defence spending

Hegseth's Acquisition Overhaul Meets GAO's Numbers: 12-Year Weapons Timelines, a Cancelled Frigate and a Late Columbia Submarine

GAO’s annual assessment of major weapons programmes, published on 2 July 2026, covered 104 programmes with planned spending of more than $2.4 trillion. It found the average time to field a new capability is now over 12 years, and rising. Of 40 programmes started on the Pentagon’s fast “middle tier” path since 2018, 18 began with immature technology.

That’s the baseline against which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acquisition overhaul, launched in November 2025, will be judged.

What changed

Hegseth’s memo, “Transforming the Warfighting Acquisition System,” replaced program executive officers with portfolio acquisition executives, who manage groups of related programmes and can move money between them. They report directly to each service’s top acquisition official and serve at least four years. The memo ended the long-standing requirements process known as JCIDS, made commercial products the default, preferred other transaction agreements over traditional contracts, and renamed the Defense Acquisition University the Warfighting Acquisition University. Major programmes are to move to the new structure within two years.

Congress wrote parts of it into law. The fiscal 2026 NDAA, signed in December 2025, included pieces of Senator Roger Wicker’s FoRGED Act: portfolio executives in statute, a narrower requirements council and a commercial-first preference. Workforce and industrial base provisions from the House’s SPEED Act made it in too. Proposals to overhaul pricing and data rights were dropped.

The programmes

GAO’s programme detail shows why reform is urgent:

  • The DDG-51 Flight III destroyer is 55 months behind schedule, up from 41 months a year earlier.
  • The Navy cancelled four of its six Constellation frigates in late 2025 and is reviewing the first two. The first ship was about 12% built. The replacement, FF(X), is based on the Coast Guard’s National Security Cutter and was sole-sourced to HII’s Ingalls yard, with a first launch planned by 2028.
  • The lead Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine slipped from 2027 to 2028.

Some newer programmes look better on paper. The Air Force says the F-47 fighter is on schedule for a first flight in 2028, with $3.45 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than $5 billion requested for 2027. The Drone Dominance programme, about $1.1 billion, plans orders for tens of thousands of small attack drones.

The war test

The war with Iran has turned acquisition into a stockpile question. Munitions and interceptors have been used faster than they can be replaced, and the bottleneck is factory capacity, not paperwork. Faster contracting helps only if suppliers can expand lines, which takes years and stable orders. Congress funds weapons a year at a time, and fiscal 2027 starts on a stopgap signed on 2 September.

What to watch

The memo set a 180-day deadline for portfolio scorecards, which fell around May 2026. The Pentagon hasn’t published them. GAO’s next assessment, in mid-2027, will be the first to show whether the portfolio structure has moved any programme faster. Weapons acquisition has been on GAO’s high-risk list since 1990.