§118c National Defense Science and Technology Strategy

Summary

The Secretary of Defense must create a National Defense Science and Technology Strategy. The plan must state the Department’s science and technology priorities, goals, and investments; recommend how the defense research and engineering enterprise should succeed in a time of strategic competition; and set a single approach for finding, ranking, developing, and fielding new capabilities and technologies. The strategy must match the National Defense Strategy and broader government S&T priorities, and tie priorities to key enablers like workforce, research and test facilities, partnerships with universities, industry, acquisition and operational units, other federal agencies, and funding. It must also guide acquisition timing, suggest needed policy or authority changes, show how to spot critical capabilities, inform leaders about new technology impacts, help close near-, mid-, and long-term gaps, support DoD and industry investments, and tell industry DoD’s technology priorities. The Secretary must make the strategy with relevant OSD offices, the military departments, defense research organizations, the intelligence community, industry and research partners, other federal research agencies, allies, and other appropriate groups. In making it, the Secretary must consider operational challenges in the National Defense Strategy, global technology reviews, current military needs, commercial tech, foreign near-peer capabilities, the need for a trusted industrial base, and near‑/mid‑/long‑term goals. By February 1 of the year after any fiscal year in which the National Defense Strategy is submitted under section 113(g), the Secretary must send Congress an updated strategy. Reports may be classified or public as needed. Within 90 days after the strategy is finished, the Secretary must brief the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on how it will be carried out.