Pentagon asks weapons makers what paperwork is slowing them down

Getting a fighter jet part built faster in America might soon depend on cutting through a mountain of paperwork that has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with accounting. The Department of War wants the companies that build its weapons to tell it exactly which forms and financial audits are slowing them down, and it just put that request in writing.

Two of the department’s top financial and acquisition officials, Michael P. Duffey and Michael T. Powers, signed an open letter last week addressed to the defense industrial base, the network of private companies large and small that manufacture everything from fighter jets to rifle ammunition for the U.S. military. Duffey serves as under secretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, the official responsible for how the department buys, tracks and maintains its weapons and equipment, while Powers is the department’s acting comptroller, the chief financial officer role overseeing how War Department money gets spent and audited. Their letter invites contractors and the broader acquisition community, the network of government officials who negotiate and manage these contracts, to submit ideas for simplifying the data and audit requirements tied to what the department calls business systems, the accounting and management software contractors must use to track costs, schedules and performance on government contracts.

The letter is not a stand-alone move. It falls under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s arsenal of freedom initiative, a sweeping effort launched in a November 2025 speech at the National War College where Hegseth announced he was scrapping the decades-old Defense Acquisition System in favor of something he calls the Warfighting Acquisition System, according to reporting from the National Guard Association of the United States. Hegseth framed the overhaul as a response to a defense industry that has grown too slow and too bureaucratic to keep pace with rivals like China, and he has spent months touring shipyards, rocket factories and defense contractors around the country to sell the plan directly to workers and executives. At a January visit to Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, Hegseth told 300 assembled shipyard workers that the era of rewarding contractors for delays and cost overruns was over, according to USNI News, signaling that the pressure campaign was aimed as much at company leadership as at government red tape.

That framing matters here because this new letter is not the department’s first attempt to get industry’s input on cutting regulatory clutter. Duffey released an earlier letter in February asking contractors for suggestions on rewriting the Federal Acquisition Regulation and its defense-specific supplement, the sprawling rulebooks that govern nearly every federal purchase, as part of what officials dubbed the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul, according to the law firm Jackson Lewis, which tracks defense contracting regulations. That effort focused on three goals: fielding new technology faster than adversaries, ramping up production capacity for a wartime surge, and putting the entire acquisition system on what officials described as a wartime footing. This week’s letter narrows the focus specifically to business systems, the software and reporting infrastructure contractors use to prove to auditors that they are managing taxpayer money properly, a process that companies have long complained eats up staff time and slows delivery without necessarily making the government’s oversight any sharper.

Behind the paperwork push sits a bigger strategic worry that has nothing to do with spreadsheets. Hegseth’s broader campaign, which he has taken to calling a new arsenal of freedom in a nod to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World War II era arsenal of democracy, is aimed at rebuilding what officials describe as America’s shrunken defense industrial base, according to CNN’s coverage of the initiative. That includes not just the private contractors who design and build weapons but also the government-owned depots, sometimes called the organic industrial base, where military personnel and civilian technicians repair and refurbish equipment like tanks and helicopters rather than replace it outright. Years of consolidation among defense contractors, combined with aging government-owned repair facilities, have left the Pentagon worried it could not surge production fast enough if a major conflict broke out, a concern that has driven both the funding increases and the regulatory overhaul Hegseth has pushed since taking office.

Acquisition reform efforts have come and gone in Washington for decades, and outside analysts, including those at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have cautioned that implementation, not announcement, is where these campaigns typically stall, particularly given that the department’s acquisition workforce has shrunk in recent years even as its ambitions have grown. For now, the invitation for industry to speak up stands as one more data point in a much larger question hanging over the Pentagon in 2026, whether America’s defense factories can actually build fast enough to matter before the paperwork reforms even finish being written.