Pentagon officials are racing to meet tight deadlines to overhaul the weapon acquisition system, prescribed by the White House in two executive orders issued in April. But their haste should not obscure the likelihood that the Trump administration is ushering in a new era of overpriced weapons—and missing the larger point, to boot.
The Pentagon’s acquisition woes are primarily a programming problem rather than an issue with how the department purchases weapons. Congress and the Pentagon order more weapons than the defense industry can produce, which contributes to cost and schedule overruns. To make matters worse, companies use their free cash to line shareholders’ pockets instead of investing in production capacity, all while crying poor to lawmakers.
Due in part to these dynamics, the Congressional Budget Office projects that annual acquisition spending from 2025-29 will be about 9 percent higher, in real terms, than from 2001-24. White House officials blame “onerous bureaucracy.” They propose eliminating or exempting weapons manufacturers from broad sections of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which they say will unleash manufacturers to produce more weapons faster and at a lower cost.
The FAR establishes the rules of the road for military contracting—guiding Pentagon efforts to purchase weapons, from soliciting bids to negotiating and awarding military contracts. Gutting it to a degree not seen since the 1990s would actually increase costs by impeding the government’s ability to negotiate fair prices on military contracts. Contractors would be largely uninhibited by requirements to substantiate their prices with cost information, leaving the Pentagon to negotiate with them blindly.
This would affect more than the initial design-and-build contracts that get the headlines when costs and schedule balloon. Some 70 percent of the lifecycle spending on a weapon goes toward sustainment, and defanging the FAR would rob the Pentagon of leverage to negotiate with military contractors on these contracts.