The Pentagon is dismantling its oft-criticized Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, pushing authority back to the military services in hopes of streamlining the setting of requirements and speeding up development of new weapons systems.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg ordered the Pentagon to “disestablish” JCIDS within 120 days in an Aug. 20 memo.
The move returns requirements setting to the services after 22 years in the joint world. It also revises the role of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, which comprises all the service vice chiefs and is led by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under the new process, the JROC will annually identify and rank “Key Operational Problems” facing the joint force. Separately, a new Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board will select and analyze some of those problems, offer guidance to programs, and recommend funding to accelerate worthy solutions.
JCIDS has long frustrated military leaders and observers who criticized it as overburdened and bureaucratic.
“JCIDS was in significant need of reform,” said Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Christopher W. Grady Aug. 27. “The answer was, ‘Let’s just get rid of it and think of different ways to do the business.’”
Addressing an industry audience at a National Defense Industrial Association conference in Washington, D.C., Grady offered an optimistic outlook: “I’m very confident that it will allow us to go faster and take away some of that onerous bureaucracy that was within JCIDS.”
Retired Air Force Col. Mark Gunzinger, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for forces transformation and resources, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that JCIDS started as “a promising concept” but devolved over time.
“To put it in plain language, it became a self-licking ice cream cone, where the service vice chiefs in the JROC, chaired by the vice chairman, essentially said, ‘We’ll support your requirements if you support our requirements,’” said Gunzinger, now with AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “And it was more of a self-satisfying exercise that really lacked teeth to define the best capability solutions, backed up by analysis, that would lead to the best outcomes for the Department of Defense as a whole.”
William Greenwalt, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy now with the Hudson Institute, criticized JCIDS as “a burdensome layer of ceremony, divorced from the real decisions that shape America’s future military edge” in a paper he co-authored in February. In an email response to questions, he said Hegseth’s order correctly diagnoses JCIDS’ “active harms and perverse incentives.”
Greenwalt and co-author Dan Patt noted in their paper that requirements could languish in the JCIDS process for upwards of 800 days—two years and two budget cycles. He cited the “needed urgency” in Hegseth’s memo, specifically its timeline for clear action.
The military services now have 90 days to review their requirements processes and:
- Develop “clear requirements prioritization derived from operational problem statements.”
- Engage early and often with industry and give more flexibility to acquisition officials
- Remove “low-value-add review, approval, staffing, documentation, or certification processes”
For the Department of the Air Force, the requirements review comes as Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink ponders whether to endorse or shutter two commands conceived by the last administration under his predecessor’s direction. The Air Force’s Integrated Capabilities Command was intended to centralize requirements decisions at Air Force Headquarters rather than in the major commands where they have been for the past three decades, and the Space Force’s Space Futures Command was conceived as an organization focused on investigating and developing next-generation warfighting concepts and technologies. The two were among about two dozen changes unveiled in February 2024 under the banner “re-optimizing for great power competition.” Both had clear roles in requirements and future acquisition, many of which were put on pause after President Trump’s inauguration. Meink has not yet signaled his plans for them.
The Pentagon’s new Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board, or RRAB, will be co-chaired by the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, while the director of Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation and the Joint Staff’s director of force structure, resources, and assessment (J8) will serve as executive co-secretaries.
Assisting the board will be another new entity, the Mission Engineering and Integration Activity, led by DOD’s research and engineering and acquisition and sustainment czars. Their role will be to engage with industry to try to solve the operational problems identified by the RRAB.
To give the concept energy, the RRAB will be able to tap a new “Joint Acceleration Reserve” to invest in solutions approved by the deputy defense secretary.
Greenwalt said the setup “aligns quite nicely” with his and Pratt’s recommendations. “Obviously, implementation is going to require a laser focus to prevent the recreation of any of the old system’s bad habits,” he concluded. “DOD and the military services rarely get a clean-sheet do-over when it comes to antiquated bureaucratic systems and processes. They now have one. Let’s hope they can take maximum advantage of this new approach and opportunity.”
Gunzinger likewise praised the new system as “clearly an improvement over JCIDS,” thanks to its policy authorities and funding. But he is concerned that policy makers may not have a voice in the new process.
“Strategy must drive requirements,” Gunzinger said. “It must drive solutions to those requirements. It must drive future force designs for all the services. It must drive the joint warfighting concept. So, who authors the National Defense Strategy, which is signed by the Secretary of Defense? OSD Policy. So we have the budgeteers—CAPE—combined with the J8 as executive secretaries for this RRAB. Where’s OSD Policy? If you take a look at the document disestablishing JCIDS and standing up RRAB, you cannot find OSD Policy in there anywhere. And I think that is a huge mistake.”
Those weighing policy and requirements decisions need a means to to conduct “cost-per-effect” analyses to determine the best solutions to operational problems—which he said is essential to avoid developing redundant or excessively expensive, inefficient solutions. Cost-per-effect champions point to programs like the Army’s long-range hypersonic missile that might meet a long-range strike requirement, but does so at a cost that’s hard to justify compared to reusable penetrating aircraft.
Grady said accelerating requirements definition can only help so much if the Pentagon doesn’t also get to make changes to the acquisition system. “None of that is valuable if there isn’t acquisition reform to go with it, and that is underway too,” he said.
Hegseth has signed a memo in March that looks to transform software acquisition and Congress is considering two bills to accelerate acquisition. Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has put forward his proposed the Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense (FORGED) bill in the Senate and in the House, Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) introduced SPEED, the Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery bill.
“There is good momentum in the building to get after that,” Grady told the NDIA audience. “There’s also good momentum with our partners on the Hill, our bosses on the Hill. So you can look at the FORGED act in the Senate side, the SPEED act on the House side, and you can see that this is coming. And those are across the compendium, from requirements to acquisition.”
