ICYMI Last week saw a major shift in defense acquisition: the SecDef dismantled JCIDS in a memo titled Reforming the Joint Requirements Process to Accelerate Fielding of Warfighting Capabilities on August 20.
For the last 20+ years, JCIDS was intended to align acquisition and capability development across the joint force. In practice, as many of us who have worked in DoD acquisition can attest to, it became something of a bottleneck: slow, bureaucratic, and often blamed for delaying critical technologies from reaching the warfighter.
At first glance, the new framework looks promising:
🔹The establishment of a Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) to prioritize and resource capabilities on a tighter cycle, focused on identifying and prioritizing key operational problems (KOPs).
🔹Creation of the Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA) to engage industry earlier, refine requirements through mission engineering, and run rapid experimentation.
🔹A clear “no new bureaucracy” mandate to keep processes lean.
Ultimately, I see this as a step in the right direction: faster requirements, greater empowerment for the services, earlier collaboration with industry, and more iterative experimentation. These are all critical to keeping pace with the threat environment. Placing the onus of meeting joint requirements on lower echelons in acquisition also empowers private companies like Cortina, who serve multiple DoD agencies, to provide ground-level insight into what’s working, where challenges remain, and how lessons learned can strengthen every pillar of the joint force.
But I do have concerns. Without a structure like what JCIDS provided, flawed though it was, there’s a real risk of fragmentation. We may see capabilities developed at speed, but the concern is always that efforts may be spent solving the wrong problems. Speed matters, but only if we move faster in the right direction.
With less oversight, the challenge becomes maintaining discipline and integrity at every level. From DoD leadership to soldiers in the field, from government PMs to contractors and industry, everyone involved in acquisition now carries more responsibility to ensure efforts remain aligned with real joint operational needs and that they end up solving the right problems for our DoD as a whole.
👉 What do you think? Is this the reform that will finally break the logjam? Or could this lead to a misalignment of efforts across the joint force?
Link to the memo: https://lnkd.in/ecAxwreW
