Commercial technologies are enabling the U.S. military and militaries around the world to operate with greater efficiency, speed, precision, and lethality. The benefits of commercial capabilities can be particularly impactful given the defense industrial base’s struggles to produce at the speed and scale needed to outmatch China, Russia, and other aligned adversaries. It is largely for these reasons that President Donald Trump mandated the Department of Defense to preference commercial solutions. Congress also reinforced efforts to prioritize commercially available solutions in Section 1214 of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.Commercial technologies are also a driving factor behind increasingly rapid evolutions in the global threat landscape. Technologies widely accessible through commercial and open-source channels enable bad actors to threaten personnel, capital assets, and critical infrastructure for a fraction of the cost of “traditional” military capabilities, allowing adversaries to erode the U.S. military’s technological advantage.Amidst this backdrop of force modernization and technological disruption, the U.S. National Defense Strategy emphasizes the need for allies and partners to build up their own capabilities, thereby enhancing collective combat credibility and deterrence. In the event of a major conflict, the Department of Defense wants allies and partners to augment U.S. military capabilities, fight alongside American forces, and hold the line in other regions.Herein lies a problem: Commercial technologies are increasingly critical for warfighting, but the Department of Defense still indexes heavily towards providing allies and partners exquisite platforms and traditional capabilities. The Department of Defense should evolve its approach to security cooperation and further encourage commercial solutions — everything from commercial cloud services to dual-use hardware — to build allied and partner capabilities.U.S. Security Cooperation Strategy Centers on Traditional Solutions The Pentagon’s current strategy for building allied and partner capabilities centers on providing solutions currently or previously used by U.S. forces, predominantly through foreign military sales. The solutions provided to allies and partners are typically defense articles and services included on the United States Munitions List that are programs of record. We will call these “traditional solutions.”The security cooperation enterprise promotes traditional solutions for three main reasons. First, global sales support the United States’ defense industrial base. To that end, recent executive orders by President Trump reinforced the need to accelerate and align foreign military sales to support expansion of the U.S. defense industrial base. The administration is now pursuing significant foreign military sales deals, such as a record $142 billion agreement with Saudi Arabia for air and missile defense systems, maritime security, and more. Second, trad