Twice in the last century, Congress has rewritten the rules for how America organizes its military. Each overhaul unlocked leaps in US combat power. In 1947, the National Security Act dissolved the War and Navy Departments to create the Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, and National Security Council. It was the first time America intentionally organized itself to manage a large, globally deployed peacetime military. That was DoD 1.0. (Later, the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 addressed deficiencies of the previous plan and growing interservice rivalries by empowering the secretary of defense, setting a DoD 1.5.)
American military struggles in Iran and Grenada led to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. This ushered in DoD 2.0, with modernized military commands that empowered the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, codified jointness, and established the combatant command structure that still shapes how the US military operates today. This reorganization improved unity of effort across services, making global postures more coherent.
Four decades later, the seams in that system are showing. Global threats no longer fit neatly within geographic boundaries. Adversaries move faster, coordinate better, and exploit exposed institutional gaps. At the same time, more global taskings with less forces and increasingly outdated bureaucratic models are straining force readiness and regional postures. More risk is carried, and yet, the Pentagon is using last century’s tools and policies to compete.
Congress must intervene to enable a third transformation: DoD 3.0. This reform would revolutionize how the legislature equips, organizes, authorizes, and funds the US military to better manage strategic competition, improve deterrence, and fight and win.
Why Change Is Needed
Governments and their militaries are struggling with the information revolution, as they try to break away from industrial age systems and institutions. The digital age is producing significant changes in societies, as well as the ways and means in which warfare is waged. Yet the Pentagon’s structure, authorities, and conceptual tool kit remain frozen in a Cold War mold—built for regional conflicts, linear escalation, conventional force-on-force fights, and prolonged procurement and modernization time horizons. Industrial age warfighting is three decades removed from relevance, and trying to organize, train, and equip a military for that era is like charging horse cavalry against an Abrams tank.
The global operating environment in 2025 is unlike anything the United States has faced, characterized by transregional adversaries, hybrid threats, and a convergence of nuclear, cyber, space, and conventional capabilities that threaten core interests. Digital technologies have “weaponized everything,” as every citizen can become a combatant due to the internet and connectivity. Adversaries of the US-led order do not respect geographic boundaries, nor do they sequence operations into isolated phases, which still influences joint and service planning concepts. Adversaries move and coordinate across domains, often below the threshold of war, aiming to destabilize societies and sway neutral countries.
At the core of this fraying order is an informal axis of authoritarianism. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly coordinate logistically, diplomatically, economically, and technologically. Their cooperation challenges what remains of the post–Cold War order. Chinese satellites enable Russian targeting in Ukraine; Iranian drones are used by Russia against Ukrainian cities; and North Korean troops deployed alongside Russian forces to push Ukrainian forces out of Kursk Oblast. Moreover, Russia militarizes the Arctic and deploys private military contractors across Africa for access to resources; China pursues debt-trap diplomacy in developing countries while signaling desires to retake Taiwan; and Iran trains and equips proxy forces all over the Middle East, especially the Houthis in Yemen. The United States has been unable to deter or punish these actions accordingly.
Meanwhile, US strategic means and domestic political will are contracting. America no longer enjoys unilateral freedom or generous peacetime defense budgets due to a national debt approaching $40 trillion in the next two years. Sustaining deterrence requires deep integration with allies and partners—but the American system for deterrence appears to be fraying.
Other trends amplify the need for reform. Antiaccess and area-denial weapon systems are growing more sophisticated, threatening the ability of US forces to operate. This problem is most glaring in the Indo-Pacific region, where China has weapons capable of striking targets out to three thousand kilometers, with sophisticated, space-enabled kill chains equally capable of jamming American satellites and military systems.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming warfare, yet, even with initiatives like joint all-domain command and control and AI task forces, institutional adoption remains uneven, and many decision cycles continue to prioritize traditional, human-in-the-loop processes. Nuclear modernization will stretch already strained budgets. Worse, gray zone tactics continue blurring lines between war and peace, exploiting gaps in US doctrine, titles and authorities, and political willpower.
Finally, the core challenge inside the Pentagon is not head count—it is output. Cutting billets without changing how the system works just means fewer people doing the same slow, redundant tasks. DoD 3.0 must go beyond shifting organizational charts; it needs to provide agile structures, proactive authorities, and resourced processes that foster a culture of execution. Incrementalism will not suffice when adversaries move faster, experiment more, and learn in real time.
Five Fixes that Congress Should Make
To meet this moment, the Pentagon cannot rely on cosmetic tweaks—it needs structural reform. Congress must usher in the DoD 3.0 era by reimagining how it authorizes and funds a force organized for global competition, empowered for innovation, and with clearly defined roles across services and partners.
The Unified Command Plan needs reform, eliminating geographic fiefdoms and aligning forces against global threat networks. It means giving DoD authorities and tools to compete in the economic and information domains where adversaries too often advance unchecked, to include closer interagency alignment. It means speeding up arms sales and training pipelines for allies and partners to be effective and interoperable. It means tying service budgets to joint interoperability—not parochial, stovepiped priorities. It also means rethinking service roles so that each branch plays to its strengths rather than duplicating others in search of relevance and more money.
Our five suggested reforms are not radical—they are overdue and must be enacted by Congress.
1. Kill the Map: Rewriting the Unified Command Plan
The current Unified Command Plan (UCP) divides the world like it is still 1995—into neat, geographic blocks that, due to a lack of great power threats, reward regional stovepipes and punish global integration. But modern threats play outside those boundaries. Chinese influence operations, Russian paramilitary forces, Iranian militias, North Korean weapons, and cartels all transverse various areas of responsibility in ways the bureaucratic military system is not built to track, let alone counter. Additionally, the seams created by artificially drawn boundaries become exploitable vulnerabilities and command-and-control dilemmas. For instance, three different combatant commands are responsible for the Arctic.
Addressing these deficiencies does not require scrapping the combatant command system altogether, but it means reimagining how global coordination occurs. Rather than anchoring operations in rigid geographic silos, the Pentagon should create cross-functional, transregional cells or task forces aligned to strategic problem sets—working alongside, not replacing, existing geographic combatant commands. For example, a globally scoped China Threat Integration Cell could synchronize actions across all geographic combatant commands, ensuring unified messaging, resourcing, and campaign design. These cells would augment geographic combatant command authorities by providing a dedicated layer of coordination without diminishing each commander’s core responsibilities.
An updated version of the UCP must improve how the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense can enforce or rapidly adapt global priorities, force management, and funding for specific threats in a more responsive manner than yearly guidance and mostly static budgeting processes. This would solve zero-sum funding games created by limiting oversight of transregional threats to coordinating authorities assigned to geographic organizations inherent to the current UCP while still avoiding the creation of a general staff, which is forbidden by US Code.
Congress has no say in the UCP, but must be brought in to force accountability, improve oversight, break regional fiefdoms that dilute strategic clarity, and encourage ruthless prioritization. Some may counter that Congress should not be involved in military command functions, but given its power of the purse, the UCP must justify its spending-to-threat prioritization to ensure the Pentagon is globally focused rather than perpetuating myopic regional interests. Already, the current administration of President Donald Trump is reexamining components of the UCP, meaning Congress has top cover to orchestrate reforms. We must abolish the idea that a single geographic combatant commander can own a threat that spans continents and domains.
2. Weaponize the Economy: Expand DoD’s Gray Zone Arsenal
Chinese state-owned enterprises, Belt and Road Initiative funding, and cyber-enabled coercion are reshaping regions in favor of China faster than American diplomacy can react. Worse, when pro-American countries in Africa or Southeast Asia ask for development investment, the United States usually offers workshops, symbolic funding, and token visits—while China offers a deal. If the Trump administration can follow through on funding the Lobito Corridor, in pursuit of extracting critical minerals and rare earths out of central Africa, then that might finally be a step in the right direction.
The Pentagon can fill this vacuum, especially as the State Department and other US aid agencies are defunded and dismantled. At the tactical level, US Army civil affairs personnel and theater special operations commands can be equipped and authorized for low-level economic and information warfare, augmenting interagency approaches to promote national interests. In fact, Army civil affairs has a historical track record of success in politically sensitive regions—and it can contribute again, especially when synchronized to enhance non-DoD activities and investments. Additionally, unlike the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where counterinsurgency doctrine often reduced the visibility of US forces’ role, having uniformed Americans, wearing the flag, aiding neutral or unaligned nations is useful for achieving influence.
This is not about militarizing development. Economic coercion has become a key instrument of authoritarian regimes in spaces where US agencies struggle to respond swiftly or lack sufficient mandate and resources. If the United States is serious about countering adversarial economic warfare, then the US military must play a role, given its reach and logistical staying power. DoD must have limited, targeted authorities to conduct low-level economic and information operations in contested regions through civil affairs, special operations forces, and military commands. Such use of American power via a joint, interagency approach can promote US national interests and achieve key objectives, aligning with proposals from the chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.
3. Fix Arms Sales: Move Fast or Lose Allies
The Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program is a Cold War relic that moves glacially. Allies and partners sometimes choose to buy elsewhere because of slow processing speeds at the Embassy, in Congress, or at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). This problem is so pervasive, the commander of Africa Command testified to Congress that “African partners consistently prefer U.S. defense assistance, but they often have to turn toward Beijing when U.S. timelines do not meet their urgent needs.” Direct commercial sales (DCS) can help bypass the slowness of FMS, but again, Congress would have to authorize the types of weapons and systems that could be sold via DCS.
Partner enablement must be a strategic priority, not a logistics problem. FMS must be streamlined by empowering DSCA, US embassies, and military commands with flexible funding by cutting bureaucratic red tape, minimizing contracting delays, applying common sense Leahy vetting, updating outdated notification thresholds, enforcing accountability for stalled or high-value cases, safeguarding exportability in defense contracts, improving interagency coordination, and making it easier for partners to acquire what they need in a crisis. Modernized FMS and DCS supports US industry, strengthens alliances through interoperability, promotes burden sharing, and ensures America does not fight alone in the next war. Given the Trump administration’s executive actions on FMS reform, Congress can further codify needed solutions.
4. Underwrite Jointness: Operationalize the Budget
Every military branch loves bragging about its jointness—until the budget hits. Then it’s every platform and data management system for itself.
Congress should enforce interoperability through the only language the services listen to: funding. From the concepts driving force design to the platforms and formations Congress funds and authorizes, they must all be more than a sum of their parts and work to solve the nation’s problems, not promote service specific interests. Joint processes must tie procurement and platform development to enforceable digital and operational standards—not more PowerPoint promises and buckets of money for the consultant de jour and DC think tanks filled with retired senior leaders that lost Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon’s productivity challenge isn’t cutting personnel—it’s unlocking output. Slashing billets without changing workflows hollows capacity. Eliminating redundancy, streamlining decisions, and scaling effective practices drive progress. Break stovepipes, accelerate cross-domain integration, and enforce measurable joint outcomes. Platforms must be interoperable by design, not as an afterthought. Every dollar should advance convergence, not perpetuate legacy divides between services, domains, and allies.
5. Service Roles Reimagined: Adapt or Fade
With growing convergence of threats, services must specialize—not compete. Congress must fix the strategic cultures of each service, stopping their rent-seeking approaches for bigger budgets.
To meet the demands of the future operational environment, specifically in the Indo-Pacific, a shrinking US Army should transfer maneuver forces to reserve components to ensure more fires, protection, sustainment, and deep intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—the real backbone of joint large-scale combat operations, are on active duty. The Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 is a model of tough, necessary change: smaller, smarter, more survivable. The Navy must reduce its dependence on carriers and invest in distributed lethality: more submarines, frigates, and unmanned assets. The Air Force must embrace effects over prestige: investing more in disaggregated airbases, autonomous systems, and cheaper fighters and bombers, not just the next generation of a more expensive, stealthy aircraft. Most importantly, the space and cyber communities must define how they support and coexist with the rest of the force, because they are not (yet) managers of violence.
DoD 3.0 doesn’t flatten service identity but ensures each branch maximizes its value rather than fighting for budget share in a zero-sum system, while mastering Title 10 roles. Services must divest from legacy systems or shift them to reserves. Congress must make tough decisions, like cutting massive shipbuilding projects (carriers) for smaller less expensive platforms or deactivating brigade combat teams, removing thousands of consumers from their districts. DoD 3.0 requires balancing oversight, resources, and service recommendations.
Innovate the Pentagon Now, or Lose Ground to Adversaries
In 1947 and again in 1986, Congress stepped in to reframe how America organizes for war. Both times, the Department of Defense wasn’t restructured because it was failing—but because it was falling behind. Each reform effort was painful, complex, and disruptive and came from outside DoD. But both left the American military better prepared to meet the threats of its time.
Now, forty years after Goldwater-Nichols, the United States is falling behind once again. Today’s threat landscape necessitates a DoD 3.0—a deliberate rethinking of how we plan, organize, equip, and integrate with allies and partners to prevail in competition and conflict. This isn’t about tearing down institutions. It’s about upgrading them to operate at the speed, scale, and complexity of warfare in the digital age.
This also isn’t reform for reform’s sake, but about making sure the next war, if it comes, is fought with the right structures, tools, and strategic mindset. America doesn’t need another commission. It needs bold, bipartisan action in Congress that reflects the reality of a world where China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are not just watching—they are coordinating.
A DoD 3.0 is no longer optional. It’s a strategic and operational imperative and America is already late.
Lieutenant Colonel Jahara “Franky” Matisek, PhD, (@JaharaMatisek) is a military professor in the national security affairs department at the US Naval War College and a fellow at the European Resilience Initiative Center, Payne Institute for Public Policy, and Defense Analyses and Research Corporation. He has published two books and over one hundred articles on strategy, warfare, and national security.
James P. Micciche is a soon to retire US Army Strategist most recently assigned to XVIII Airborne Corps. He holds degrees from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and Troy University. He can be found on LinkedIn and X/Twitter.
The authors would like to thank the legendary Dr. Francis Park (US Army colonel, retired) for providing extensive feedback on this article.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza, US Navy