In the Army, a new acquisition bureaucracy is starting to take shape. It means new names for some longstanding Army organizations. But at its core, the reorganization is about letting Army officials manage the acquisition system as portfolios of capabilities with less of a focus on individual programs.
That idea’s been championed by outside reform advocates for years, including when the “Section 809 panel” on acquisition reform released its final report in 2019. The Congressional panel on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution Reform echoed the call as part of its recommendations. So did both the House and Senate in their respective versions of the latest Defense authorization bill. And last month, it got the explicit endorsement of the secretary of Defense.
“We will leverage taxpayer dollars in a more accountable, flexible and deliberate manner to maximize their value across capability portfolios,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during an address at the National War College. “We will shift funding within portfolios’ authorized boundaries swiftly and decisively to maximize mission outcomes. If one program is faltering, funding will be shifted within the portfolio to accelerate or scale a higher priority. If a new or more promising technology emerges, we will seize the opportunity and not be held back by artificial constraints and funding boundaries that take months or even years to overcome.”
In that address, Hegseth credited the military services with laying the groundwork for some of the reforms he wants to make department-wide. And the Army started its implementation work last month, naming six new “portfolio acquisition executives.” Each of those PAEs will oversee different “capability areas” with programs managed by what had, up until now, been called program executive offices (PEOs), and will now be called capability program executives (CPEs).
But there’s more in those portfolios than just the former PEOs, said Brig. Gen. Christine A. Beeler, the capability program executive for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (CPE STRI).
“The PAE is going to be able to wrangle all of those enablers, and we are just one enabler to the PAE,” said Beeler during a staff town hall late last month. “There are also folks up at big Army that are going to help us on the programming side … and you’ve got requirement folks. That can get combined and come to us in a single requirements community of practice, so that things that get decided at the PAE level will be easier to understand and make trades on.”
Last week, another of those former PEOs announced the details of its own internal reorganization. Leaders of the newly-dubbed Capability Program Executive for Command, Control, Communications, and Network say most of their changes will be at the program manager level — both to align with the Army’s broader acquisition “transformation” agenda, and to orient the office more explicitly around the Army’s plans for Next Generation Command and Control.
The changes there include four new program offices — one each for applications, data and AI, infrastructure and transport, plus changing roles for several other offices. CPE C3N officials expect to detail the changes during the next Army technical exchange meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground next month.
Beeler said there will be program office changes within her organization as well, but the reorganization will take until the summer of 2027 to fully unfold. Along with that, she said, will be a reduction in senior officer positions.
“The key changes were a mandated reduction of command select list billets by 30% at both the O-6 and the O-5 level,” she said. “So that means, over time, we’re going to transition from three CSL billets to two CSL billets at the O-6 level, and from eight CSL billets eventually to five CSL billets at the O-5 level.”
And at the even more senior levels, Beeler says the end state of the Army’s acquisition reorganization is that the new PAEs will be two-star generals or the civilian SES equivalents. And the CPEs will be one-star positions.
But those details — like many others in the reorganization — are still subject to change.
“This is a very time and event-driven process,” she said. “We’re not jumping in tomorrow, both feet and everything’s changed. That wouldn’t make any sense, and we would lose the discovery part of how these pathfinder adjustments to the acquisition process are actually going to work. For the time being, we will be the Capability Program Executive STRI. We believe in the future we’re going to change the logo and we’ve got some ideas out there for how we’re going make other changes over time, but at the end of the day, this is what we’re going to do. We simulate the fight, we replicate the threat, and we’re going to make sure that the Army can win across all domains.”
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