Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has vowed to serve as the Pentagon’s “change agent,” reforming the acquisition process and placing emerging capabilities in the hands of warfighters faster.
This is a tall task.
Truly disrupting the Pentagon will require starting at the top, specifically adopting a comprehensive joint force design, in which capabilities are developed and integrated cohesively across all military services, domains and functions.
This approach is especially critical for identifying capabilities vital to the joint force, but which no single service has a major interest in funding, because they are “common pool” assets.
By the Joint Staff’s own admission, joint force design is “necessary to produce a unifying vision for the future of the Joint Force.” Yet the U.S. military lacks such a future-oriented framework for guiding joint modernization priorities and timelines. While the Joint Warfighting Concept outlines a broad approach for how the Joint Force should fight in a future conflict, it lacks specificity about which services are expected to provide what future capabilities and on what timelines. As the Marine Corps commandant lamented in 2023, the services lack “a common aimpoint … that says this is where the Joint Force needs to be 5, 6, or 7 years into the future.”
Instead, each branch independently develops its own separate force design, laying out operational capabilities required at varying future dates. The Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, which is now known as “Force Design,” emphasizes a lighter and more mobile force armed with long-range sensors and precision-strike weapons. The Navy’s Force Design 2045 proposes a hybrid fleet, in which surface and subsurface uncrewed vessels augment traditional naval assets, while the Air Force’s One Force Design envisions a mix of stand-off, stand-in and asymmetric capabilities designed to attack an adversary’s kill chains. The Army is expected to unveil its new force design later this month.
The problem with this approach is that too often, the driving force behind service choices are budgetary considerations rather than a joint strategic vision. The competition for a larger share of total obligation authority promotes spending on service-centric warfighting capabilities while simultaneously reducing investment in the service-provided capabilities needed to generate and sustain U.S. military power.
This puts the entire joint force at risk.
In economic terms, capabilities like intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, data connectivity, and logistics are “common pool resources” — when they are procured by one service, they can be used by all under a joint command. Because these assets are non-excludable, each service has incentives to free-ride on the investments of others. Here’s the rub: The validity of each service’s force design depends on the other services’ investments in common pool resources, but there is no forcing function to enforce their provision across the joint force.
Take the Marines’ Force Design as an example: it assumes robust Navy support, including logistics, intelligence, and mobility. The Navy’s Navigation Plan 2024, however, make no mention of the Navy’s important role in supporting and sustaining Marine stand-in Forces. Why? Because no joint mechanism exists to ensure service force designs either fulfill these dependencies or envision forces which are not dependent on common pool resources.
This is particularly troubling because U.S. military advantage increasingly requires cross-domain, and therefore cross-service, solutions.
A common understanding in force design is that each service should strive to dominate its own domain. Each domain — land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace — offers unique advantages that, when combined, generate more robust and flexible national military capabilities. Each domain also has specific vulnerabilities best mitigated from other domains, and possibly by other services. For example, ground forces have limited visibility from the ground, but, with access to the air, space, and even cyber domains, have the potential to see further. While domain expertise is essential, an overemphasis on domain-centric superiority can undermine the fighting effectiveness of the joint force, particularly when it leads to missed opportunities to develop new capabilities that operate across multiple domains.
To achieve an effective joint force, the Department of Defense should start with a joint force design, deliberately integrating domain-specific expertise into a unified force design. Such a design would prioritize the creation of options over the creation of platforms, ensuring military capabilities align with overarching national security objectives, not just individual service preferences.
This joint force design should also identify those common pool resources which are chronically underfunded in service budgets, acknowledge their critical importance to the entire joint force, and drive resources to them.
To make that happen, the Pentagon ought to move some acquisition authorities away from the services, structuring the budget around the joint force design rather than just service-specific priorities. The current Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System often fails to align funding with the true needs of the joint force, resulting in inefficiencies and capability gaps. Reforming Pentagon budgeting is therefore essential to ensure US defense dollars are used efficiently and effectively and not misallocated because of unproductive bureaucratic competition among the services.
Rethinking and redesigning the current force structure is not merely an option — it is a necessity for maintaining military advantage in an increasingly complex global security environment.
Col. Maximilian K. Bremer, US Air Force, is the director of the Advanced Programs Division at Air Mobility Command.
Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an adjunct professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University.
This commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the US Defense Department, or the US Air Force.
