Optimizing Defense Requirements Cooperation Among the United States and Its Allies

With the rise of China in the Indo-Pacific, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and other conflicts, the United States, the United Kingdom (UK), and Australia have realized that their defense requirements and acquisition processes are not optimized for current and future conflicts. Each nation has been making major changes to its defense requirements and acquisition processes. In the United States, the President directed acquisition reform to enable state-of-the-art capabilities to be delivered at speed and scale. Subsequently, the Pentagon announced the disestablishment of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System. In Australia, the updated One Defence Capability System has aimed to streamline requirements and approval processes, emphasizing centralized prioritization, minimum viable capability procurement, and off-the-shelf acquisitions. In the UK, the Ministry of Defence began implementing reforms of how defense is organized, referred to collectively as the Defence Reform. Part of this effort—largely initiated because of Russia’s war in Ukraine—is the improvement of defense requirements-setting and acquisition speed, resilience, and efficiency.

This period of reform provides an opportunity for the United States to leverage allied initiatives to enhance the effectiveness of combined forces and their ability to deter adversarial conduct. In this paper, RAND researchers outline the benefits of defense requirements cooperation; highlight areas of divergence among the United States, the UK, and Australia; and analyze how the benefits of cooperation may be optimized among these three allies. Although this paper focuses on the UK and Australia, these considerations are also relevant to prospective requirements cooperation with other partners.