Mobilize is a prescription to save our nation. This book is a must read for anyone who gives a damn about our country’s future.

This is a visualization, above all, of speed. On the commercial side, time-to-market increased slightly for aircraft and decreased for cars. But on the government side, time-to-market absolutely exploded, diverging from the commercial sector in the 1970s and never looking back. The F-35 took more than 20 years to achieve initial operational capability—and it wasn’t even the slowest of the bunch. The troubled V-22 Osprey took nearly a quarter-century to enter operations.

In technological terms, 25 years might as well be an eternity. Twenty-five years ago, Windows 2000 was the state-of-the-art and the world was breathing a sigh of relief after Y2K. If your procurement cycle takes a quarter-century to complete, that means by default you’re fighting today’s war with yesterday’s army.

In the two decades after the Second World War, the United States moved fast. Very fast. Military aircraft projects took an average of five years from first contract to first flight. The trend was similar for other systems. It took five years for Bernard Schriever to build the Atlas, Minuteman, Thor, and Titan missiles. Hyman Rickover’s first nuclear-powered submarine was delivered in fewer than seven years. The list goes on.

So what went wrong? The Pentagon started breaking in 1961 when the Department of Defense and Congress embarked on a series of centralizing “reforms” that attempted to give planners greater insight into, and control over, the defense acquisition process. (Here, we’re using the term “acquisition” to refer to the entire lifecycle of a weapon or a system, from concept all the way to procurement and fielding.) The primary output of these reforms is new acronyms and endless delay. The acquisition process now starts with JCIDS (for Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System), where it takes the Department of Defense a couple of years, at least, to come up with the requirements for a new system, whether it’s an air superiority fighter or a pistol. Then, via PPBE (for Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution), it has to incorporate the new system into its budget and persuade Congress to authorize and fund the system. That’s another three years (add another half year for good measure, since Congress can’t pass a budget on time). Only then, with money in hand, can the Department of Defense initiate the contract. As the system progresses through development, testing, and fielding, defense contractors and program managers must comply with the 5000 series, which are directives that include process-intensive milestones and performance reviews against requirements conceived years ago. On average, it takes 17 years for a system to work its way through the dark triad of JCIDS, PPBE, and the 5000 series. At the end of this process, the military theoretically has a shiny new weapon or platform to use on the battlefield. Then our troops get to find out whether it really works.

But today, that six percent has ballooned to 86 percent. When Pentagon officials talk about the “DIB,” or defense industrial base, they aren’t talking about the dynamic, commercially focused companies that supplied the military once upon a time. They’re talking about a shrinking number of contractors, most of which live and die by their ability to get defense dollars...

So how did our military go from being supplied by hundreds of highly competitive commercial companies to a handful of lumbering specialists? As we will see, the Department of Defense became a very unattractive customer. Companies were forced to adapt in one of two ways. They could either transform into specialists, only capable of doing business with the government, or take their talents and disruptive engineers elsewhere—namely, to the parts of the economy that still resembled American capitalism. Most did the latter.