Wealth & Money Quote by Stephen Cambone

Budget talk rarely sounds like ideology, but Stephen Cambone turns procurement into a philosophy of power. The phrase is a mouthful of bureaucratic varnish, yet the intent is blunt: stop spending to keep today running and start spending to wire the system together. “Horizontal integration” isn’t just a management fad here; it’s a strategic bet that the real advantage comes from connecting agencies, platforms, and data streams so they operate as one nervous system rather than a pile of organs.

The subtext is triage. “Sustain current capability” is the polite way to describe maintenance, readiness, and the unglamorous costs of keeping people trained and equipment functional. Cambone frames that as a lower priority not because it’s unnecessary, but because it doesn’t change the game. “Advance” does the work rhetorically: it casts integration as progress and anything else as stagnation. The careful construction “Where we have the choice” implies scarcity and inevitability, pre-empting backlash by presenting the trade-off as forced rather than chosen.

Context matters: Cambone’s Pentagon-era worldview was shaped by post-9/11 urgency and the push for network-centric warfare and intelligence reform. The promise was speed, interoperability, and fewer blind spots. The risk, unspoken but real, is that chasing integration can become an endless modernization campaign while basic capacity erodes underneath. It’s a line that smuggles a revolution into a spreadsheet: connectivity as doctrine, and maintenance as an afterthought.