, or failing to be delivered, due to its reliance on an immature technology that could not be matured on schedule, or at all.

The revolutionary tech should be vetted in projects whose purpose is to rapidly assess as quickly as possible if the technology can be developed at all, and if so, whether it can be developed at a reasonable cost. And then a prototype of the tech can be rolled out and incorporated into a test platform, and if possible, iteratively tested by uniformed operatives. Then and only then should the innovative technology be incorporated into weapon systems that our sailors, marines, airmen, and soldiers will be relying upon in the near future.

Streamlining the incorporation of useful innovations into weapons systems that will perform reliably and at a reasonable cost is good thing. But at the same time, the Pentagon needs to stop setting itself up for failure by letting contracts for major weapons systems that rely on risky immature, unvetted technology go ahead.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.