Buy Fast or Lose Slow

For decades, the Pentagon has enjoyed the luxury of time. It could afford to buy slowly, build exquisitely, and assume that America’s technological edge would endure. Much oxygen has been spent on the rapid exhaustion of magazines during the past few months of skirmishing with Iran. That is short-term thinking, a symptom of the problem.

The United States faces a world in which adversaries are rearming rapidly, military technology is changing at breakneck speed, and the character of war is shifting toward cheap, autonomous mass and constant adaptation. The greatest threat to America’s military preeminence is not China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea — it is an acquisition system that is too slow, too rigid, and too attached to a model built for yesterday’s threats.