Disruptive By Design: Speed and Rigor Are Not Enemies

Editor’s Note: This article was written by a member of the U.S. intelligence community whose identity has been withheld at the author’s request to protect professional privacy. We are publishing it because of the author’s relevant expertise and the value of the perspectives shared. The author is a member of AFCEA’s Emerging Professionals in the Intelligence Community, or EPIC, Committee.

The government’s shift to urgent acquisition is real. The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s (GAO’s) 2025 report on defense acquisition reform noted that the Department of War (DOW) takes an average of nearly 12 years to deliver the first version of a weapon system. In an era of rapid technological advancement and pacing threats, this rate is unacceptable. Leadership across the DOW, the intelligence community and federal civilian landscape are making the first steps to address this challenge with replacing acquisition and integration systems, forging new acquisition authorities, refactoring requirements and incentivizing creative contracting. This momentum toward more efficient acquisition is a necessary reform and cannot be held in conflict with test and evaluation, because speed without rigor is a costly gamble our warfighters ultimately pay.  

The push to buy commercial is not arbitrary as industry continues to prove that the center of technological innovation has shifted. For decades, the U.S. government was the primary funder in cutting-edge research, and the defense industrial base led the world in developing advanced capabilities. The dynamic has now fundamentally changed to where the most transformative technologies, like artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, advanced semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and more, are being developed and refined at commercial speed. National security-specific development cycles have been simply unable to match the ignition of private capital and global market competition.

Industry’s pace creates both an opportunity and an imperative for the individuals and organizations that are tasked with our nation’s security. The fiscal year 2026 military funding bill recognized this explicitly, expanding preferences for commercial products on the premise that more flexible acquisition models allow the DOW to access cutting-edge technology with each new iteration of improvement. If technological innovation is occurring more rapidly in industry, it is the government’s job to buy it for our warfighters without duplicatively investing at a slower rate. 

The competitive dimension makes the reform even more urgent; China is not constrained to the same acquisition bureaucracy and is eager to prove it. Beijing has spent years systematically institutionalizing what it calls military-civil fusion, an integrated ecosystem designed so that civilian technological innovation automatically serves military purposes. The entire Chinese technology sector must now be understood as a potential military resource, and maintaining overmatch in this environment cannot rely on outspending adversaries through slow, traditional acquisition. It requires matching, and ultimately exceeding, the tempo at which commercial technology is being developed, fielded and continuously iterated. 

The argument for speed is made, but it is not the entire solution. The cost of speed cannot be paid at the cost of the quality of our warfighters’ tools. The proliferation of commercial technology brings an extended vulnerability to lower-quality products with exquisite marketing, less robust systems and potentially higher price tags for multiple attempts. Buying and fielding faster does not change those underlying realities and could lead to discovering faults after a system is bought and deployed. 

This is where test and evaluation become indispensable for strategic assurance rather than bureaucratic checkpoints. Consider the use case of AI and autonomous systems, for example. Failure modes are harder to anticipate, context-dependent and potentially consequential in ways that a malfunctioning radio is not. Commercial solutions must meet higher national security standards to develop systems that are scalable, robust and operator-centric. Iterative test and evaluation done by trusted, savvy stakeholders and operators that is integrated continuously into agile fielding cycles can deliver both speed and confidence, ultimately harnessing smarter acquisition. National security leaders and acquisition officials must build this discipline into the new acquisition culture so that lagging acquisition is not traded for naïve acquisition. 

The acquisition system needed reform, and the current momentum is welcome. Simultaneously, speed without reliability is a different kind of failure that surfaces in the field. Test and evaluation is not the enemy of this momentum; its purpose is to ensure that what reaches the warfighter truly works when it matters most. National security leaders and acquisition officials must stay committed to efficient rigor across every acquisition pathway, because in this arena, the real measure of reform is not how fast we buy. It’s how well we fight.