Senior acquisition and Department of the Air Force leaders took center stage to discuss the department’s ongoing acquisition transformation and the need to put operational outcomes at the center of decision-making during the “Sustaining Forces Through Acquisition and Innovation” panel at the 2026 Air and Space Forces Association , Sept. 15.
The panel included Gen. Dale White , director, Critical Major Weapon Systems for the Department of War ; Dr. Erich Hernandez-Baquero , assistant secretary of the Air Force, Space Acquisition and Integration; and William Bailey , performing the duties of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
The panelists described a common goal: give acquisition teams the authority, expertise and resources needed to make informed decisions quickly and deliver capabilities that have a measurable impact on the fight.
Bailey said that means moving beyond a traditional focus on individual program milestones.
“We need to shift the focus to mission outcomes,” Bailey said.
Instead of measuring success primarily by whether a design review is completed or a test milestone is met, acquisition professionals should understand how those activities contribute to the operational effect a capability is intended to provide.
Hernandez-Baquero said the need for speed is particularly important in the space domain, where missions, technology and threats continue to evolve rapidly.
“We’re living in a very different environment,” Hernandez-Baquero said, emphasizing speed and agile execution as central to the Space Force’s acquisition transformation.
The Space Force is aligning its Portfolio Acquisition Executives around missions and empowering individual leaders to be accountable for delivering those capabilities.
White said the department’s direction to operate on a wartime footing should reinforce that approach. Cost, schedule and performance remain important, he said, but they are means to the larger objective of delivering effective combat capability.
A wartime footing also changes how leaders should think about risk.
White challenged acquisition professionals to consider how they would approach a problem differently if the nation were at war and what risks they would accept to achieve the mission.
But taking more risk does not mean taking reckless risks.
“Fail forward, you don’t fail recklessly,” White said, stressing the importance of expertise in understanding the risks associated with decisions.
Hernandez-Baquero said risk management should be a primary function of an acquisition professional. Rather than simply tracking performance against a plan, program leaders should continually identify and manage risks that could prevent them from achieving the mission.
Bailey said acquisition professionals also should not wait for perfect requirements, additional staffing or new funding before addressing a problem.
“If I have a problem, I need to move out on it,” Bailey said.
Senior leaders, the panelists said, must create the conditions for that behavior by delegating authority and removing unnecessary barriers, while leaders in the field must embrace the responsibility that comes with that authority.
For the Space Force, that transformation also means finding faster ways to move promising technology into operational capabilities.
Hernandez-Baquero announced during the panel that the Space Force will establish a Technology Portfolio Executive who will report directly to him and serve as a peer to the service’s Portfolio Acquisition Executives. The executive will focus on identifying promising technologies and creating pathways for them to transition into acquisition portfolios.
The announcement reflects a broader challenge discussed throughout the panel: preventing promising technologies from stalling between development, prototyping and production.
White said the department must make difficult decisions earlier in the process.
“We can’t carry everything to prototype. We can’t carry everything to production,” White said.
Instead, leaders need to identify which technologies provide the greatest mission value and ensure those capabilities can transition into production at the necessary rate and scale. That requires greater decision velocity.
The same principle applies to the defense industrial base.
White emphasized that deterrence depends not only on advanced technology, but also on the ability to manufacture it. Hernandez-Baquero said the department is working to create more stable demand signals for industry through tools such as multiyear procurements while increasing opportunities for commercial solutions.
The panelists also called for a less transactional relationship between government and industry.
Bailey challenged industry partners to examine whether their business models are keeping pace with the department’s effort to increase speed, scale and resilience.
“We are sending out the largest signal for change that I’ve seen in my entire career,” Bailey said. “We need you to meet us there.”
Ultimately, the panelists said acquisition transformation will succeed when these principles become part of the everyday culture across the force.
For acquisition professionals, that means understanding the mission they support, becoming experts in their fields, actively managing risk and using their authorities to move with urgency.
Hernandez-Baquero challenged the audience to start with a simple question: What mission outcome will my capability deliver?
“If you don’t know the answer to that, start asking questions up your chain and work it,” he said.
The objective, the panelists said, is an acquisition enterprise capable of moving at the speed of the mission while giving its people the expertise and authority needed to deliver combat capability.