The Department of Defense is overhauling how it sets military requirements to accelerate the delivery of new technologies, following a directive from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Central to this reform is the dismantling of the decades-old Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), which will be replaced by a streamlined governance model aimed at faster and more responsive capability development.
JCIDS has long served as the formal process for defining acquisition requirements and setting evaluation criteria for future defense programs.
Effective immediately, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will begin disestablishing JCIDS and will direct the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) to stop validating component-level requirements.
Going forward, individual military services will take full responsibility for determining their own requirements.
Instead, the JROC will focus on identifying and ranking “key operational problems (KOPs)” the joint force faces. Additionally, Hegseth’s memo establishes a new Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) led by the vice chairman and the deputy secretary of defense, to link those priorities directly to budget decisions.
Additionally, the under secretaries for research & engineering and acquisition & sustainment will create a Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA), which will work with industry to refine requirements through rapid experimentation and deliver solutions aligned with KOPs. The Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office will partner with the Joint Staff to ensure funding is allocated effectively in each budget cycle.
“These funds are intended to bridge the “valley of death” between prototype development and full-scale deployment, the memo reads.
Hegseth also directed the military departments to review their internal requirements processes and recommend reforms to improve speed and effectiveness. At the same time, the Office of the Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment will begin updating key policy documents, including the removal of JCIDS references from existing directives.
According to Hegseth, these changes are intended to streamline – not complicate – the system. He emphasized that no new review layers or bureaucratic hurdles will be introduced that could delay the timely fielding of critical technologies.
The memo is in response to a recent executive order by President Trump, which directs modernization of the defense acquisition system and encourages innovation in the defense industrial base. The order directs the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the secretaries of the military departments, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to complete a comprehensive review of the JCIDS in order to streamline and accelerate acquisition.
“This is a decisive change intended to improve the Department’s ability to prioritize, act, and execute with urgency,” Hegseth wrote in the memo. “Every organization must now meet a simple test: Are we accelerating the delivery of integrated capabilities to solve our most pressing operational problems?”