The U.S. defense enterprise routinely discards one of its most valuable assets — real-world performance data generated by systems in the field — according to a new paper that argues Washington must begin treating operational feedback as a deliberate strategic resource rather than an administrative byproduct of deployment. The argument, by Defense One, arrives at a moment when competitors are demonstrably closing capability gaps by absorbing lessons the United States is generating but not systematically capturing.

The paper’s central contention is structural: feedback loops between warfighters and the acquisition system are informal, inconsistent, and often severed entirely once a program reaches full-rate production. The result is that hard-won data about how weapons, sensors, and platforms actually perform under operational stress — data that cost lives and billions of dollars to produce — rarely reaches program offices, requirements writers, or doctrine developers in time to matter. The problem is not a shortage of information but a shortage of institutional machinery to route it where it can drive decisions. For context on how allied industrial capacity intersects with the same readiness pressures, earlier reporting underscores the broader stakes of systemic planning failures.

What the Paper Proposes

Rather than incremental reforms to existing after-action processes, the paper calls for treating operational feedback as a managed intelligence function — with defined collection requirements, assigned custodians, and formal pipelines into both the acquisition cycle and strategic planning. The authors contend that the current approach, which depends largely on informal relationships between program offices and unit liaisons, produces feedback that is anecdotal at best and invisible at worst. Formalizing the function, the paper argues, would allow the department to identify systemic performance gaps earlier, reduce costly late-stage engineering changes, and accelerate the adaptation cycle against adversaries who are updating their own systems continuously.

The paper does not prescribe a single organizational home for this function, but it argues the responsibility must be explicitly assigned rather than assumed. Leaving it diffuse, the authors write, guarantees it will be deprioritized whenever budget or personnel pressures mount — which is to say, routinely. Officials have not publicly responded to the paper’s specific recommendations, and Defense One’s reporting does not indicate whether any program office or service has announced plans to act on its proposals.

The Competitive Backdrop

The paper’s urgency is sharpened by the competitive environment. Adversaries including China have demonstrated a willingness to absorb and act on data about U.S. system performance, including through aggressive intelligence collection targeting American technology development. A CISA advisory issued in September 2026 warned that China-based artificial intelligence companies have been conducting what the agency described as industrial-scale distillation campaigns against U.S. AI firms — a pattern that illustrates how systematically competitors are working to extract and exploit American technical data, whether through espionage or open-source exploitation.

That context gives the paper’s argument additional weight. If adversaries are investing at scale to learn from U.S. systems — including by targeting the companies that build them — the failure of the U.S. government to learn from those same systems with equal discipline represents a compounding disadvantage. The paper’s authors frame this not as a technology problem but as an organizational one: the sensors, communication channels, and analytical tools to capture and process operational feedback largely exist. What is missing, they argue, is the institutional will to treat the resulting data as a strategic input rather than a paperwork obligation. Whether that argument gains traction inside the Pentagon will depend on whether acquisition leadership chooses to engage with it during the current budget and requirements cycle. Defense One’s reporting indicates no timeline has been established for any official review.