Retired BG Ed Barker on Underwriting Risk So Acquisition Teams Will Move

Ed Barker, Brigadier General (ret.), spent 34 years inside the Army acquisition system, including special operations units where mission failure wasn't an option and "no" was the beginning of the conversation, not the end. That environment forced him to know the rulebook well enough to seek waivers and reclamas through proper channels, and it shaped a career-long instinct for pushing acquisition teams past self-protection and toward what the warfighter actually needs, even when that meant telling senior leaders to stop active programs.Barker breaks down why OTA-enabled iteration (soldier feedback, live demonstrations, hands-on kit evaluation before any final buy decision) consistently outperformed major capability acquisition pathways locked to requirements documents seven or more years old. He explains how he underwrote risk personally to give teams the cover to move, and how Ukraine exposed programs that would not have survived contactResources: Carnegie Mellon AI coursesJohns Hopkins AI coursesNational Reconnaissance Office (NRO)Topics Discussed:Navigating a 34-year Army career across enlisted artillery, infantry, military intelligence, and acquisition leadership rolesRunning special operations contracting where mission stakes demanded knowing the rulebook well enough to waive itUsing OTAs and iterative soldier feedback loops to outperform legacy major capability acquisition pathwaysChallenging requirements documents and telling senior leaders to stop active programs mid-trackBuilding acquisition cultures that treat waivers and reclamas as standard tools rather than last resortsManaging billion-dollar procurement decisions under conditions of organizational agility amid constantly shifting requirements and techAssessing military AI education gaps and what separates leaders who apply it operationally from those who attend for opticsDrawing lessons from Ukraine on survivability gaps in programs built to outdated requirements