The staff gap: Or, why architecting national power starts with a better toolset

Why did one of the nation’s senior-most military leaders recently begin a new role as a program manager, a title typically reserved for professionals twenty years his junior?

In July 2025, the Senate confirmed President Trump’s appointment of Four-Star Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein as direct reporting program manager for the Golden Dome for America — a veritable modern-day Manhattan Project. His appointment — there has never been a higher-ranking program manager in history — underscores not only the importance of the Golden Dome program, but the criticality of the program management discipline in executing complex technical programs.

The operational success of the Golden Dome for America will be judged on its ability to shrink latency from sensor to shooter and close a cross-domain kill chain in an inordinately short period of time. Its programmatic success will be based on its ability to reduce lag in coordination and decision-making among dozens of siloed systems that straddle hundreds of stakeholders and thousands of individual contributors.

As Gen.Guetlein and others have alluded, Golden Dome, like other once-in-a-generation undertakings, is not simply a technical challenge, but one that will test our workforce and leadership in how they adapt organizational culture, exercise diligent systems thinking, and embrace multi-domain multi-stakeholder integration.

“How do I take capabilities that were built in stove pipes for different mission areas, among different services, different agencies, [and] bring those together as an integrated architecture?” Guetlein observed at a fireside chat hosted by the Space Foundation on the day of his confirmation. The capabilities, he shared, are well understood and their development, for the most part, is either underway or they’re already fielded. He’s now leading the effort to make those systems, and the people developing and operating them, seamlessly interoperate.

This century’s moonshots can’t rely on last century’s digital tools

Our nation’s most celebrated aerospace and defense achievements were not merely scientific and technological breakthroughs. They were equally, if not more so, feats of systems engineering prowess. The giant leap that marked the finish line of the Space Race and conclusion of the Cold War relied heavily on the nascent, yet revolutionary discipline.

Indeed, the Space Race was not won by machines, however exquisite and far-flung they were. It was a contest waged between two nations’ engineers to see who could more quickly and accurately diagnose and remedy problems.

Both nations had catastrophic failures in their respective programs. The winner understood and corrected them faster. It’s for this reason that systems engineers and program managers are the unsung heroes behind breakthroughs that reshape our world. Their techniques and tools dictate how efficiently a team can determine failure modes, anticipate and mitigate risk, communicate information to decisionmakers, and implement leadership’s intent.

These achievements were not just technical marvels; they were a symphony of coordination, integration, troubleshooting, and meticulous planning across extensive networks of engineers, scientists, and manufacturers. However, the technological advancements of the last several decades have far outpaced the original means of managing their development.

Why, then, are our 21st-century moonshots still being managed with 20th-century tools? By doing so, we are effectively treating skilled managers, engineers, and technicians in these programs like human APIs – requiring them to transfer information from one location and format to another – when more efficient alternatives exist.

Government programs have conflicting incentive structures: it’s never easy to optimize for both perceived taxpayer value and system performance, not to mention maintaining compliance and being innovative. So, with few exceptions, acquirers often opt for the smaller price tag, even if it represents a lower overall value. The resulting hidden costs are instead accounted for with their workforce’s time and an increase in programmatic risk. The true costs of these trades aren’t evident when they’re measured in hours by an organization that fails to recognize time as a limited resource.

Perhaps it’s time to stop building things internally that are half-baked and overpriced for their value. The government is mostly out of the hardware development game. The same case can be made perhaps even more easily for software, especially given the powerful applications commercially available today.

Equipping a modern defense workforce

As we look towards our next giant leaps – returning humans to deep space, building a first-of-its-kind integrated missile defense, and achieving artificial general intelligence – the tools of the trade must evolve.

Fielding those highly visible national programs is important, but along the way, we’ve lost focus on the foundational enablers that keep them on track. Known shortcomings, especially in support functions like security, IT, human capital, and other administrative functions, have all but atrophied in some corners of the federal enterprise and are now critical weaknesses for the rest of the workforce. There’s an excess of legislation and policy for acquisition reform and defense modernization, yet we still grapple with significant cost and schedule overruns. Most are not the result of unforeseen events; they’re systemic issues rooted in suboptimal management of finite resources. By nature, we’ve regularly and unknowingly prioritized process over product.

The solution to this paradox is not simply more oversight and regulation, but rather the provision of better and more seamlessly integrated systems for program execution and staffing. The same software that is ubiquitous in the private sector – learning and human capital management, program and project management, data visualization and business intelligence, collaboration and planning, and just about anything involving generative AI – is still woefully out of reach for the majority of the federal workforce. Spending money on the right platforms ensures that staff are effective stewards of taxpayer funds while optimizing their programs for performance rather than forcing them to choose between the two.

The need for better management tools has become even more imperative as the federal government undergoes significant downsizing and restructuring. As much as 8% of the civilian workforce at the Department of Defense and over 20% at NASA have attrited this year. As a result, more impact is expected of far fewer people. The only reasonable solution is to give people the long-overdue digital tools required to keep pace with today’s rate of technological innovation. Leaders need to remove obstacles to their teams’ success and preserve their bandwidth. Ensuring teams have the resources needed to serve the public is not only necessary, but a show of respect for both their time and the taxpayers.

The solution to inefficiency shouldn’t be to instinctively apply another body to the problem; it should be empowering individuals to do what previously required a team.

Chris Beauregard is the Managing Director of Washington Operations at Integrate. He previously served in roles at the White House National Space Council, the United States Space Force Headquarters Staff, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration.