Pentagon terminating JCIDS process as part of larger acquisition reform: Memo  

WASHINGTON — As part of Pentagon leaders’ quest to rapidly field new weapons, they are revamping how requirements are validated and bidding adieu to the controversial Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process.

In an Aug. 20 memo titled “Reforming the Joint Requirements Process to Accelerate Fielding of Warfighting Capabilities,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his deputy, Steve Feinberg, lay out a roadmap aimed at fielding “new technology and capabilities faster.”

The objective, they note, is threefold: to streamline and accelerate the joint force needs, work with industry earlier in the process, and better integrate requirements determination and resource prioritization to make better budgeting decisions.

While the memo lays out multiple changes, a key provision is the “disestablishment” of JCIDS — a joint staff process for pinpointing gaps in military capabilities, and identifying and validating joint requirements. In turn, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), which oversees that process, will stop validating component-level requirement documents.

The JROC comprises the vice chiefs of each military service, and is chaired by the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The memo, first published [PDF] by NewSpace Nexus earlier this week and confirmed to Breaking Defense by a senior service official, also sets up a Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) that will be co-chaired by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the deputy defense secretary.

“Each budget cycle, the RRAB shall select topics from the top-ranked KOP [key operational problems] and nominations from the co-chairs to perform analysis, issue programming guidance, and recommend allocation of funding from the Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR),” the memo said. “By exception, the RRAB may identify a Component-specific requirement or activity for modification or termination.”

Then for each program and budget review cycle, the board will present recommendations on the highest ranked KOPs and any additional topics the co-chairs want to separately nominate and approve. That could include new program starts, realignments, terminations, and other program changes.

Meanwhile, DoD is also getting a Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA) within 120 days. The idea here is for the JROC to prioritize KOPS, then the MEIA will reach out to industry, conduct mission engineering analysis to help refine requirements, and conduct rapid integration of new capabilities while also creating experimentation campaigns. 

“These activities will create opportunities to integrate industry contributions and innovations as well as Military Service capabilities and to support the development of new operational concepts and non-materiel solution elements,” the memo adds. 

Spokespeople for the Pentagon did not respond to Breaking Defense’s request for further information about the memo.

JCIDS Under Fire 

By and large, feedback from former officials and experts on the requirements overhaul has been positive. Reform of the JROC and the JCIDS process has been recognized for years as much needed, but up to now making changes had eluded Pentagon policy-makers and military brass.

William Greenwalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy, said that by shutting down the JCIDS, individual services again have validation authority over their bigger-ticket programs. Greenwalt, who criticized JCIDS in February, said the move could ultimately cut through red tape and endless stacks of joint validated memos that wither on the shelf. 

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Breaking Defense he “generally” agrees with the changes since he said the JROC and JCIDS process has “provided a lot of bureaucracy with very little added value.”

“They never met a military service requirement they didn’t like,” he wrote in an email today. “I also applaud the emphasis on mission engineering and integrated capabilities.”

Eric Felt, former director of architecture and integration in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, said the move gets at one of the key problems bedeviling acquisition reform for decades.

“There are three processes that are broken: acquisition, requirements, and budgeting. All three must be fixed if we want to move faster and deter China. This memo takes a sledgehammer to the second problem, the requirements bureaucracy that had become the pacing process for many new programs,” he said.

“The most successful recent programs have all been ‘JCIDS exempt’ for one reason or another; that should tell us something about whether JCIDS was value added,” Felt added.

Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agreed — calling the memo a “major change” for a process that “took time” but sought to make the program joint. 

“The last few years, acquisition has moved in the opposite direction, towards giving the military departments the initiative. So, this is consistent with recent reforms,” he wrote in a statement to Breaking Defense on Thursday. 

But Questions Of ‘Rigor’

However, there are questions, and as the senior service official said, it’s still early days and not yet 100 percent clear how those changes will play out. 

“We can confidently say that the memo will help us accelerate some requirements — meaning it’s one less gate that we have to work through,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “However, that gate was an important one for rigor. … The joint force needed some visibility with the services we’re building and delivering, and the JROC provided that visibility.”

For example, the Army is moving full steam ahead with procuring drones, but if it’s buying smaller ones with the Indo-Pacific theater in mind, that’s simply not what combatant commanders there will need to operate across vast distances.

“The JROC was supposed to make sure that the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines were not building something exclusive for their service that wasn’t necessarily compatible with or helpful in the rest of the joint force,” the service official added.  “So, the way I read the memo is great, we can go a lot faster now but the big question that remains is, ‘Are we moving faster in the right direction?’”

Greenwalt raised a similar concern, noting it’s not clear how the MEIA will factor in combatant commanders’ needs, but their feedback will be key to getting the right new tech to troops in the field on an expedited timetable.

Lawmakers have also been weighing in on the JCIDS process as of late, with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees offering their own suggestions for reforming the requirements process. Both committees included language affecting the JROC in their versions of the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

HASC proposed taking the JROC and turning it into the Joint Requirements Council (JRC), which would no longer validate “highly specific capability documents” and instead focus on evaluating evolving threats and future force design needs, as well as developing joint capability requirement statements.

The JRC would submit its recommendations to a new organization called Requirements, Acquisition, and Programming Integration Directorate (RAPID), which would evaluate technological options and their costs and provide its own recommendations to the deputy defense secretary, which would decide whether to press forward. The hope, congressional officials have said, is to cut the requirements timeline from 800 days to about five months.

Meanwhile, SASC would remove the JROC’s authorities to validate and approve requirements, instead limiting its responsibilities to providing input on global trends and threats, as well as on capability gaps and emerging technologies. Newly designated “Portfolio Acquisition Executives” among each of the services would in turn have broader latitude to manage requirements for a portfolio of similar technologies.

Neither the House nor Senate have passed a defense policy bill, and HASC and SASC leaders will eventually have to settle on one approach for reforming the requirements process — or, to back away and simply adopt the Defense Department’s new version of the process — when the NDAA is reconciled into a single bill later this year.