HONOLULU —Nine months into the second Trump administration, an acting defense secretary from President Trump’s first term said he thought “we’d be a lot further along” toward a nimbler military.

“I’m seeing a lot of marketing coming out of the department, and not a lot of outcomes,” Chris Miller said during a panel at the AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference last week.

Miller, who served as acting defense secretary from November 2020 to January 2021, said today’s Pentagon leaders are taking “an approach where if you have experience inside the Beltway, somehow you’re suspect and not worthy. And what I’m seeing are a bunch of like, quote-unquote brilliant business people that do not understand the plumbing of the most bureaucratic, Byzantine organization, probably since [the] Byzantine

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