<p style="font-weight: 400;">War Secretary Pete Hegseth <a href="https://x.com/rebekazeljko/status/2020998100072964167">gave a characteristically blunt answer</a> Monday when asked about the “choke points” in the defense production pipeline.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“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&#8217;s the hang-up at some of these production facilities, why have we seen delays on certain projects?”</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“A lot of the hang-up has been us,” Hegseth acknowledged. “If we don&#8217;t look at ourselves first, the way we do business, we&#8217;ve been impossible to deal with. A bad customer who year after year changes our mind about what we want or what we don&#8217;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.”</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“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&#8217;re doing with munitions. I encourage folks to look at the deals we&#8217;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&#8217;s groundbreaking stuff.&#8221;</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“Our department&#8217;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&#8217;re going to be buying into the future. That&#8217;s just good business. We haven&#8217;t operated that well that way before. And then things like requirements, there&#8217;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&#8217;re five years behind the actual technology.”</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">“So we&#8217;re going to companies and say, ‘Tell us what you can do based on the parameters of what kind of capabilities we&#8217;re looking for, say, in Indopaycom or Southcom or out in Europe, and let&#8217;s tailor it accordingly,’” he concluded.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">The U.S. Army recently finalized a <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/09/03/us-army-awards-lockheed-record-98-billion-missile-contract/">multibillion-dollar</a> deal with Lockheed Martin for the production of PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptors. This month, Raytheon <a href="https://www.rtx.com/news/news-center/2026/02/04/rtxs-raytheon-partners-with-department-of-war-on-five-landmark-agreements-to-exp">signed</a> five framework agreements with the U.S. Department of War to significantly increase production capacity and accelerate deliveries of several high-demand systems.</p>

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

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