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.
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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."