The pace of battlefield innovation far outstrips the speed at which militaries can evaluate and field new systems — a dynamic starkly illustrated by the conflict in Ukraine. The common explanation points to bureaucracy, and the popular fixes — trimming procurement red tape or relaxing autonomous weapons review — feel intuitively right. But bureaucratic reform alone cannot resolve the fundamental difficulty that machine-learning-based systems pose for testing, evaluation, validation, and verification. Legal and operational imperatives also make it unwise to shortcut compliance with domestic and international law.
Rather than simply cutting review, the United States and its NATO allies can streamline the process by embedding legal and operational advisers inside defense firms. These advisers would offer guidance at the company’s discretion, accelerating review without adding bureaucratic oversight. The core shift is architectural: instead of a single gate at the end of development, review becomes a continuous process running in parallel with design. This is not a panacea, but it is a concrete step industry and militaries can take together.
A clarification is needed, because “review” encompasses several distinct processes. In the United States, a law-of-war weapons review — a policy requirement since 1974 and now mandated by DoD Directive 5000.01 — asks whether a weapon could be lawfully employed. A separate senior-level review under Directive 3000.09 examines whether semi-autonomous systems meet policy requirements before development and fielding. Test and evaluation establishes actual capabilities. Each draws on the same underlying evidence, though the pressure is sharpest on the Directive 3000.09 review, which serves as our running example.
The Technology Gap
Ukraine has demonstrated that militaries can adapt platforms, software, electronic warfare, and doctrine on timescales of days. In the United States and NATO, this remains the exception rather than the rule.
The mismatch is most acute for AI and machine-learning systems. Fielded models gain value from retraining on current theater data, creating strong operational incentives to update. Yet the test, evaluation, verification, and validation that review demands can take longer than a contractor needs to ship the next iteration. Traditional procurement and review pipelines become not merely burdensome but strategically dangerous.
The problem is especially severe for models with millions or billions of learned parameters, where small changes to a dataset or training process can produce significant, poorly understood shifts in behavior. A review that begins only at deployment-readiness fails twice over: it leaves procurement authorities far behind the technological curve, and any defect uncovered forces costly rework across every prior iteration built on top of it.
Cutting Red Tape Versus Cutting Review
Two responses dominate the debate. The first is to reduce regulatory burden — pruning overly complicated processes, redundant rules, and requirements that mainly exclude smaller entrants. Some deregulation is warranted, since many rules are the residue of past failures. But the fundamental challenge remains: complex models must be examined, massive datasets assessed, and every change re-evaluated. Cutting tape alone cannot make review timely.
The second approach is to shorten review itself — relaxing standards to accept less predictable, less discriminating, or less controllable systems, or simply curtailing testing. Either would accelerate pipelines.
But such measures run counter to standing U.S. policy and are neither ethical nor safe for the warfighters who depend on these systems. The United States is not a party to Additional Protocol I, so Article 36 imposes no treaty obligation. Yet America has conducted law-of-war weapons reviews as a matter of policy since 1974, carried today by Directive 5000.01 and supplemented by Directive 3000.09 for autonomous systems. Both endure because the underlying judgment is sound, not because a treaty compels them. Law and ethics are force multipliers for U.S., NATO, and allied militaries, and trading them for speed undermines the readiness such programs are meant to secure. Thorough testing also establishes the critical system limits that become the raw material for field manuals and training.
Embedding Military Advisers Within Industry
Current reviews and the procurement regimes around them are too slow and risk leaving militaries technologically behind. But going faster can compromise safety and core values, harming readiness. The goal should be efficiency, not speed. The proposal is to embed legal and operational advisers inside industry to observe development, document challenges and solutions, advise on request, and compile a running portfolio of a system’s technical details alongside their ethical, legal, and operational implications.
This may sound familiar. The Defense Contract Management Agency maintains resident personnel inside contractor facilities, and both the law-of-war review and the Directive 3000.09 review are meant to occur at multiple points in a program’s life. But these mechanisms were built for a different era. Contract-administration personnel oversee cost, schedule, and specification conformance — not the legal and operational character of what is built. Acquisition is adapting to software timelines, but milestone-based review remains too infrequent. The proposal adds neither new oversight nor new headcount; it adds cadence and competence. Military advisers would be present continuously, focused on legal and operational questions, documenting for the reviewing body rather than the contracting officer.
One might ask how this speeds review if it appears to add more process. Documentation of earlier versions cannot substitute for evaluating the final AI system, since changes between versions can be large. But embedded documentation changes the review architecture. When reviewers know what changed between versions, what testing accompanied each change, and which model behaviors remained stable, reviewing a deployment candidate becomes assessing deltas from already-examined baselines rather than starting from scratch. Reviewers inherit running records and can focus scarce test-and-evaluation resources on what is new. Because military advisers compile that record, it is more likely to include what reviewing bodies need rather than what industry wants to highlight. Running assessments are not reviews themselves, but they give reviewers a ready-made first pass.
The proposal calls for two kinds of embed: legal and operational advisers. Legal advisers can flag development decisions that would render a system unprocurable — accepting data of unclear provenance or possibly compromised inputs, for example — sparing firms further investment in unfieldable systems. They can also steer designs away from legal obstacles to fielding. Operational advisers keep development aligned with real military needs and should sit high enough in the command hierarchy to understand formation requirements, yet low enough to stay connected to operators and veterans who can fine-tune designs. Together, they ensure the record supports later field manuals and training.
Neither class of embed replaces technical evaluators and their burden of proof. For the largest programs, embeds should be supported by the military’s test-and-evaluation community, either as a third embed category or as reach-back capability. Legal advisers set the documentation standards reviewers require, industry engineers produce content that meets them, and the military side vouches for completeness.
To safeguard review integrity, embeds should have no role in reviewing or procuring the systems they observe. Tying their career prospects to the thoroughness of their reports — rather than to whether systems are procured — mitigates conflicts and ensures accuracy.
Others have proposed the reverse: placing industry engineers inside military units to accelerate combat iteration. These are complements, not competitors. The faster engineer-in-unit cells spin the develop-adapt loop, the larger the documentation debt owed to the reviewing body. This proposal is how that debt gets paid down.
A Carrot, Not a Stick
Three industry objections deserve serious consideration: fear of micromanagement or burdensome oversight; fear that outsiders familiar with ongoing research could threaten intellectual property or competitive advantage; and reluctance to expose the messier realities of development.
Each objection has an answer. Embedded advisers are advisers, nothing more. Industry decides whether to request advice, share information, or confine advisers to their offices. The proposal accelerates review for firms that choose openness and creates competitive pressure on the rest, since guarded firms yield thinner documentation and consequently slower review — but it does not mandate coverage. Firms may restrict access, leaving the military’s insight no worse than under the status quo. That limit is deliberate. Contracts could, in principle, require firms to grant embeds access to development records, test results, and facilities, but that would turn a voluntary benefit into a compliance obligation. Any mandate must be weighed against the trust the voluntary model is designed to build.
Protecting intellectual property will require deployment rules tailored to domestic law. Embeds should remain with a single company as long as possible, never rotate between competitors, and a non-compete rule should keep former embeds out of the defense industry for a suitable period. These protections carry their own risk: long, exclusive tenure invites capture, in which the embed begins to see matters through the company’s lens. The promotion incentive described above mitigates but cannot eliminate this. Periodic independent audits comparing embed reports with how systems later fared in review would provide a check, as would pairing embeds with staggered tenures on the largest programs.
The third worry is that letting military professionals witness every trial, false start, and failure might undermine trust. This gets things backward. Openness and candor build trust, and in defense, trust is among the hardest currencies to earn. Embedded advisers give companies a running opportunity to be transparent across a system’s full lifecycle. Some introduction of military professionals to the realities of defense research may be needed so they understand how business and development actually operate. Showing how the sausage is made is only a problem if the company is putting garbage in it.
The military bears costs of its own: embedding requires billets from legal and operational communities already stretched thin, along with clearances and facility arrangements. It also raises the worry that the military might “pick winners” by choosing which companies receive advisers. No fully satisfactory response exists, but a sensible approach is to assign advisers first to companies where research is most apt to outpace review. The proposal also raises hard questions of accountability: if a system observed throughout development nonetheless fails review or fails in the field, who answers?
These costs are real, but so are the status quo’s: capabilities that sit unfielded for years, defects caught at final review that invalidate multiple generations of work at once, and reviewers left to reconstruct a system’s development history after the fact. The proposal can start small, with a pilot placing a handful of embeds in programs where development cycles most outpace review. Operational advisers can come from units with a stake in the capability, legal advisers from the judge advocate community, and technical support through reach-back rather than resident billets. Because embedded documentation reduces the load of final assessment, the net effect shifts effort rather than adding headcount.
Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Responsibility Are Mutually Reinforcing
A common view holds that law, ethics, and oversight hinder rapid development and acquisition of emerging technologies. This assumption misreads both the force-multiplying value of ethics and law and the critical importance of thorough testing, evaluation, verification, and validation for fielding systems that work. Without thorough documentation, field manuals and training rest on guesswork, and soldiers ignorant of systems’ limitations are likely to misuse them — to their own harm. “Move fast and break things” is sensible when breakage means a crashed app and a subsequent patch. In the military, the things that break are our own warfighters. Curtailing evaluation risks filling arsenals with systems that are technically capable yet cannot be safely or effectively deployed. That is not readiness.
What is needed is a review process that is efficient, not merely fast. Embedding military legal and operational advisers within industry keeps industrial partners informed of evolving needs, documents day-to-day trials and development solutions to accelerate test and evaluation, and builds cooperation for better systems and faster integration. It will not solve every acquisition problem, but it is a concrete step militaries can take to address the challenges posed by how fast new technologies are developed and iterated. While differences in legal regimes among allied states may hinder complete interoperability, better documentation tailored to faster review can improve each state’s internal processes. Most NATO members are parties to Additional Protocol I and carry an Article 36 obligation the United States does not, yet implementation across the alliance is uneven. A common documentation standard would give those states something their own obligations already require.
This architecture has a further advantage: it holds regardless of who runs government. Oversight is a pendulum. One administration loosens review to move faster; the next tightens it, re-examines inherited programs, or cancels systems with contentious records. A program begun today may span several administrations before fielding, so the greatest schedule risk may not be today’s review standards but tomorrow’s. Existing program documentation offers little protection, since snapshots go stale as systems iterate. A continuous, military-authored record fills that gap. It gives future skeptics nothing to hold a program up for and lets future standard-setters raise the bar without years of new testing. Continuous documentation gives each side what it wants without waiting for its turn in power.
