Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited Colorado space companies Monday and promised to cut bureaucracy within the Pentagon to ensure smaller defense businesses have a chance to compete for contracts. 

“If we are going to have space dominance and deterrence, we need to unleash every company possible,” said Hegseth, in a video filmed at True Anomaly, a company with headquarters in the Denver area. He also visited Sierra Space. 

He noted that the nation’s defense can’t be reliant on five companies and or sole-source contracts. Some single-source contracts have left the Department of Defense paying billions to one company over 10 to 15 years before a product is complete. 

“We can’t do that anymore,” he said during the visit that was part of his Arsenal of Freedom Tour. The visits are focused on rebuilding the American defense industrial base. 

“One of the biggest wars that we are fighting is against our own Pentagon bureaucracy every single day,” he said.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink emphasized a similar message Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Aurora, where he highlighted how the Air Force is reforming its contracting processes to encourage speed. 

New portfolio acquisition executives now have greater authority to manage risk and resources across their programs to bring new technologies to bear, such as new planes, he explained. So far, the Space Force has hired two of the new executives and the Air Force has five. Eventually, the Air Force will have 18 and the Space Force will have nine. 

Those executives will also have more responsibility for how much new planes or systems will cost to maintain once they are fielded, he said. 

When Meink took responsibility for the Air Force as part of the new Trump administration, he observed a clear problem with the defense industry. 

“The contractors were struggling to get to the production rates we had in place,” he said. 

He wants to see companies make the investments necessary, such as building new facilities to increase production rates. But the government also needs to commit to longer-term deals to support private investments, he said. 

Amid the public appearances, the Department of Defense told Congress in a spending plan released Monday it expected to spend the $152 billion allocated in a 2025 reconciliation bill this year, Breaking Defense reported.  

As part of that plan, $500 million is set aside for space launch infrastructure, and $7.2 billion will fund “development, procurement, and integration of space-based sensors,” the online military publication reported. 

Big investments in space are needed as the Space Force prepares for 2040, when it’s possible space will be dominated by autonomous technology that will sense, decide and act at machine speeds, Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, told the crowd at the symposium. 

A team within the Space Force has been dedicated to analyzing what that threat environment could look like so the small military branch can prepare for it. Most of the Space Force’s manpower is based in Colorado Springs. 

The analysis helped build a plan for the systems, units, people and supporting infrastructure needed to face the possible threats, he said. Saltzman expects the plan will be republished every five years to stay relevant. 

But he is not looking for perfect solutions from contractors. Part of the problem with fielding new systems has been the military’s countless requirements for new technology. So Saltzman wants to see solutions that will fill the need, rather than achieving perfection on paper. 

“I am extremely confident that we are more than capable of meeting these challenges head-on,” he said.