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THE FUTURE
Trends in the Defense Department’s
Science & Technology Funding
2
June 2023
First published in 2023 by NDIA’s affiliate, the Emerging Technologies Institute. 2101 Wilson Blvd, Suite 700, Arlington, VA 22201, United States of America. (703) 522-1820 © 2023 by the National Defense Industrial Association. All rights reserved. This report is made possible by general support to NDIA and Emerging Technologies Institute. No direct sponsorship contributed to this report. This report is produced by NDIA, a non-partisan, non-profit, educational association that has been designated by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization – not a lobby firm – and was founded to educate its con- stituencies on all aspects of national security. Its research is nonpartisan.
DISCLAIMER: The ideas and findings in this report should not be construed to be official positions of either NDIA or
any of the organizations listed as contributors or the membership of NDIA. It is published in the interest of an informa- tion exchange between government and industry, pursuant to its mission to bring industry and government together to engage in discussions of important topics. For more information please visit our website: EmergingTechnologiesInstitute.org Typeset and produced by Hannah Meushaw, Alexander Feeser, and Eve Dorris. Edited by Jacob Trask.
The Honorable Al Shaffer, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, ETI
Dr. Reed Skaggs, Chief Strategy and Business Operations Officer, Lewis-Burke Associates
ETI EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Dr. Arun Seraphin, Director, ETI
MEDIA QUERIES:
Habiba Hamid, Director of Public Affairs & Communications at hhamid@NDIA.org
INVESTING IN THE FUTURE: TRENDS IN THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT’S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY FUNDING
3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 4 Introduction �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 5 Methodology �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 7 Findings ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������8 S&T Funding Overview �����������������������������������������������������������������������8
S&T in the Context of the DoD Topline and
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation (RDT&E) ����������������������������������������9 Conclusion ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������13 Endnotes �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������14 Appendix A� Full-Size Graphs �������������������������������������������������������������15 4
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The NDIA Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI) has analyzed the Department of Defense’s (DoD) research and development funding data to help stakeholders throughout the policy, research and engineering, and business communities understand how the government is prioritizing cutting-edge emerging technolo- gies. This portfolio of funding, known as defense science and technology funding, or “S&T” for short, comprises the bulk of the Pentagon’s investments geared towards ensuring that the U.S. military has a consistent pipeline of leading-edge capabili- ties informed by the most recent developments in scientific and technical research.
ETI analyzed S&T funding levels throughout the twenty-first
century, placing them in the context of five selected eras of stra- tegic planning: Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Budget Control Act of 2011, the Third Offset Strategy, the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), and the 2022 National Defense Strategy.