‘Goldplating’ — not speed — is the real problem in weapons acquisition

A perpetual fever dream of the National Security Establishment is to speed up the process of buying new weapons. Few should be surprised by this considering that it can take years, and sometimes decades, to field a new piece of hardware.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is expected to shortly issue new acquisition guidance meant to deliver new tech to the troops “at the speed of relevance,” to steal a common Pentagon refrain. Before the new administration’s reformers begin implementing solutions, they need to understand the true nature of the problem.

The current acquisition process is far from perfect and does need to be streamlined, but the process itself is not the primary reason new weapon programs blow through their budgets and fall years behind schedule.

Acquisition programs struggle mainly because they are poorly conceived. The fundamental mindset within the national security establishment is that more technology is always better, but this causes the majority of delays and cost growth. Service leaders and their allies in the defense industry work to pack as many features as possible into every weapon and then wonder why they can’t get all the components to work together properly.

An emblematic example is the F-35’s Distributed Aperture System notably represented by the program’s $400,000 helmet. Fighter pilots need to be able to see what is happening in the sky around them. History has shown that the pilot who spots the enemy first is typically the one who wins.

The best fighters throughout history like the F-86 and the F-16 were designed to improve the pilot’s visibility by having them sit high in the fuselage with a clear bubble canopy. Pilots of those aircraft could use the greatest ocular device yet discovered… the human eyeball.

Such an organic solution apparently would not suffice for the F-35, so designers had to devise something more befitting of the 21st century. Enter the Distributed Aperture System. It uses a series of cameras mounted in the skin of the jet which projects images into the pilot’s helmet visor. Program boosters called the system “magical” and used it as a major selling point for the F-35.

The Government Accountability Office offered a different assessment. In a 2023 report, their analysts singled out the Distributed Aperture System as a primary degrader of the F-35’s full mission capable rate. A reasonable person would be justified to believe that F-35 pilots at least find the system useful.

As it turns out, that is not the case. When asked about the DAS by a documentary crew, an F-35 pilot said that if he needs to see what is beneath him, he simply rolls the jet on its side and looks with his own eyes because he can see “with much higher clarity.”

The term of art for adding needless complexity to weapon programs is “gold plating.” Defense industry leaders engage in the practice for both financial and political reasons. They get to charge the government for the extra costs to research and develop the technologies.

Additionally, each new gadget becomes a subcontract to be awarded to a supplier. These suppliers are scattered all over the country. The member of Congress representing the district containing one of these suppliers suddenly has a vested political interest in the program’s survival. The same goes for the state’s two senators.

Sticking with the F-35 example, Lockheed Martin now claims suppliers for that program in all 50 states according to a helpful interactive map created by the contractor.

Once all of these components are built, they have to be assembled into a F-35. Bolting everything together can be problematic, but system integration at the software level is the real trouble in the information age. The Pentagon’s top testing official recently reported that software development in the F-35 program has stagnated as developers discover flaws faster than they can create fixes.

Any acquisition reform proposal coming from the new administration that does not address the gold plating tendency will fail to produce the desired results. Simply streamlining the weapon buying process without fundamentally changing design practices will only deliver warfighters more acquisition failures at a slightly faster pace.

Accountable acquisition reform begins with a shift in thinking. Weapons are only tools people use in combat. As anyone who has reached for a screwdriver knows, the best tools are the simplest ones that can perform the intended function. In the event that U.S. warfighters employ weapons in combat – which the United States must proactively prevent at all costs – they must be effective. Any additional features make the tool more expensive and are just as likely to distract from the task.

Simplicity is a key in weapon design. Simple weapons have shorter development cycles and cost less. Secretary Hegseth can save money and deliver capabilities to the troops faster merely by changing the way people think about weapon design.