by Dr. Marcus Jones

Executive Summary

This think-piece examines the implications and potential of the May 2025 directive reorganizing the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), a reform aimed at increasing agility, reducing bureaucratic friction, and focusing the Department of Defense’s test and evaluation (T&E) enterprise on its core statutory mission. The reorganization marks a turning point in the evolution of oversight and performance assessment for defense systems, one that invites fresh thinking about how best to align speed, innovation, and warfighter confidence. The urgency of this reform has now been explicitly acknowledged in Congress: the Senate’s FY26 NDAA includes a legislative proposal to establish an Alternative Test and Evaluation Pathway, initially scoped to software-intensive systems, that embodies many of the very principles advocated here: mission-focused evaluation, continuous feedback, early failure discovery, and decoupling from rigid documentation requirements.

Drawing on four decades of institutional experience, this paper explores the rationale for reimagining T&E as an integrated, continuous function grounded in mission context, powered by digital tools, and focused on fielding capabilities that are both effective and adaptable. It highlights how legacy structures, while built on good intentions, have often struggled to keep pace with the demands of software-defined systems, autonomous platforms, and modern joint operations.

The paper identifies key enablers that can help ensure the success of the current transformation: investment in digital test infrastructure, reinforcement of evaluation as a lifecycle function, preservation of transparent performance reporting, and the development of a modern T&E workforce. These steps are not about preserving legacy forms but about building a leaner, faster, and smarter T&E system aligned with emerging technologies and operational demands.

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