Pentagon Pushes Ahead With Plan to Overhaul Weapons Buying

The Pentagon is gearing up to invest in defense companies and offer grants, loans and other incentives as way of speeding up weapons development and attracting more competitive bids for contracts, according to a draft memo.

The undated and unsigned memo, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News, is the latest step in the administration’s goal of fixing a decades-old problem: the painfully-slow procurement process in which weapons are often over-budget, years late and sometimes obsolete by the time they debut.