The Pentagon’s requirements council needs a complete overhaul, the nominee to be vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told lawmakers, backing Senate’s reforms in the annual defense bill to shift it from reviewing paperwork to designing future force.
The Joint Requirements Oversight Council — a group that establishes and approves requirements for new weapon systems — is supposed to take about 100 days reviewing and validating requirements documents, but the Government Accountability Office found the process often drags on for more than 800 days.
“The JROC concept, I think, is completely valid. We have to get rid of some of the bureaucracy, and [vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Adm. Grady has started down that road. We have to make the process less burdened by paperwork and more sensitive to speed and product,” Marine Corps Gen. Christopher Mahoney told Senate lawmakers on Thursday during his confirmation hearing.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg already directed the current vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to start the “disestablishment” of Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) that JROC uses to manage the review and approval of capability requirements documents and ordered the council stop validating service-level requirements to the “maximum extent permitted by law.”
Meanwhile, the Senate’s version of the 2026 defense policy bill, which incorporates the Fostering Reform and Government Efficiency in Defense, or the FoRGED Act, seeks to completely redefine the council’s mission and position it as a strategic organization focused on future force needs.
If the bill is enacted, instead of validating paperwork, the council will evaluate global threats and trends to shape a joint force design; work directly with combatant commanders to compile and prioritize operational problems; continuously assess military capabilities against the National Defense Strategy; identify and prioritize gaps and opportunities in military capabilities; and identify new technologies, commercial solutions and operational concepts that could give the U.S. an edge.
“The way I see, the JROC should be in the business of providing top-down, strategic-level direction to the Services to drive Joint Force Design without micromanaging service acquisition decisions,” Mahoney said in his written responses to advance policy questions submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The bill would strip JROC of its authority to approve service-level requirements and major acquisition milestones. Reforming JROC, however, is just one piece of the FoRGED Act’s push for a much larger shake-up of defense acquisition.
“I agree with the reform approach, end to end, from requirements to resources, and the FoRGED Act moves us along that trajectory,” Mahoney said.
To reform the requirements process, Mahoney said he wants the Defense Department to draw on recommendations laid out in a recent report to Congress, which Grady described as a “fundamental reorientation of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and overhaul of the joint requirements process.”
Mahoney also highlighted several recommendations from the PPBE Reform Commission Report he believes would complement requirements reform, including multi-year use of operations and maintenance funds, protections against continuing resolutions and higher thresholds for reprogramming money between accounts.
“When we look at this and we take best of breed, I think we will get a process from determining a gap, looking at the solutions against that gap, getting a coherent and quick acquisition strategy and meaningfully, and this is important, synchronizing that with the resources. Those three things are often treated as separate pillars. I believe they are a system, and if you don’t treat them as a system, you’re going to break down somewhere,” Mahoney said.
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