An AIAA Perspective on the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act and the Warfighting Acquisition System
The FY26 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), together with the Pentagon’s transition to a Warfighting Acquisition System, marks the most consequential structural realignment of U.S. defense procurement and sustainment policy in a generation. For the first time, Congress has moved beyond oversight and pilot programs to directly engineer how acquisition speed, industrial capacity, sustainment readiness, and portfolio-level risk are governed in statute. These reforms codify commercial-first procurement, establish Portfolio Acquisition Executives with broad termination authority, impose production and depot modernization mandates, and tie operational readiness to measurable sustainment and stockpile requirements.
For the aerospace and defense community, these changes reshape how systems are conceived, fielded, sustained, and industrialized. This article examines the enacted reforms, their implications for readiness and industrial resilience, and the execution risks that now emerge as speed becomes the dominant organizing principle of the acquisition enterprise. AIAA offers this analysis as a neutral technical convener across government, industry, and academia.
1. Readiness Has Become a Statutory Production and Sustainment Mandate
For more than two decades, acquisition reform efforts have sought to improve the speed and flexibility of defense procurement. What distinguishes the current reform cycle is that readiness is no longer framed solely as an operational or strategic objective. It is now codified in law as a production, sustainment, and workforce challenge that must be solved through explicit statutory mechanisms.
The FY26 NDAA links readiness directly to industrial throughput, depot and arsenal modernization, software sustainment, munitions stockpiles, aviation spares, shipyard capacity, and workforce availability. Readiness is no longer treated as the downstream consequence of successful acquisition. It is now the organizing principle around which acquisition, sustainment, and industrial-base policy are being explicitly aligned by Congress.
This shift reflects growing recognition that the dominant constraints on force availability are no longer limited to platform design or program management, but increasingly reside in fragile supply chains, aging depots, workforce shortages, and limited surge capacity across critical sectors of the defense industrial base.
2. The Warfighting Acquisition System Is Now Anchored in Statute
Executive Order 14265 and subsequent Pentagon guidance initiated the formal transition to a Warfighting Acquisition System oriented around speed, iterative delivery, and greater reliance on commercial technology. What the FY26 NDAA accomplishes is the full codification of that philosophy into permanent statutory form.
The Act formally redefines traditional Program Executive Officers as Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs) and vests them with authority to modify, terminate, or accelerate programs across entire mission portfolios. It directs contracting officers to default to commercial products and services unless no suitable commercial options exist. It expands the use of Commercial Solutions Openings, removes approval thresholds for large-dollar procurements, authorizes consumption-based contracting for software and services, raises cost-and-pricing data thresholds, and exempts nontraditional defense contractors from selected regulatory requirements.
Collectively, these provisions institutionalize speed-to-field as the primary organizing metric of defense acquisition. The legal default is no longer bespoke government development; it is now rapid adaptation of commercial and hybrid solutions wherever feasible.
3. Congress Has Shifted from Oversight to Direct Execution Engineering
Previous acquisition reform statutes largely focused on oversight, reporting requirements, and pilot programs intended to inform executive-branch experimentation. The FY26 NDAA represents a decisive departure from that model. Congress is no longer merely guiding acquisition behavior through policy direction. It is now directly engineering the mechanics of production, sustainment, and industrial-base operation through binding statutory mandates.
Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the industrial base and sustainment provisions of the Act. Congress has enacted a five-year Arsenal Workload Sustainment Pilot Program with public–private contracting preferences; mandated modernization of government-owned arsenals; authorized automated munitions manufacturing at government-owned, contractor-operated facilities; expanded advance procurement authorities for long-lead systems and components; and imposed workforce protection and apprentice hiring requirements at public shipyards. These are not discretionary tools; they are binding production-side controls designed to stabilize capacity and throughput.
At the same time, Congress has directly legislated sustainment performance. The Act requires that by 2028 the F-35 enterprise demonstrates sufficient spares, support equipment, and depot maintenance capacity to sustain 90 days of high-tempo combat operations. It mandates prioritization of amphibious warship maintenance, authorizes naval type commanders to exercise direct oversight of private shipyard maintenance execution, integrates depot-level sustainment into multinational exercises, and statutorily funds software modernization through the Continuous Capability Development and Delivery construct.
These provisions transform sustainment from a budgetary afterthought into a legislatively enforced operational readiness requirement.
Notably, the final conference agreement removed provisions that would have expanded the Pentagon access to contractor technical data for maintenance and repair, following sustained industry opposition. The resulting statute preserves the current data-rights framework, placing renewed importance on lifecycle data strategies negotiated at program inception rather than imposed retroactively through statute.
4. Implications for the Aerospace and Defense Community
4.1 Portfolio Authority and Risk Concentration
The elevation of portfolio authority fundamentally reshapes how risk is distributed across defense programs. Decisions about schedule, scope, and termination will now be driven not by individual program performance alone, but by portfolio-level delivery priorities. Programs that cannot demonstrate realistic production scalability, industrial viability, and schedule discipline now face materially higher termination risk under statutory authority.
For industry, this demands a shift away from optimizing individual platform performance in isolation toward explicitly aligning program execution with portfolio delivery logic.
4.2 Sustainment as a First-Order Design Requirement
With sustainment metrics now codified in statute, lifecycle support no longer occupies a secondary position in system design. Maintainability, modularity, upgradeability, and data accessibility increasingly function as threshold requirements for program survivability under portfolio oversight.
Digital twins, predictive maintenance, open-systems architectures, and cyber-secure sustainment ecosystems are no longer simply matters of technical best practice. They are becoming statutory enablers of compliance with congressional readiness mandates.
4.3 Industrial-Base Capacity Under a Speed-Dominant System
While a faster acquisition system is now legally mandated, industrial-base capacity, rather than contracting velocity, has emerged as the dominant constraint on delivery. If the federal government’s procurement timing, quantities, and funding profiles remain volatile across fiscal years, an accelerated acquisition system may unintentionally amplify stress on an already constrained defense industrial base.
Congress has explicitly recognized this risk and responded through direct stabilization measures. Advance procurement authorities, arsenal and depot modernization mandates, automated manufacturing investments, public–private production partnerships, and workforce protection requirements collectively reflect a legislative determination that predictable demand signaling and targeted production investment are now prerequisites for readiness, not optional industrial-policy instruments.
The success of the Warfighting Acquisition System will therefore depend as much on demand stability and workforce expansion as on contracting reform.
5. Emerging Execution Risks
The scale and ambition of the current reform effort introduce identifiable execution risks that warrant continued technical scrutiny. A system organized primarily around speed may unintentionally suppress lifecycle affordability if sustainment incentives are subordinated to near-term fielding pressure. Portfolio authority may concentrate termination risk in ways that disrupt fragile supplier ecosystems without adequate industrial transition planning. Workforce shortages may constrain effective utilization of newly authorized production funding. Finally, software-intensive sustainment models may outpace existing depot cyber infrastructure and data management capabilities.
These are not arguments against reform. Rather, they underscore the necessity of continuous technical validation as policy shifts into execution.
6. Implications for Industry
To remain viable under the reformed statutory framework, industry participants will increasingly be judged not only on performance and innovation, but on their ability to demonstrate credible production scalability and sustainment maturity at program entry. Firms will be expected to architect systems for rapid upgrade, integrate manufacturing planning with arsenal and depot operations, deploy digital sustainment ecosystems that support statutory readiness metrics, and prepare for portfolio-driven program reviews that prioritize delivery realism over theoretical performance margins.
7. Congressional Oversight in the Implementation Phase
By embedding itself directly in production flow, depot workload distribution, maintenance prioritization, and sustainment performance definition, Congress has transformed the character of future oversight. The central oversight question will increasingly shift from whether programs meet individual cost and schedule targets to whether the industrial enterprise as a system is producing and sustaining combat-ready force elements at scale.
This shift will require a correspondingly deeper integration of industrial engineering, logistics analysis, and sustainment economics into the oversight process.
8. AIAA’s Role in the Reformed Acquisition Environment
AIAA does not advocate for individual programs or vendors. Under the new statutory regime, our value lies in serving as an independent technical convener capable of assessing second- and third-order engineering impacts of speed-driven acquisition policy. AIAA can provide neutral forums on sustainment engineering, digital readiness, and industrial-base resilience, and offer nonpartisan technical insight when legislative design misaligns with physical production or lifecycle support constraints.
With Congress now directly shaping acquisition execution in statute, independent technical validation will be essential to ensure that speed-to-field is matched by durability-in-service.
Conclusion
The FY26 NDAA and the Warfighting Acquisition System represent a decisive transition from process-based reform to statutory control over acquisition and sustainment execution. Speed is now codified. Portfolio authority is compulsory. Industrial-base stabilization is legislated. Sustainment readiness is defined through mandatory operational benchmarks.
Whether this transformation ultimately delivers durable readiness will depend not on additional statutory reform, but on disciplined execution by Congress, the Pentagon, and industry, anchored in engineering realism rather than acquisition theory.
AIAA stands ready to continue serving as a neutral technical partner as this transformation unfolds.
