As a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC), I had to log controls to stay current. Miss it, and I didn't stop being a JTAC. I just couldn't control aircraft until I requalified.
Nobody thought that was an insult. It was the whole point. The qualification was permanent. The trust was perishable.
We have no equivalent for the people we expect to transform the Department. We don't select them, we don't train them, we don't credential them, and we never check whether they've shipped anything lately.
I had to earn my beret every single day. We should expect the same level of dedication and excellence for those who reshape our entire department.
BLUF: Make the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) a weapons school for commercial technology acquisition. Select the mavericks, train them hard, give them a patch they keep for life, and make them stay current the way pilots and JTACs do: by actually doing the job. Then send them back into the services to teach everyone else.
What Weapons School gets right
The Air Force Weapons School and the Navy's Top Gun solved this problem decades ago, for tactics. Their model has four moves:
- Select the people with the temperament and reputation for it.
- Train them harder than anyone else in their community.
- Credential them visibly, with a patch everyone recognizes.
- Send them back to the squadrons, where they teach everyone else.
The fourth move is the one that matters. A Weapons Instructor Course (WIC) graduate doesn't stay at Nellis. They go home, become the squadron's weapons officer, and raise the tactical floor of every pilot around them. One graduate per squadron changes the whole force.
We've never built that for acquisition. We built innovation organizations and hoped the culture would leak out. It didn't.
DIU is the schoolhouse
DIU pioneered the Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) in 2016 and has awarded more than 500 prototype agreements through it since.[1] It's still the Department's front door for commercial technology. No organization has more reps running the deals.
That makes it the natural schoolhouse. It also keeps DIU small. The schoolhouse is how DIU proliferates its approach without growing into another bureaucracy: graduates do the spreading.
The idea isn't untested. Since 2022, DIU's Immersive Commercial Acquisition Program (ICAP), built with the Defense Acquisition University (DAU), has embedded acquisition professionals with DIU teams for a year,[2] and the Department is now scaling it with the same university under its new name, the Warfighting Acquisition University (WarU).[3] What ICAP doesn't have yet is a career system around it: selection, a credential, currency, and a plan for where graduates go next.
That's the gap. My colleague Ben McNally and I lay out the first version in War on the Rocks that published earlier this week. We dedicated it to the memory of Col Michael "Rags" Seltzer: a WIC graduate, a DIU portfolio director, and exactly the kind of officer this model is built to find and keep. He would have been its loudest champion. This post is where it goes next.
A course, then a tour
Who gets in. Operational experience first. You can't translate warfighter needs into a deal if you've never been the warfighter. DIU's own practitioners pick the candidates; your command endorses and is notified, but doesn't get a veto. (More on why tomorrow.) The door is open to the total force: active, Guard, Reserve, and civilians. Yes, this should include acquisition professionals such as contracting officers, finance specialists, and the like, but is certainly not exclusive. Just as many of DIU's greatest program managers (PMs) have been pilots, surface warfare officers or infantry grunts, the program is open to all.
The course isn't onboarding. It's a formal curriculum, run by DIU's senior program managers and contracting officers, built on real case studies and live deals. It isn't a stack of WarU certificates with extra reading. It includes an industry fellowship through Education With Industry (EWI), the Cyber & Information Technology Exchange Program (CITEP), or a revived Defense Ventures Program (DVP). As an example, Marque Ventures runs an amazing six week program that could serve as an example of excellent curriculum for defense exposure to venture capital (VC). You learn how a startup actually raises money, prices risk, and decides whether the Department is worth the trouble. Then you figure out how to make it real.
Then the tour. Graduates don't leave. They stay at DIU for the rest of their assignment as junior Tier 1 Pathfinders, running deals in left seat/right seats with Tier 2 professionals at DIU, and can be detailed to other innovation organizations, not merely the service organizations (Army Applications Lab (AAL), AFWERX, Marine Innovation Unit (MIU), NavalX, and SpaceWERX), but also to the other joint organizations like Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Office (CDAO), Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), etc., the way Top Gun graduates teach at the schoolhouse before going back to the fleet. The Air Force Weapons School is a long temporary duty; this is a full assignment. You learn by doing it over and over with people who've done it hundreds of times.
A permanent patch, perishable currency
The patch is earned once and kept for life. So is the special experience identifier (SEI). Neither one expires.
What expires is currency. A Pathfinder who goes twelve months without shipping a deployed artifact or a validated outcome isn't current. They're still a Pathfinder, the same way a non-current JTAC is still a JTAC. They just don't get the next Pathfinder billet, can't evaluate in Stage II, and can't teach until they requalify.
This is what keeps the program from rotting. Success destroys the selection filter that produced it: once an assignment becomes prestigious, it starts attracting people who want the bullet, not the work. Currency is the antidote. You can collect the patch for your record, but you can't stay current without delivering.
A small DIU standards cell, overseen by a joint board with every service represented, defines what counts as shipping and audits it. Outputs, not attendance.
Make it pay: two lanes
I went to DIUx in 2016 and was never promoted again. The single highest-leverage fix is making that tour a career accelerator instead of a career stop. Officers and enlisted need different levers, so there are two lanes.
Officers | Enlisted | |
|---|---|---|
Primary lever | The SEI, which can be tied to special and incentive pays | |
Why it works | Joint qualification is required for flag rank and weighs heavily at O-5 and O-6 boards. | The identifier matters more to enlisted careers and pay than to officers |
Board signal | Prioritized at promotion boards, not just tolerated | Prioritized for assignments and senior-NCO selection |
Joint qualification is an officer system, so enlisted Pathfinders don't get JDAL credit and don't need it. The working tour is what earns joint credit, which is one more reason the DIU time is a full assignment and not a long school trip.
The SEI is an Air Force term. The other services get their own equivalents: the Army's additional skill and skill qualification identifiers, the Navy's enlisted classification codes and officer qualification designators, and the Marine Corps' additional military occupational specialty (MOS).
Where graduates go
First, program offices. The initial cadre lands in Program Executive Offices (PEOs) and Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs). That's where the Department's acquisition overhaul needs them most right now, and where one person who knows how to run a commercial deal has the biggest effect.
Then, everywhere. Program offices are the first landing zone, not the last. Over time, Pathfinders go back to line units, wings, fleets, and major commands, the same way weapons officers end up in every squadron. A Pathfinder at a squadron is the unit's innovation belly button: the person who knows how to scope a small contract so it can scale to the enterprise if it works.
Once a year, they reconvene. The Pathfinder Summit runs alongside a Dual-Use and Innovation WepTac, so the people and the deals cross-pollinate in the same building.
The fix
Take what ICAP already proves and wrap a career around it. DIU selects. DIU trains, with industry fellowships built in. Graduates stay a full tour, earn a permanent patch and SEI, and keep their currency only by shipping. Officers get joint credit; enlisted get an identifier that pays. The first cohort goes to program offices; the ones after that go everywhere. Every piece of it runs on authorities the Department has today.
We've been staffing transformation by accident. Weapons School shows how to staff it on purpose.
What you can do Monday
- Unit commanders: You probably know who your maverick is. Encourage them to apply, and endorse them. Don't block them.
- PEOs / PAEs: Ask for ICAP alumni by name, and reserve billets for the first Pathfinder cohort.
- Contracting officers: Apply to ICAP. It's open now, and it's the closest thing to this course that exists today.
- Service personnel offices: Create the identifier (SEI, ASI/SQI, NEC/AQD, or additional MOS) and brief promotion boards to prioritize it.
- DIU: Wrap ICAP in a career system with selection, a credential, and currency, and open it beyond contracting officers to program managers, officers, and enlisted.
- OSD (P&R and A&S): Designate DIU tour billets as joint duty assignments.
- Congress: No new authority required. Report language can direct DoW to treat DIU tours as joint duty and to report on ICAP's expansion each year.
Works Cited
1 Defense Innovation Unit. 2025. Advancing DoD Operations With Software Acquisition Reform. March 7.
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