A Letter to the Leaders of the DOGE

Dear Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy:

When you agreed to support President Trump by leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he stated that the DOGE will play an essential role in the "Save America Movement." Without a doubt, the most urgent undertaking by the DOGE to save America is to ensure the U.S. government is capable of fulfilling its most fundamental responsibility - keeping our homeland safe by securing our borders and protecting and defending American interests around the world.

America's current defense acquisition system is slow and bureaucratic and does not provide our warfighters with new capabilities at the speed of relevance to the threats they are facing. It has a structure and a culture that stifles innovation and discourages risk-taking.

I write to you today to express my desire to help the DOGE make America's national defense ecosystem great again. As a multi-decade leader at the top of the defense industry, I understand the Pentagon's acquisition processes, the evolving global threat environment, and where we have vulnerabilities that our enemies may exploit.

Today's national defense ecosystem is not optimized to build the modern "Arsenal of Democracy 2.0" that we urgently need to deter and defeat China, Iran and other rogue nations and non-state actors. In my most recent op-ed, published in POLITICO in November, I discussed how victory in this new era of great power competition will be determined by the ability to fuse software, artificial intelligence and hardware in ways that give our warfighters decision dominance, or the capability to "sense, understand, decide, act and assess faster and more effectively than any adversary." In other words, shorten the "kill chain."

The first Trump administration was successful in introducing modernized, streamlined acquisition models into the Department of Defense (DOD). A key example was President Trump's creation of the Space Force in 2019. This was a powerful catalyst that drove missile warning/missile defense capabilities forward at a fraction of the cost of a typical DOD program. In partnership with the Space Development Agency, we rapidly repurposed our commercial weather monitoring technology to track hypersonic missiles, providing a missile warning capability on a delivery schedule not seen in decades. Simply put, the first Trump administration laid the groundwork for breaking through the DOD bureaucracy. Now, the DOGE can finish this vitally important job.

For the past several years, L3Harris has successfully pursued a bold strategy as the Trusted Disruptor in the defense industry. Based on our experiences, we have identified four policy recommendations to unleash American industry and make defense acquisition more efficient.