“Operational feedback should be treated as a strategic resource,” Barak Seener, an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, wrote in a report released Monday.
Barak Seener’s central thesis
Seener’s report argues that the Pentagon’s acquisition system must change to reflect how wars are fought now. He frames the problem not merely as a need for speed but as an organizational one: “Future military advantage will belong to organizations that can learn, adapt, and integrate faster than their adversaries.” That, he argues, requires treating software and operational lessons as ongoing inputs to strategy and procurement—rather than one-off outputs of a linear development process.
Lessons from Israel: operational feedback as a strategic resource
Seener points to recent operations involving Israel to make a wider point about the limits of tactical success. Describing an episode involving Iran, he said, “in the first couple of days, America and Israel together were able to decapitate the regime, eliminate their command and control, with this rapid tempo, this high velocity of strikes against a huge number of targets, which was unprecedented. And yet it made no strategic impact. Everybody was dazzled; they were awe-inspired at the impact it made…but look, the regime remains intact. Their missile capability remains intact. So this operational wowing effect that it has is not the same as having the strategic impact.”
From that example, Seener draws a policy lesson: battlefield spectacle and rapid tactical effects do not automatically translate into lasting strategic advantage unless operational feedback is captured and fed back into decision structures.
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See what we buildLessons from Ukraine and the Houthis: competition, decentralization, and commercial innovation
Seener also looks to Ukraine and to nonstate actors for different lessons. He says the conflict in Ukraine highlights “the strategic value of competition, decentralization, and commercial innovation.” In the same interview he added, “But look what Ukraine is doing in Russia. Look what the Houthis are doing, just by deploying mass.” Those short, pointed observations underline the report’s argument that distributed and commercially driven approaches can create outsized effects on the battlefield.
Software-defined warfare requires software-defined acquisition
At the heart of Seener’s prescription is a reframing of software in defense acquisition. “Software-defined warfare requires software-defined acquisition,” he writes, and acquisition models should “treat software as a continuously developing capability, rather than a completed product.” To match the tempo of change, Seener urges tapping commercial technologies already in the market—“particularly AI, software, cloud computing, autonomy, sensors, and data analytics.”
That framing shifts the acquisition conversation: from discrete platforms completed and fielded after long development cycles to capabilities that must be updated, iterated, and integrated on an ongoing basis.
Portfolio acquisition executives and the 2025 reforms
Seener acknowledges reforms the Pentagon began in 2025 and calls the introduction of portfolio acquisition executives “a good step.” But he stresses a critical condition for success: “the main challenge facing the American defense acquisition process is not simply one of speed. It is the ability to align authority, responsibility, and operational outcomes within a single decision-making structure.” He warns that “the effectiveness of the reform will ultimately depend upon the degree to which portfolio managers are able to exercise genuine authority over requirements, resources, capability trade-offs and program termination.”
In short: structural change without real decision authority risks preserving the same disconnect between acquisition choices and battlefield realities.
What this means for the Pentagon, procurement leaders, and technologists
- The Pentagon: must reconcile operational tempo with acquisition authorities—aligning responsibility and outcomes rather than only accelerating timelines.
- Procurement leaders: will be judged on whether portfolio managers receive “genuine authority” over requirements, resources, trade-offs and program termination; without that, reforms may be cosmetic.
- Technologists and vendors: should expect an increased premium on scalable, continuously updated software and on commercial technologies in AI, cloud, autonomy, sensors and analytics.
Seener’s report threads a clear, if unsettling, line through contemporary conflicts: dazzling tactical effects and long, exquisite development programs both can fail to secure lasting strategic advantage unless the system that buys, updates and integrates capabilities adapts to continuous learning. The decisive question his paper leaves squarely on the table is institutional: will portfolio managers be empowered to convert operational feedback and commercial innovation into real programmatic authority, or will authority remain diffused across systems that produce “operational wowing” without strategic outcomes?
Source: Defense One — Treat operational feedback as a strategic resource, new paper argues
