Mackenzie Eaglen assesses the need for long-term action on Pentagon reform.
The Pentagon bureaucracy has historically proved resistant to sustained change despite repeated reform efforts. Institutional incentives tend to favor continuity over experimentation, reinforcing a risk-averse culture that limits rapid innovation, agility, and adaptation. Combined with political challenges across Washington, this has often stifled well-meaning efforts at defense reform.
The Trump administration and its leadership team in the Pentagon have begun yet another drive for change aimed at making goods, tech, and services better, faster, more abundant, and cheaper. While most of these reforms are individually necessary and overdue, combined, their pace and volume risk overwhelming the workforce required to implement them. The risk is that the volume, pace, and scale of change being imposed will foster inaction over risk-taking due to uncertainty, fear, turnover, and disjointedness.
This report analyzes almost 300 changes to the Pentagon from January 2025 to June 2026. It examines what policy areas are targeted, which part of the government is executing the change, and the level at which reform has been implemented. By quantifying reforms to acquisition, supply chains, the relationship between the Pentagon and the defense industry, workforces, the defense budget, and force structure, this report demystifies the churn and explains what could move the needle.
Staying above water in the flood of defense reform means achieving reform that lasts to avoid a series of similar repetitive efforts later. Lasting, successful reform is binding and supported by both political parties, multiple administrations, and those in uniform. It prioritizes revolutionary initiatives over many small, individual efforts or guidance. It measures not ideas but outcomes, and it changes incentives and processes. Sweeping reform also alters the Pentagon’s rigid budgetary structures and adjusts the flow of resources.
Serious defense reform is overdue, and the latitude for disruptive action is now. … Implementing these recommendations and making them last will ensure the War Department is prepared to deter or win a conflict against a formidable peer adversary that has not similarly fallen into complacency.
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