Onebrief COO Adam Lackey, speaking at a Breitbart News Policy event alongside Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, described how the company supports collaborative planning and staff workflow across military echelons — from tactical levels to the Pentagon and the White House.
Lackey emphasized that credible military deterrence begins with planning. “If you’re not capable of inflicting violence on your adversary, you have no credible deterrence,” he stated. Planning, he explained, must be adaptive and continuous: “It is a repetitive and continuous improvement process.” This becomes even more critical when operations involve what Lackey called “actual kinetic events,” which, he noted, make situations “even more chaotic.”
He noted that Onebrief supports this mission by providing a collaborative planning and staff workflow platform used across military echelons — “all the way back up to the White House,” and spanning key operational levels from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command under Admiral Paparo, to components of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Lackey characterized Onebrief’s presence as “deep into the Army,” with growing footprints across the other service branches. “We’re just continuing to fight… to have the right, frankly, to be there and to be represented inside of our commands.”
A veteran himself, Lackey was critical of legacy defense acquisition systems and their effects on troops: “I got so much garbage handed to me going out the door. ‘Hey, take this with you to war.’ It was mass produced, and it’s not what you need.” He asserted Onebrief’s philosophy is to demand “cutting edge technologies that are the right technologies for the commanders,” adding that this must be driven by coherent policy.
Lackey explained efforts by the current administration inside the Pentagon are aimed at tearing down acquisition bottlenecks and bureaucracies, noting reforms like rewriting the FAR and increased purchases of commercial products. Still, he cautioned, “You replace old bad bureaucracy with new, slow bureaucracy.”
Still, challenges remain. Compliance requirements like cybersecurity standards can create high barriers to entry for smaller, innovative firms. “Now you’ve got to deal with all these cyber compliance requirements, which are very burdensome today,” Lackey warned. To address this, he called on Department of Defense partners like DIU and DARPA to focus on empowering the best ideas “at any level” and ensuring those ideas make it to the warfighter.
During the discussion, Marlow said that Onebrief and similar firms represent “venture backed non traditionals,” a phrase he noted he had heard, which he associated with companies that can innovate and move faster than the “very bloated” Department of War. Lackey pointed to legacy acquisition failures, saying, “You can look at many a program inside the DOD, where they’ve upfronted $80 million… and it was built on a contract that was vaporware.”
Instead, he argued, the value comes from companies that absorb their own R&D costs and prove their product’s worth to the government. “We are selling to the government what they need, and the government sees the value in that product,” he stated, adding that this model ultimately stretches taxpayer dollars further.
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