Introduction

America finds itself in a tremendously dangerous era. It faces a well-resourced geostrategic adversary in the form of China, which appears poised to challenge the United States for global dominance diplomatically, economically, and militarily. One of its most dramatic moves—a long-telegraphed operation to reclaim Taiwan—may take place as early as this year. The U.S. may find itself outmatched in such a test of its authority, with most wargames concluding that American munitions stocks would deplete in a matter of weeks. The supply issues already facing the U.S. in its combat operations in Iran show that this concern is more than just speculation.

These major threats to American power demand urgent and significant changes to the nation’s brittle defense industrial base. Secretary of War Hegseth has captured the significance of the moment, calling for America to put itself on “wartime footing.” As he remarked in a November 2025 speech, “We're not just buying something. We are solving life and death problems for our war fighters. We're not building for peacetime; we are pivoting the Pentagon and our industrial base to a wartime footing, building for victory should our adversaries FAFO.”

This is no small statement. Wartime footing implies more than incremental changes to defense procurement, or a few novel pilot programs. Instead, it suggests a wholesale mobilization of the defense industrial base that would prepare the country for major combat operations and the prospect of a scale of conflict not seen for a generation. It implies monumental reforms that would have a realistic chance of addressing quickly the many problems that plague American defense, from a decrepit shipbuilding industry and faltering munitions production to slow-moving prime contractors and wasteful acquisitions bureaucracies.

Big actions are required. But what exactly should wartime footing in the 21st century look like? Part of the challenge is that our historical templates for seriously organizing for wartime dates to World War II, a period so dramatically drawn in works like Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge, which has grown in popularity in the defense space in recent years. While we can draw inspiration from this era, the hard truth is that America is decades removed from this period. We must blaze our own path in a way that takes into account the technological opportunities, material constraints, and changes in military organization that confront us in the 2020s.

This paper aims to contribute to that effort. It presents five fresh ideas that consider what the Department of War (DOW) might do if it wanted to dramatically address the problems that face America’s teetering defense industrial base today. Each reform addresses a different bottleneck in the American defense system: talent, competition, leadership accountability, procurement incentives, and grassroots innovation. These are:

• The Defense Acquisitions Delta: The DOW should form a crack team of elite military officers whose purpose is to serve as an acquisitions special operations squad. This group of the “best of the best” would be tasked with the hardest defense procurement missions, empowered to roam through the defense bureaucracy, and delegated wide authority to reshape or terminate programs.
• Eliminate the Shadow Competition: The DOW should eliminate wholesale the thicket of programs harbored by warfare centers, government labs, University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs), and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) that perversely work to stifle innovators and new entrants into the defense industry.
• The Secretary’s Firing Line: The DOW should implement an ongoing, department-spanning “firing line” review that brings together the entirety of top military leadership to directly review all legacy programs and cut ruthlessly where needed.
• The Billion-Dollar OTA: The DOW should work towards launching a new, simple kind of procurement under its Other Transaction Authority (OTA) that looks at only one factor: whether a company is able to deliver systems meeting defined operational metrics. If a contractor is able to meet these requirements, the government would guarantee a certain purchase volume worth billions. This “outcomes budget” would strip away requirements, opening up competition to new upstarts.
• The Citizen’s Proving Grounds: The modern battlefield is one in which commercially available, attritable systems like drones are reshaping tactics. This commodification of systems creates the opportunity for small-scale innovators to develop the major munitions breakthroughs of the future. The DOW should support a nationwide network of proving grounds that allow solo innovators and early teams to test out weapons concepts.

Each concept is designed to be an action that the DOW can take today to change the trajectory of American defense.