Defense Department dismantles long-standing Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System during joint requirements process restructuring

Headline: Defense Department Overhauls Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) Process

The Defense Department is making a significant shift in its approach to joint warfighting problems, dismantling its Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process and replacing it with a new system that aligns the Pentagon's most pressing issues with funding.

The change, announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, aims to incentivize the military services to act jointly, with the only incentive that has ever worked with them being money. The services are expected to be incentivized to want to take advantage of the time-based, experimental, rapid prototyping efforts that are the sources of new money for successful projects.

The Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) will no longer validate service-level requirements through the JCIDS process. Instead, the services will now be responsible for determining and validating their own requirements. This reform is about encouraging the services to work together, with the hope that the competitive nature of the new system will lead to more effective solutions.

The JROC will serve as the Pentagon's single forum for identifying and ranking "Key Operational Problems" the joint force faces. A new type of funding stream is being created for priorities identified in the Key Operational Problems that support the combatant commanders. Each budget cycle, the Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) will issue programming guidance and recommend how much money from the new Joint Acceleration Reserve should go toward solving key operational problems.

The under secretaries of defense for research and engineering and for acquisition and sustainment will stand up a Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA). The MEIA's role will be to ensure that the services' efforts are aligned with the joint force's priorities and that the services are working together effectively.

The services have 90 days to launch reviews of requirements processes, and the Defense Department has 120 days to stand up the Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board and establish a Mission Engineering and Integration Activity. Instructions and manuals governing JCIDS will be rescinded within the next 120 days.

The memo represents a fundamental shift, making the process time-based and aligning the Pentagon's most pressing joint warfighting problems with funding. However, the services have defied rationality in the past, so the response to the competition for funds and programs is uncertain. The search results do not provide information about who the co-chairs of the Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) are nor how the members of the RRAB are determined.

The role of MEIA and the combatant commanders could be the biggest potential risk in this concept, according to Greenwalt. The services will now have to overhaul how they define requirements and allocate resources inside their own bureaucracies, which could lead to conflicts and delays. The new system relies heavily on the cooperation and coordination of the services and the combatant commanders, and any missteps could have serious consequences for the joint force's readiness and effectiveness.

Defense Department dismantles long-standing Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System during joint requirements process restructuring