Stop Funding Duct Tape

DoD Modernization is Burdened by Legacy Systems and Services

The biggest barrier to deploying new defense tech is attempting to integrate it with many systems and services that were designed, developed, and produced last century.

As the pace of change in operations, threats, and technologies continue to increase, we are burdened with decades old systems, infrastructure, and contracts. A significant portion of defense budgets, resources, and personnel go towards duct taping solutions.

The Department will spend more in the next two years modernizing the 1970s-era F-15C/Ds than it will on some of its most promising autonomous programs. The F-15C/Ds lack a clear mission. No stealth for its air-to-air role and is overkill for homeland defense. In the Iranian conflict, we saw three (superior F-15Es) shot down rather easily by friendly forces. It is unclear if it was a mix of air and ground defense or if they were destroyed by a single F-18 which calls into question their ability to support any role (i.e. weapons carrier) close to the fight.

DoD makes valiant efforts to divest of legacy platforms by retiring hundreds of aircraft for billions in O&S savings or decommissioning dozens of legacy ships in recent budget requests. Retiring old F-15s can save over a billion dollars over five years. Redirecting $5B of legacy IT enterprise equipment to AI and JADC2 would yield far greater mission impact. DOGE may have found >$10B in DoD savings.

As the Department develops and deploys new unmanned systems across the air, surface, undersea, and ground domains, one of the greatest limiting factors is integration with existing legacy systems and force structures. Should the Navy retrofit legacy ships to interoperate with and carry drones, or design new platforms and force structures that leverage the asymmetric advantages these new systems offer?

We don’t have a funding problem, we have a prioritization problem. Every dollar spent patching 1990s-era platforms, updating clunky systems, or sustaining low-value weapon systems is a dollar not going to autonomous systems, new major platforms, or key joint force enablers. It’s time to retire acquisition debt and ruthlessly prioritize.

DoW CIO Kirsten Davies at Defense Tech Leadership Summit

“Innovation is not interoperable, necessarily, with legacy systems, with old processes, with technology that’s no longer even supported,” Kirsten Davies, DoW CIO

The Hidden Tax of Legacy Systems

Most of these legacy systems don’t even show up on modernization roadmaps. They hide in the Operations & Maintenance lines, quietly renewed every year by pure bureaucratic inertia. The cost isn’t just money, it’s people. Entire teams exist whose main job is babysitting software that vendors stopped supporting years ago. Analysts burn hours on manual workarounds instead of feeding actual decisions. And trying to shove a modern data pipeline into a system designed before the internet? It’s like running fiber into a rotary phone.

Meanwhile China and other adversaries have an advantage that isn’t just new hardware, it’s the fact that they don’t carry the same decades of dead weight.

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Horizon Zero: The Navy Points the Way

The Navy’s CTO Justin Fanelli and PEO Digital have been doing something refreshingly honest. Their Investment Horizons framework doesn’t treat technology like sacred infrastructure. They treat it like what it actually is: a lifecycle. Horizon 0 is decommission. Retire. Turn it off. Not because it failed, but because its time is up and the cost of keeping it breathing exceeds any value it still delivers.

They even gave the effort a name that sticks: the Cattle Drive. Rounding up obsolete enterprise services and herding them toward the exit. It’s half technical, half cultural, and 100% necessary. Program managers now have a real framework and a mandate. You want money for something new? Show me what you’re killing first. That single forcing function is rarer in the Department than you’d think.

The principle underneath it is simple and powerful: savings from divestment should actually fund what comes next. This isn’t slash-and-burn austerity. It’s grown-up portfolio management.

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The Interoperability Trap

Legacy doesn’t just cost money. It quietly chokes everything new. Modern tools to include AI pipelines, cloud-native apps, and zero-trust architectures are built for loose coupling and APIs. Legacy was built for the opposite: monolithic, proprietary, tightly coupled. Every new capability therefore turns into a bespoke integration nightmare that’s expensive, fragile, and piles on its own technical debt.

Davies made this point in her confirmation testimony: we don’t just need to ask for interoperability standards, we need to enforce them through acquisition. There’s a world of difference. Nice guidance is a suggestion. Contract language is law. We’ve spent years choosing the former and then acting shocked when nothing talks to anything else.

There’s the cyber piece nobody likes to say out loud: unsupported legacy systems are basically open doors for adversaries. No patches. Ancient protocols. Well-known exploits. Keeping them alive is expensive and risky.

The future Joint Force will be built around integration, not platforms. Dynamic kill webs demand capabilities from across the vendor landscape to integrate with one another and deliver effects on demand. That’s an opportunity for innovative companies to disrupt those living for decades off legacy contracts.

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Three Things That Need to Happen Now

1. Make retirement a funded, measured activity, not an afterthought.

Decommissioning isn’t free. Data migration, transition support, contract wind-down, workforce retraining all cost real money and require real planning. The DoW should create explicit, decommissioning funding within portfolio budgets, tied to measurable retirement milestones. Ms. Davies intends to use budget certification authority to drive risk-informed IT investments; that lever should explicitly include decommissioning criteria. If a program cannot present a credible sunset plan, its sustainment funding should be subject to escalating scrutiny.

The newly established Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs) are uniquely positioned to drive this discipline. With responsibility spanning both modernization and sustainment across entire capability portfolios, PAEs have the mandate and the vantage point to surface what legacy costs in dollars, in manpower, and in opportunity, and to make the retirement case where program managers rarely will. PAE dashboards should track divestment progress as part of broader ROI analysis for mission impact.

2. Adopt a department-wide Investment Horizons framework, especially Horizon 0.

PEO Digital’s model works because it builds retirement into the same strategic planning process as capability investment. It’s not a separate sunset review, it’s part of how technology is categorized and managed from day one. DoW should mandate an equivalent framework across all major IT and digital portfolios. Every program should be required to place its systems on a horizon map, updated annually, with clear criteria for advancement or decommissioning.

PAEs should own this mapping function at the portfolio level, analyzing the full inventory of systems, monitoring lifecycle status, and reporting to senior leadership with strategies that treat retirement not as institutional failure but as deliberate portfolio hygiene. New PAE portfolio roadmaps and analytical tools should examine the full suite of legacy and modern capabilities to optimize investments, timing, and mission impact.

3. Tie modernization funding to demonstrated divestment and let industry help.

The most powerful policy lever available is a simple one: condition new capability funding on the retirement of a legacy equivalent. Before a new enterprise service gets programmed, show the system it replaces and the plan to turn it off. PAEs are the right mechanism to operationalize this at scale. They can identify where legacy sustainment costs are crowding out modernization investment, develop strategies to redirect those resources, and build the business case that connects retirement decisions to funded capability outcomes.

As we explored in Commercial Competition, DoW leaders can structure solicitations and incentives that explicitly invite industry to propose how commercial solutions could replace new development programs or legacy systems faster and at lower cost. A vendor proposing a modern, cloud-native capability should be able to make the case: here is what you’re currently running, here is what we estimate it costs you to sustain it, here is how we replace it, and here is the retirement plan. It changes the incentive structure to drive behavior in large bureaucracies.

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The department does not lack innovative vendors, emerging tech, or talented people who want to build something better. What it lacks is the institutional discipline to clear the field. You cannot plant a new crop without turning the old one under.

Legacy modernization is not a technology problem. It is a leadership, governance, and prioritization problem, and the tools to solve it already exist. Use them.

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