My Customers Are Running on Two Clocks

I spend a lot of time in customer meetings, and those meetings have split into two kinds. Not two kinds of customer. Two kinds of clock.

One is the traditional major-program path. It was designed for rigor, oversight and accountability, and it is still very good at all three. Speed was never the thing it was optimized for. In July the Government Accountability Office reported that the overall average time to deliver a capability has risen to over twelve years — and said that average will probably keep rising. Nobody in that meeting is happy about it, least of all the program office.

The other is a fast lane that did not exist in this form five years ago. The rapid prototyping pathways are meant to finish in five. Twelve years against five is not a difference in tempo. It is a different business.

That lane is real and it is funded. Contract obligations to nontraditional companies reached $122.6 billion in fiscal 2025, roughly double the $60.9 billion of a decade earlier, and about ten thousand new firms entered the defense market across fiscal 2024 and 2025.

It is also being widened deliberately. The Department of War issued its Acquisition Transformation Strategy last November alongside directives that rename the Defense Acquisition System the Warfighting Acquisition System, rework the joint requirements process, and push middle-tier acquisition approvals down to the lowest permissible level. The FY2026 authorization carries a title devoted entirely to acquisition reform. The declared posture is commercial-first, and speed is the stated measure of success.

Reasonable people disagree about how much of that survives contact with the institution. My customers are already behaving as though it will.

I will leave the acquisition mechanics to people who know them better than I do. What I can tell you is how it looks from a supplier's side of the table.

The primes are running both clocks at once

This is the part I find most demanding, and I do not think it gets enough attention.

A prime is not choosing between the two. It is carrying a legacy program with a twenty-year support horizon and a fast-turn program in the same building, often in the same division, sometimes with the same engineering staff. Those two programs want opposite things from me on the same day.

The legacy program wants configuration control, qualification evidence, obsolescence management and a commitment that what I ship in 2031 is identical to what I shipped in 2026. It takes months to decide and expects me to still be there in fifteen years.

The fast-turn program wants a derivative quoted in weeks, a modification accepted without a new program office review, and hardware it can put on a bench this quarter. It will decide within four-to-six weeks and it will move on if I cannot keep up.

Both customers are right. They answer to different people.

The neo primes have only ever run the fast clock

The newer entrants are a different conversation, and a genuinely enjoyable one. They move quickly, they are clear about what they want, and they do not spend much time on process.

Here is what I raise with them. The fast lane merges. A prototype that wins becomes a program of record, and a program of record brings the qualification burden with it — the evidence, the configuration discipline, the long support horizon. A company that has only run the fast clock has not built the muscles for the slow one, and it usually finds out late. I would rather have that conversation early than watch it arrive as a surprise.

What this means for a supply base

A supplier serving this whole community has to be good at two things that do not naturally sit together: qualification-heavy legacy work, and fast-turn derivative work.

Those are not the same capability. One is built on process discipline, documentation and the refusal to change anything. The other is built on responsiveness and a design approach that assumes change is coming. A company can be excellent at one and genuinely poor at the other, and most are.

We have the same problem

I should be straight about this. Everything I have just described about our customers is true of us.

Our teams run on both clocks as well, and often it is the same team. The people holding configuration discipline on a program with a long support horizon are frequently the same people I am asking to turn a derivative around in weeks. Those two demands land on the same desk, and they pull in opposite directions.

That tension is where a large share of our new product investment is going. Much of what we have in development right now is aimed at one thing: compressing the turnaround time on derivative and custom work, without giving up the discipline the legacy side depends on. I am not going to dress that up as a strategy statement. It is the constraint we are engineering against, because it is the one our customers keep running into.

We are not finished. The measure I would want to be held to is simple: how fast we turn a derivative, and whether the legacy side holds while we do it.

One question

If you are on the customer side of this, I would like to know which clock you think you are running on — and whether your suppliers have noticed. I suspect a lot of programs are running on both and have not said so out loud.

Sources

Delivery time and the five-year rapid prototyping target: US Government Accountability Office, Weapon Systems Annual Assessment: Requiring Mature Technologies Could Enable Shift to Rapid Delivery, GAO-26-108457, 2 July 2026.

Nontraditional contract obligations and new market entrants: A.J. Dilts, Is the Industrial Base on a Wartime Footing? A Progress Report, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 6 July 2026, reporting Federal Procurement Data System figures.

Acquisition reform: Department of War, Acquisition Transformation Strategy, November 2025, and accompanying memoranda announced 7 November 2025, including “Transforming the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System” and “Reforming the Joint Requirements Process”; acquisition reform provisions in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act.