‘We’ve Been Impossible To Deal With’: Hegseth Vows To Fix Pentagon’s ‘Bad Customer’ Behavior

War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a characteristically blunt answer Monday when asked about the “choke points” in the defense production pipeline.

“You identified several policy changes the department was implementing to actually speed up and expedite some of the production,” a reporter said to Hegseth. “I was wondering, what are the specific choke points that you guys have encountered when it comes to regulations? What are the issues, what’s the hang-up at some of these production facilities, why have we seen delays on certain projects?”

“A lot of the hang-up has been us,” Hegseth acknowledged. “If we don’t look at ourselves first, the way we do business, we’ve been impossible to deal with. A bad customer who year after year changes our mind about what we want or what we don’t want, and then we make little, small technological changes, which makes it more difficult for them to produce what they need to produce on time.”

“So we have to fix our own house first,” he declared, “provide clarity, simplify the system, allow more people to access it, give that steady demand signal, which is what we’re doing with munitions. I encourage folks to look at the deals we’ve cut recently with Raytheon, with Boeing, with other companies, Lockheed, on Patriot missiles, on THAADs [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems], on other exquisite munitions. That’s groundbreaking stuff.”

“Our department’s never done that,” he continued. “The Deputy Secretary, Steve Feinberg, is a whiz kid on these things, putting these deals together. The companies are investing because they know we’re going to be buying into the future. That’s just good business. We haven’t operated that well that way before. And then things like requirements, there’s mazes of requirements that this department has traditionally put on different systems and platforms that are impossible to navigate and by the time you navigate them, you’re five years behind the actual technology.”

“So we’re going to companies and say, ‘Tell us what you can do based on the parameters of what kind of capabilities we’re looking for, say, in Indopaycom or Southcom or out in Europe, and let’s tailor it accordingly,’” he concluded.

The U.S. Army recently finalized a multibillion-dollar deal with Lockheed Martin for the production of PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptors. This month, Raytheon signed five framework agreements with the U.S. Department of War to significantly increase production capacity and accelerate deliveries of several high-demand systems.