War Secretary Hegseth compares Pentagon bureaucracy to Soviet planning

Minister of War Pete Hegseth He tore into the Pentagon’s entrenched acquisition bureaucracy in a fiery speech Friday, comparing the department’s planning culture to Soviet-style central planning that he says has stymied innovation, risk-taking and the nation’s ability to prepare for war.

Hegseth opened his speech to a group of defense industry executives by summoning the specter of a familiar enemy — but he quickly turned his criticism inward.

“Today, I would like to talk to you about an adversary who poses a threat, a very serious threat, to the United States of America,” Hegseth said. “This enemy is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It rules by dictating five-year plans from a single capital, and attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, continents, oceans, and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and endangers the lives of our men and women in uniform.”

After drawing dramatic comparisons to the former Soviet Union and even the Chinese Communist Party, Hegseth delivered his final sentence: “The adversary I’m talking about is much closer to home. Pentagon bureaucracy “Not the people, but the process.”

The United States may lose the next major war because of the Pentagon’s “broken” acquisition system

War Secretary Pete Hegseth tore into the Pentagon’s entrenched acquisition bureaucracy in a fiery speech this week, comparing the department’s planning culture to Soviet-style central planning that he says has stymied innovation, risk-taking and the nation’s ability to prepare for war. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Hegseth accused decades of War Department policy of being paralyzed by “impossible risk thresholds” and “cumbersome and inefficient processes” that turned the Pentagon into a self-reinforcing machine where “process, not results, is what matters.”

He said previous administrations had made matters worse by trying to “circumvent the process rather than confront it head-on,” leaving the U.S. military and defense industrial base weaker and slower to adapt. “The institution shapes the individuals as much as the individuals shape the institution,” Hegseth said. “Over time, the dominant pattern becomes more entrenched, risk-averse, and immutable.”

This bureaucratic inertia has extended to the defense industry itself, creating a system in which contractors profit from inefficiency rather than performance, Hegseth said. “The defense industry benefits financially from our backward culture,” he said. “Schedule overruns, huge order backlogs, and unpredictable cost increases are becoming the norm.”

The minister warned that the result is “a lack of urgency Fear of innovation and a fundamental lack of trust” between the Pentagon and its suppliers — precisely the kind of flaw that America’s adversaries exploit.

“Our military and our taxpayers need a defense industrial base they can rely on to expand urgently in a crisis — not one that just waits for money before taking action,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth’s remarks are part of a broader push within the administration to accelerate defense procurement reform, streamline contracting, and restore what he called “wartime urgency” to the Pentagon’s day-to-day operations.

‘Come to Jesus Meeting’: Military Community Reacts to Hegseth, Get Fit, Get in Line or Stay Away

“The defense industry benefits financially from our backward culture,” he said. “Schedule overruns, huge order backlogs, and unpredictable cost increases are becoming the norm,” Hegseth said. (Sakis Mitroulidis/AFP via Getty Images)

The letter came as Hegseth signed three internal memos directing leadership to take the necessary actions to achieve comprehensive takeover reform.

The first memorandum focuses on reforming the acquisition process, directing each branch of the service to identify and remove internal barriers that delay weapons deployment. It gives the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps 60 days to submit plans to Hegseth outlining how they will streamline procurement, trim redundant layers of oversight, and move from “process to results.”

The second memo, which addresses the defense industrial base, warns that American production has become “risk-averse and immutable,” a reflection of the bureaucracy that supports it. Orders the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment to submit, within 120 days, a comprehensive plan to expand surge manufacturing capacity, enhance supply chain resilience, and align industrial production with wartime demand.

The third memorandum reorganizes the Pentagon’s project in the field of arms transfers and security cooperation, by unifying foreign military sales and direct commercial sales under one authority to accelerate arms deliveries to allies. This guidance also includes a 60-day deadline for acquisition and policy leaders to produce an implementation plan that reduces redundant oversight and aligns U.S. export policy with “America First” industrial priorities.

“Our goal is simple: convert the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime basis,” Hegseth said.

Army It has become the Pentagon’s testing ground for acquisition reform, making some of the most aggressive efforts to speed up the arms procurement process and cut through the red tape that Hegseth criticized in his remarks. Over the past year, the agency has begun dismantling decades-old software structures that officials say are too rigid, too slow and too far removed from the battlefield.

Senior leaders unveiled what they called a “transformation strategy” — a plan to streamline the Army’s force structure, cut redundant oversight, and reform contracting practices that prevented modern systems from reaching soldiers on time.

He added, “The army is running as fast as possible in an attempt to reinvent itself, to be ready for modern warfare.” Dan Driscoll told Fox News Digital earlier. “They will be doing a lot of this outside of the traditional procurement process. This flexibility allows them to innovate and test at a speed that is difficult to do in a traditional force.”

The Army has become a test bed for the Pentagon to overhaul acquisitions, as it makes some of the most aggressive efforts to speed up the arms procurement process and cut through the red tape that Hegseth criticized in his remarks. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Click here to download the FOX NEWS app

The Army and the War Department more broadly emphasize a “commercial first” approach: using commercial technologies and industrial models rather than unique, bespoke defense systems wherever possible.

“They will be doing a lot of this outside of the traditional procurement process,” Driscoll said. “And that flexibility allows them to innovate and test at a speed that is difficult to do in a traditional force.” “They basically just use their company credit card to go online and buy things to test it, and they’ll find what works.”