Sherry Chen
The Pentagon’s internal machinery has calcified into delay, detachment, and dysfunction.
Executive effectiveness demands a systemic upgrade in planning, budgeting, and problem-solving.
The Pentagon’s greatest vulnerability in today’s multipolar world isn’t lack of funding or capability, but the internal lag that paralyzes innovation and responsiveness. If the United States wants to maintain its leadership in the multipolar world, then itshould upgrade the systems inside the Pentagon to enhance executive efficiency.
Nowhere is this imperative clearer than in the Indo-Pacific. In the South China Sea, where China builds artificial islands, fields maritime militias, and deploys precision-strike systems in contested waters, bureaucratic latency is a strategic liability. U.S. credibility in the region depends not just on presence, but on timely adaptation—yet the Pentagon’s sluggish systems risk ceding initiative to faster-moving rivals.
Critics may argue that systemic reform during a period of great-power rivalry risks internal disruption, introducing friction or delays just when consistency is most needed. But the reality is that the current system already imposes friction in the form of invisible delays, mismatched priorities, and missed opportunities. In a conflict environment where technological cycles move faster than bureaucratic ones, clinging to rigid structures offers the illusion of stability while undermining real readiness.
While the Pentagon debates how to modernize its budgeting process, China has prototyped and deployed hypersonic weapons through war-gaming and feedback loops that outpace U.S. timelines fivefold. Russia continues to adapt its electronic warfare and drone operations in Ukraine with battlefield-driven speed. Meanwhile, America’s defense bureaucracy lags, not for lack of money, but for lack of movement.
The United States still takes years to approve requirements, locks funding into five-year cycles, and buries reform reports that threaten budgetary comfort. In July 2025, Congress advanced modest acquisition reforms, while Secretary of Defense Hegseth gutted the Pentagon’s weapons testing office. The result doesn’t signify a strategic victory, but a procurement delay.
Bureaucratic Inertia: The Cost of Standing Still
The critique dates back decades. In the 1980s, Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney famously diagnosed a “Plans-Reality Mismatch” in the Pentagon’s core budgeting and planning logic. His warning still resonates today: the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) system, which is supposed to allocate resources efficiently, is now dominated by outdated projections, rigid five-year cycles, and institutionalized loyalty to legacy programs. Instead of responding to real-world dynamics, PPBE perpetuates bureaucratic priorities untethered from strategic necessity.
Recent attempts to reform PPBE have amounted to little more than incremental adjustments. The Pentagon’s 2025 update report acknowledged critical flaws but ultimately offered tweaks, not transformation. Meanwhile, Congress has moved forward with modest acquisition streamlining via the FORGED Act, but these legislative efforts remain narrowly focused and far from systemic enhancement.
The system’s reliance on wartime supplemental funding enabled entire lines of spending to bypass Congressional scrutiny, fostering a culture where urgent battlefield needs were met through ad hoc pipelines, while outdated weapons systems and redundant capabilities stayed untouched in the base budget. This separation between “real war” and “budget war” created a distorted incentive structure: combat adaptation happened outside the Pentagon’s official processes, and reform efforts rarely outlasted the crises that triggered them.
One emblem of this dysfunction is the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS). Originally intended to harmonize service priorities around joint warfighting needs, JCIDS has devolved into a “bureaucratic priesthood” of redundant reviews, compliance paperwork, and capability wishlists detached from operational urgency. As detailed in a 2025 AEI report by William C. Greenwalt and Dan Patt, it now takes over two years to approve a single requirement.
By the time the ink dries, China has already prototyped and fielded next-generation capabilities, especially in the South China Sea, where Beijing’s rapid deployment of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems has reshaped the strategic calculus. PLA Rocket Force units, hypersonic glide vehicles, and satellite-guided strike platforms are operationalized in months, while U.S. Indo-Pacific Command often waits years for the tools it requests. This asymmetry empowers China to dominate the escalation ladder in contested maritime zones. In contrast, U.S. programs remain stuck in formatting purgatory. Even the slightest deviation—like the F-35’s combat radius falling short by six nautical miles—can paralyze the process for a year, consuming senior leadership bandwidth without any gain in combat effectiveness.
Meanwhile, oversight mechanisms designed to keep these inefficiencies in check are under attack. In July, Secretary Pete Hegseth drastically cut the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), the Pentagon’s independent weapons tester, by reducing over 50% of staff. This hollowing out of internal accountability comes at a time when strategic misfires are increasingly expensive and global competitors are accelerating their cycles of adaptation.
Perhaps most emblematic of the Pentagon’s unwillingness to self-correct was its decision to bury the 2015 Defense Business Board report, which identified $125 billion in potential savings through back-office reform. The recommendations did not require cutting troops or slashing combat capabilities. They simply proposed streamlining administrative overhead, reducing contractor dependency, and modernizing IT. But instead of acting, senior Pentagon leaders placed secrecy restrictions on the data and removed the report from its website—not because the analysis was flawed, but because they feared Congress might cut the overall defense budget if the waste became public. Insight was sacrificed to inertia.
This is not merely inefficient, but debilitating. When threats evolve in months but Pentagon reforms take years, the U.S. cedes initiative to adversaries who outpace it by design. To restore agility, reform must start at the core.
Institutional Upgrade: Reform the Core Systems
- Replace JCIDS with a Problem-Centric Framework
The Pentagon should replace JCIDS with a problem-focused experimentation model akin to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) or U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). Instead of starting with predetermined solutions, the process should begin with clear problem statements derived from theater commanders and warfighters. Services should then propose and test prototype solutions in campaigns of experimentation, integrating real-time feedback into capability development. This iterative method not only compresses development timelines but aligns procurement with actual combat utility.
Such a model already exists in concept: China’s PLA leverages joint problem-solving, red-teaming, and war-gaming cycles to field technologies in 6–12 months, while U.S. forces await “validated” requirements from a system that cannot keep pace. Replacing JCIDS is not radical—it is survival.
- Modernize PPBE into an Adaptive, Mission-Driven System
The PPBE system should evolve from a rigid top-down exercise into a flexible, mission-driven funding architecture. Budgeting should be built around modular funding blocks, with rapid-reallocation authority for Combatant Commands and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Critical capabilities—AI, cyber, unmanned systems, hybrid resilience—need to have dedicated contingency investment pools immune to legacy budget inertia. While the Pentagon’s recent PPBE reform report gestures toward greater flexibility, it still falls short of what’s needed. As threats become more fluid, funding should shift correspondingly. The budget should not be a ledger of sunk costs, but a living document of national strategy, shaped by battlefield feedback and real-time intelligence.
It is worthwhile to note that while modular, mission-driven budgeting promises strategic flexibility, it carries risks that must be managed. The GAO has repeatedly flagged DoD’s lack of financial oversight and accountability as long-standing deficiencies . Similarly, RAND analysts warn that any faster budgeting cycle must preserve interdependence, predictability, and transparency—not dismantle them. Even modular procurement models may introduce new complexities.To balance agility with fiscal discipline, reforms should include strong audit trails and clear congressional.
- Declassify and Implement Internal Reform Reports
Transparency is a prerequisite for accountability. The Pentagon shall declassify the 2015 Defense Business Board report, update its findings, and implement at least the top 20% of its recommendations within two years. To ensure follow-through, Congress can create a permanent, independent Defense Audit Board, composed of civilian experts, former commanders, and non-industry policy professionals, with the authority to publicly report on institutional waste and propose binding timelines for action.
This proposal aligns with renewed Congressional efforts to rein in cost overruns. The bipartisan Nunn–McCurdy Reform Act aims to tighten reporting requirements and increase pressure on the Pentagon to contain ballooning program costs. But legislation alone is not enough. Without institutional enforcement and declassified benchmarks, reform will remain rhetorical.
Some experts argue that declassifying internal reform reports risks exposing sensitive information. But the reports in question focus not on tactical secrets, but on administrative inefficiencies, contractor dependence, and IT bloat. Shielding dysfunction to protect the top line undermines public trust and congressional confidence. Transparency, when paired with a structured implementation mechanism, is a prerequisite for credible stewardship and strategic readiness.
Reform is Strategy
The Pentagon shall catch up with the world, as its rivals are developing faster, and hybrid threats are reshaping the form of conflicts. Without reforming its core systems, the United States risks losing wars before they begin due to the lack of speed, alignment, and will. While experts warn against simply corporatizing defense, it is evident that this is not about importing private-sector jargon, but restoring strategic coherence to a system that rewards inertia. To enhance executive efficiency, the first step is clear: cut the deadweight, rebuild around operational truth, and free the future from the past.
Without this reform, the U.S. risks losing not just its edge in innovation, but its ability to defend allies and deter adversaries in flashpoints like the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Strategy starts at home, but its consequences play out abroad. The Indo-Pacific will not wait for Washington to fix its systems.
Sherry Chen is a Research Associate at South China Sea NewsWire (SCSNW), a regional news and analysis platform focused on political, economic, and strategic developments in the South China Sea, and is currently studying in a dual program between Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris.
