Applying The Updated Warfighting Acquisition Principles To Power Projection Platforms
AMP Newsletter - Guest Column
The Implications of “Speed to Capability Delivery is Now Our Organizing Principle” for Base Planning and Facilities
Republished from SRPlanning / LinkedIn, 5 December 2025
Secretary Hegseth’s streamlined Acquisition Strategy can and should be applied to the planning of the Garrisons, Bases, Camps, and Stations. The bureaucratic roadblocks impeding agile weapon development are indistinguishable from those hindering rapidly evolving missions and the transformation of Safe Havens into future-flexible Power Projection Platforms. Replacing limiting, prescriptive guidance with “risk-based decision-making”, asset management and commercial technologies will help leaders ensure that constrained resources are prioritized in support of operational requirements, resilience, and readiness.
“The Department must … balance speed and rigor, while promoting competition, incentivizing faster execution, taking calculated and shared risks to accelerate … shifting from a culture of compliance to rapid and mission-focused execution.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Transforming the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System To Accelerate Fielding of Urgently Needed Capabilities to Our Warriors, 11/7/2025
The principles of the new Warfighting Acquisition System can and should be applied to base planning, facility design and real property management. Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Guardians and Marines are our most important weapons system, yet installation policy remains far more concerned about physical assets than with people or mission. “Aggressively prioritizing the timely and urgent delivery of operational capabilities to the Warfighter,” will ensure installations provide them with what they need when and where they need it, while also ensuring families are supported when facing the unique challenges of military service.
Current doctrine and Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC) guidance have produced an unsustainable, inflexible portfolio that has hampered the transformation of Safe Havens into Power Projection Platforms. Steady-as-she-goes will continue to fail to provide Warfighters with the agile and updated capabilities they require in a resource-contained environment.
Long-standing planning practices were created when the national defense posture was intended to counter a single adversary from safe havens with enduring systems. Out-of-date practices and assumptions proven ineffective at flexibly supporting evolving missions, reigning in FSRM (Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization) budgets or improving the cost, performance, or timeliness of Military Construction (MILCON).
The world has changed. We now counter rapidly evolving adversaries by training Warfighters to adapt and overcome utilizing the world’s most sophisticated weapons, tactics, real-time data, feedback and AI. Yet
the installations they execute missions from remain bogged down by static legacy systems and prescriptive regulations that are neither data-drive nor agile.
Modern installations are complex aggregations of interdependent systems - from pavements to power grids, comms to weapons, housing to food. Decades ago, there was no other way to provide capabilities other than with a physical facility. Before online ordering and delivery, Warfighters had to leave their duty stations to go to a chow hall, even when increased operational tempo made that difficult or impossible.
Most Warfighters grew up in a world where food comes to them at any time of day or night via online apps. But outdated regulations and legacy systems make bringing mature, simple technologies on base almost impossible. Across the enterprise static, prescriptive regulations prevent commanders from implementing proven, safe technologies and services that could quickly improve mission, agility and quality of life.
The platforms from which we project power remain based on backwards facing prototypes, old technologies and risk-averse guidance. Instead of embracing adaptability they favor single-purpose, inflexible assets that are expensive to build, costly to maintain, and difficult to modify. Risk-to-mission and personnel remain secondary considerations to concerns about compliance and scoring.
Further slowing us down, too much time and money is being spent developing long-term installation visions when there is no reliable way to know who the enemy will be in 10 or 20 years, let alone the weapons, technology or doctrines that will be needed to counter them.
Five years ago, few predicted a protracted land war in central Europe that would be fought with artillery, cheap drones, social media and AI. Recognizing this, the Department has entire commands dedicated solely to planning for, as Donald Rumsfeld called them, unknown unknowns. Yet installations remain primarily interested in historical precedents and current conditions instead of ensuring that ever-changing missions have an easily and inexpensively reconfigurable environment to fight from.
“Military Departments have allowed their organizations to slip into a compliance-based, checklist mentality, which is generally slower and does not foster the required value-added critical thinking and professional judgment needed to plan and execute programs.”
The military is, by definition, “a risk-based decision-making organization focused on meeting warfighting operational needs.” Design must align with that by finding ways to ensure that installations, systems and facilities can “rapidly meet the needs of the Warfighter.” This requires the acceptance of more risk, changing “from a culture of compliance to one of speed and execution and rapidly tackle the strategic challenges facing the nation.”
Like acquisition, installations must move past historical, prescriptive rules to those than can “adopt rapidly evolving commercial systems that use data and feedback/AI in day-to-day operations.” To embrace “speed to capability delivery” as planning’s core principle, we must consider “trade-offs” that “permit iterative enhancement and rapid delivery” by:
Prioritizing flexible requirements that enable timely delivery at the “speed of relevance”
Allowing continuous adjustment to optimize processes for agile requirements
Applying flexible, less costly, non-facility-based solutions whenever possible.
Focusing on rapidly filling capability gaps instead of prescribing unique system requirements
Ensuring that designs are “solutions-based” and that “bespoke requirements do not preclude new systems and technologies”.
Attracting private capital investment to accelerate innovation.
Maximizing purchases of “products, services, and parts available in the commercial marketplace to avoid additional cost and schedule delays”
Embedding policies such as asset and risk management into day-to-day and long-term operational planning.
Many of these goals are easy to apply to facilities and installations. From “commercial-first” approaches that “account for the Department’s unique statutory and operational requirements” to ensuring that alternative solutions are encouraged, new planning guidance can:
Establish “the right balance of program and technical authority, enabling tighter collaboration with industry to deliver safe, suitable, and effective systems on relevant timelines and achieve cost baselines…that…will ensure operational safety, suitability, and effectiveness while maintaining accountability.”
Ensure that “the Department … overhaul the processes in place to balance speed and rigor, while promoting competition, incentivizing faster execution, taking calculated and shared risks … shifting from a culture of compliance to rapid and mission-focused execution.”
Replace facility centric guidance with ones that are focused on outcomes and agility, especially those related to readiness, retention and quality of life:
Invest in predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to:
Align designs with what modernization commands project Warfighters will need in 10 to 15 years, the typical time horizon to complete MILCON
Map solution effectiveness using data and feedback loops like OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) to ensure that predicted outcomes are achieved and adjust if goals are not realized.
Eliminate redundant analysis that delays program starts by investing in experimentation and demonstration of existing or emerging technologies.
Understand what Warfighters and missions currently have versus what they will need, using the delta between them to develop future-flexible investment strategies.
The practice of installation planning must shift from arranging unfunded facilities on maps to providing actionable data for leaders to use in making the complex trade-offs inherent to modern warfare. Planning must move on from the industrial age assumption that all requirements should be met with purpose-built facilities to a 21st century, system-of-system and data/AI driven approach. Only then will it be possible for bases to become Power Projection Platforms organized with “speed to capability delivery” as their “organizing principle.”
Sources:
For more information, please contact Scott Pollack at SRPlanning@comcast.net
Really solid framing around applying the acquistion principles to physical infrastructure. The tension btw the 10-15 year MILCON horizon and the need for speed is particualrly gnarly. I've seen similar issues in corprate real estate where buildings outlive the business models they were designed for. One thing that might be worth exploring is how modular/containerized systems could bridge this gap - basically treating facilities more like field deployable assets than permanent structures. The commissary comparison is spot-on; I rememmber waiting in line for chow while watching delivery drivers come and go from off-base restaurants, and thinking about how absurd the whole setup was.