A retelling of Christian Brose’s remarks on the podcast Fighting The Next War, Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril Industries and author of The Kill Chain, in conversation on the Hoover Institution’s Secrets of Statecraft.
Asked whether anything could be changed constitutionally or procedurally to make America’s military planning system more likely to favor simpler, faster, cheaper weapons, Brose pushed back on the framing itself. In his view, Washington chronically overestimates how much process reform can fix. The real problems — and the real solutions — sit further upstream, in the realm of imagination and leadership will, not in the mechanics of the acquisition system.
He argued that what ultimately matters is whether senior leaders understand where future trends are heading, are willing to place bets on that understanding, and are prepared to disrupt processes that are, by design, built to move existing decisions smoothly through the system rather than challenge them. That kind of process delivers predictability and demands less time from senior leadership — but it comes at the cost of path dependence: the military keeps refighting the last war, building the same kinds of things, just incrementally better versions of what already exists. Brose pointed to military history more broadly to make the point: major disruptions in military technology are usually born out of battlefield or operational experimentation, but they only take hold when senior leaders are both willing and able to see where the future is going and force their institutions toward it.
From there, he turned to a specific structural critique of how the United States buys weapons — one he described in blunt terms: “a Pentagon planning process that is communist in its nature“.
By this he meant a system built around centralized, single-source decision-making, where once a company wins a program, the award effectively becomes permanent. He compared it, half-jokingly, to receiving academic tenure — once you have it, it’s yours indefinitely, regardless of performance. What’s missing, in his view, is genuine internal competition.
Brose contrasted this with how the United States ran its most consequential technology programs during the early Cold War — building intercontinental ballistic missiles or the space program — where multiple competing efforts and companies were funded simultaneously, allowed to compete ruthlessly against one another, and only after a winner clearly proved itself was it taken to scale. He argued the U.S. needs to reintroduce that same entrepreneurial, competitive dynamic into defense programs today, wherever it’s affordable to do so — and crucially, that competition can’t be a one-time event. Programs need to be re-competed periodically, rather than locked in for good once a winner is chosen, or the system simply drifts back into stagnation.
Finally, Brose added an important caveat about where the blame for this inertia actually lies. He pushed back on the common narrative that pork-barrel politics or an entrenched military-industrial complex are the primary obstacles to retiring legacy systems. Members of Congress, he said, are not the problem — they’re rational actors responding to a genuine information gap. When the Pentagon asks to retire an old system while promising a replacement that’s still years away, lawmakers are understandably reluctant to take a working tool away from warfighters before a better one is actually in hand. The real fix, in his view, isn’t political persuasion — it’s making new capabilities appear faster and in greater numbers, so that the tradeoff between old and new becomes self-evident rather than a matter of trust.