The Department of Defense’s acquisition and sustainment culture is pathologically risk-averse. The greatest threat to acquisition transformation is not the Federal Acquisition Regulation. It is not congressional oversight, statutory constraints, insufficient training, or an absence of strategy.
The greatest threat is fear. Not fear as emotion, but fear as architecture.
The defense acquisition system is not broken. It is functioning precisely as designed. It produces compliance. It produces documentation. It produces defensible process. It produces career survivability.
But it does not reliably produce speed or meaningful results.
For more than three decades, senior leaders have promised reform. Since the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, the acquisition community has cycled through transformation campaigns: Better Buying Power, the Adaptive Acquisition Framework, expanded other transaction authorities, congressional mandates, and more. Each wave arrives wrapped in urgency. Each diagnoses the same pathology: acquisitions are too slow, too rigid, too risk-averse.
And yet the system is getting worse, not better.
The Government Accountability Office reported that the average time to field capability for a major defense acquisition program has increased from roughly eight years to more than 11. The Government Accountability Office concluded in another report that while policy language aligns with speed and innovation goals, implementation across most pathways does not reflect leading iterative practices. Programs continue to default to certainty over speed, planning over execution, and documentation over delivery despite repeated findings saying that doesn’t work. Risk is managed by adding layers of review rather than by making smart decisions, which means acquisition professionals take almost no risk at all.
That is not because leaders lack intelligence or intent. It is because language does not change systems. Incentives do.
The dominant incentive in this system is fear: of audit, protest, scrutiny from the Government Accountability Office, being named in a congressional hearing, or of a poor performance review. Yet there is no consequence for managers whose projects are slow.
When visible failure carries career-ending consequences and invisible delay carries almost none, rational actors adapt.
Fear is not an anomaly inside acquisition culture. It is the operating logic of the system. And if fear defines the operating culture of acquisition, transformation will remain a romantic ideal rather than an achievable reality.
Transformation Isn’t New
Acquisition reform rhetoric is louder than ever with executive orders and strategy documents increasingly emphasizing speed, agility, commercial adoption, and outcomes. Even with all this momentum at the strategic level, meaningful change will remain stubbornly elusive at scale.
The Adaptive Acquisition Framework, established in 2020, was the most recent attempt to move the needle towards progress and explicitly intended to deliver capability “at the speed of relevance.” But outside the software pathway, the Government Accountability Office found no consistent incorporation of the iterative development cycles that enable commercial firms to move quickly. Big defense programs usually reverted to slow, linear, one-step-at-a-time (or “waterfall”) development processes instead of getting capability to the field quickly and improving it overtime.
Even with new authorities, flexibilities, and policy guidance intended to fix those problems, the underlying behavior of the system has barely shifted.
When “Fast” Fails to Last
I have been fighting these same problems since 2018, working on Army defensive cyber programs where the operational need was clear, urgent, and undeniable. We could not field software fast enough to cyber protection brigades operating against real and evolving threats. The cost of delay was not abstract. It was a real operational risk measured in degraded readiness and increased exposure.
So, we built a rapid acquisition construct designed to bypass the bureaucratic bottlenecks that everyone agrees are the problem. We streamlined decision-making, collapsed timelines, and focused relentlessly on delivery.
And it worked, but only briefly.
We accelerated delivery of a mobile hardware and software kit by five years. We moved from concept to fielded production in nine months. We aligned requirements, contracting, and delivery around operational needs rather than process milestones.
But nothing about that success endured beyond the extraordinary, and unsustainable, effort of a handful of individuals. Once the individuals driving the effort rotated out or burned out, the system reverted. Not because the authorities disappeared. Not because the law changed. Because the incentive structure remained intact.
Safety was rewarded over creativity. Procedural caution was praised over adaptive judgment. Exceptional delivery did not reliably translate into promotion, authority, or protection. Informal reputational signaling (e.g., quiet warnings, exclusion from key forums, coded performance feedback) communicated the real lesson: deviation carries risk.
That experience is not an anomaly. It is the pattern. Every meaningful acquisition breakthrough of the past decade occurred because a group of individuals, often at relatively low levels, decided to act against the institutional inertia. The Defense Innovation Unit trailblazed the first use of a commercial solutions opening solicitation method, paving the way for codifying more merit-based approaches into regulation. AFWERX flipped the acquisition script on leveraging industry-driven solutions with its open topic model. Kessel Run’s use of the cATO was the first meaningful attempt at improving cyber security practices for software focused on speed to production environments. The Joint AI Center’s Tradewinds Marketplace pioneered a streamlined acquisition model for emerging technologies that has become a critical enterprise pathfinder and centerpiece for the department’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy. Each demonstrated that pockets of innovation continue to emerge and what is possible when incentives temporarily align.
But without structural reinforcement, each remains vulnerable to bureaucratic gravity.
Reform dependent on heroics is not reform. It is temporary at best.
The Real Adversary is Performative Reform
This article is not arguing against Congress, the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or oversight writ large. It is arguing against a specific and pervasive leadership narrative: the belief that acquisition transformation can occur without redistributing risk, power, and consequence.
Leaders publish memos, give flowery speeches, and issue calls to arms. However, the operational reality shows leaders demand speed while rewarding caution. They praise innovation while protecting the status quo. They call for urgency while insulating decision-makers from downside. Ultimately, the department has perfected rhetorical reform while preserving incentive asymmetry.
Fear Is Not Irrational Because It Is Engineered
Fear inside acquisition is not cowardice but instead is a rational adaptation. In many cases, caution began as prudence. It was learned, reinforced, and rewarded. But over time, that prudence hardened into doctrine. Fear became institutionalized — not as emotion, but as a governing logic for how decisions are made, how risk is framed, and how careers are protected.
The Defense Innovation Board’s study on aligning incentives found that the department rewards the status quo and fails to provide top cover for innovators. The board’s scaling nontraditional defense innovation report concluded that culture, capital, and organizational structure should change together to enable speed.
In other words, everyone understands the problems, and few believe they can fix them without career risk. In that environment, inaction becomes the rational choice. Delay becomes normalized and is quietly rebranded as diligence.
An article by Alexis Bonnell in the Texas National Security Review calls out “bureaucratic sabotage” and draws an alarming parallel to the engineering nature of this problem: organizations can be slowed not through open resistance, but through rigid adherence to process, excessive communication, and compulsive caution. What the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) once described during World War II as techniques to paralyze enemy bureaucracies, such as insisting on perfect compliance, referring decisions to committees, and elevating minor procedural concerns, now often appears inside the U.S. government under the banner of professionalism. The more concerning part is that these tactics read less like espionage and tradecraft and more like a contemporary staff meeting at the Pentagon.
Until consequences for delay approximates consequence for failure, behavior will not change.
The Unspoken Cost of Being First
The most dangerous lie in acquisition transformation is the idea that change fails because people are unwilling to try. The reality is the system is full of people who try and are punished for it.
First movers in acquisition are uniquely exposed. They challenge inherited norms, reinterpret guidance, and attempt to apply authorities in ways that deliver results rather than preserve process. They choose speed over certainty and outcomes over optics. When those efforts threaten the equilibrium of the organization, the response is rarely overt or immediate. It is reputational.
I ultimately left the Chief Digital and AI Office because I was labeled as reckless — as lacking judgment or expertise. As “working around policy” rather than exercising professional discretion. These labels followed me and have followed other first movers into performance reviews, promotion boards, and future assignments. Middle management, fearful of association or of being implicated in perceived risk, quietly distances itself. I saw this happen in different ways to the Chief Operating Officer and the Acquisition Chief at the Joint AI Center (which was later disestablished and folded into the Chief Digital and AI Office) before it happened to me. In both instances, the individuals were informally labeled and pushed out of the system or chose to leave.
This is not accidental. It is how bureaucratic systems restore balance when disrupted. The Defense Innovation Board’s study on incentives makes this explicit: innovators are punished not because they fail, but because they threaten the incentive structures that reward predictability, compliance, and risk avoidance over outcomes.
Silence Is a Feature, Not a Bug
One of the most corrosive features of today’s acquisition environment is not open resistance to change but enforced silence.
Many practitioners are not exercising judgment or initiative. They are reacting to what their reviewers, approvers, and leaders tell them to do. Direction flows downward; compliance flows upward. In theory, this is disciplined execution. In practice, it leaves little room for the people closest to the problems to offer their perspective when they see a better way of doing business.
The cost of that silence is stagnation. Problems persist not because they are unsolvable, but because they are never meaningfully challenged.
Leaders crave control because control feels safe and defensible. Status updates substitute for progress. Approval chains reward consensus and dilute accountability. Planning is prized over execution. Studying the problem becomes a career-safe alternative to solving it.
Courage With Eyes Open
If leaders are serious about transformation, then the solution is not another strategy document. It is institutional surgery.
Senior leaders should ask the uncomfortable question of whether they have institutionalized the “bureaucratic sabotaging” behaviors and can begin immediately by rewiring incentives, accountability, and daily management practices to privilege speed, learning, and mission outcomes over process compliance and risk avoidance. This can take many forms and can be as simple as shifting resources away from excessive analysis and staffing drills toward rapid prototyping, iterative delivery, and early user feedback; rewriting performance evaluations and promotions to reward measurable delivery speed rather than document and task completion; shifting accountability upward when approved risks fail instead of pushing consequences downward; requiring written justification for schedule slips and treating delay as a decision rather than a default; and publicly protecting pathfinders, granting named portfolios authority to move fast without career penalty.
Besides structural incentives and formal accountability measures, leaders should also reshape the daily behaviors that quietly reinforce fear and inertia. They can normalize intelligent failure by formally documenting and discussing lessons learned, rewarding teams that take informed, mission-driven risks even when outcomes fall short, and prohibiting negative career consequences for good-faith experimentation. Even more radical, they could change expectations across the enterprise by eliminating performative reporting requirements that consume time but do not accelerate delivery. Replacing slide decks and status theater with short written decision briefs, real-time data available in dashboards and platforms, and in-person problem-solving sessions. If a meeting does not result in a decision, cancel it. If a report does not change an outcome, stop requiring it.
These are uncomfortable moves. They redistribute risk upward and require leaders to accept more of it themselves. They reduce plausible deniability and make speed and failure visible.
Practitioners, in turn, should recognize their own agency within constraint. While they do not control the system, they do control daily choices: whether to raise an alternative in a review, whether to frame a problem around outcomes instead of process, whether to use existing authorities creatively rather than defaulting to precedent. Agency does not require recklessness, but it does require the willingness to act without guarantees.
No reform cavalry is coming. Leadership protection often follows action, not the other way around. Every breakthrough of the past decade began with individuals acting before the system made it safe.
No one is a mere observer of this system. Everyone is its designers and its operators.
If anyone operating at any level wants different outcomes, they ought to change what the system rewards. Culture is not something that lives in policy documents; it is created through repeated human decisions. If everyone waits for permission, protection, or perfect conditions, nothing changes.
Until then, the silent staff meeting where leaders ask for ideas and no one speaks will remain the most honest measure of the acquisition culture.
Fear will continue to govern unless individuals decide otherwise. The next era of acquisition professionals will demand a mindset marked by uncommon courage — one that pairs seasoned judgement with a warrior’s resolve; that understands transformation is a shared effort. And if the Department does not move together, then it will not move at all.
Bonnie Evangelista is a seasoned acquisition leader with 17 years of experience modernizing federal acquisition and accelerating the delivery of innovative capabilities for civilian and defense agencies. She is currently a Senior Advisor for Acquisition Policy at the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy and previously supported the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul initiative at the General Services Administration as well as held acquisition leadership roles with the Chief Digital and AI Office, the Joint AI Center, Army’s Defensive Cyber Operations, and the Transportation Security Administration. Bonnie is widely recognized for her expertise in rapid and creative acquisition pathways and her leadership in shaping forward-leaning procurement policy and practice.
This article would not have been possible without the contributions, insight, and intellectual rigor of Andrew Bosworth. His perspective on risk, incentives, and industrial base dynamics sharpened both the structural framing and the urgency of this argument.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the Department of Defense, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Spc. Kelsey Kollar via DVIDS.
