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The U.S. Department of Defense is racing to rebuild itself for a new kind of warfare. Guided by the stark reality that China and Russia have been rapidly modernizing their militaries, the Pentagon has launched one of the most ambitious technological transformations in its history.
The Defense Department is fundamentally changing how it develops, acquires, and fields technology to deter conflict and win on future battlefields where speed and connectivity matter more than raw firepower.
The Strategic Wake-Up Call
China Sets the Pace
The driving force behind this transformation is spelled out clearly in the 2022 National Defense Strategy. For the first time, this strategy was developed in a fully integrated way, incorporating nuclear posture and missile defense reviews to ensure tight links between strategy and resources.
The strategy explicitly identifies the People’s Republic of China as the “pacing challenge” for the Department, meaning China’s military advancements set the tempo and scale for the DoD’s own development efforts.
The document notes that the PRC is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.” Russia is also identified as an “acute threat,” particularly following its invasion of Ukraine.
Integrated Deterrence
In response to this environment, the strategy puts forward “integrated deterrence” as its central concept. This represents a significant evolution from traditional deterrence, which often focused primarily on the threat of military retaliation.
Integrated deterrence involves developing and combining U.S. strengths to maximum effect by working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, other instruments of national power, and an unmatched network of alliances and partnerships.
The goal is ensuring potential foes understand the “folly of aggression” by convincing them that the costs of their actions will far outweigh any perceived benefits.
Technology is a central pillar of this concept, enabling deterrence through denial—developing capabilities like long-range strike, undersea, and hypersonic systems to make it physically difficult for adversaries to achieve their objectives—and resilience—ensuring the U.S. can withstand and fight through attacks on its forces or infrastructure.
Fixing a Broken System
A recurring theme throughout the DoD’s modernization effort is the acknowledgment that its own bureaucracy has become a national security liability. A 2025 Presidential Executive Order stated bluntly that the defense acquisition system “does not provide the speed and flexibility our Armed Forces need to have decisive advantages in the future.”
The order called for a “comprehensive overhaul” of the “antiquated” process. This reform effort aims squarely at closing the infamous “valley of death”—the gap where promising technologies developed in government labs or by small businesses fail to transition into major programs and get fielded to warfighters.
New Acquisition Pathways
The core tenets of reform are speed, flexibility, and execution. The Pentagon is mandating use of flexible acquisition frameworks like the Software Acquisition Pathway and the Middle Tier of Acquisition pathway, designed to deliver capabilities in months or a few years rather than the decade-plus timelines of traditional programs.
Commercial Innovation
The Pentagon is prioritizing flexible contracting tools like Other Transaction Agreements and Commercial Solutions Openings. These tools allow the DoD to bypass some rigid regulations of the traditional contracting system and work more easily with non-traditional defense companies, startups, and commercial innovators.
The Defense Innovation Unit has used these authorities to award over 500 contracts, with 88% going to non-traditional vendors.
Cultural Change
The reform effort also seeks to change performance metrics for the DoD’s acquisition workforce, incentivizing risk-taking and rewarding program managers who deliver capabilities quickly, even if they’re not 100% perfect initially.
This embraces an iterative approach where a “minimum viable product” is fielded quickly and then improved over time based on warfighter feedback.
The Technology Roadmap: 14 Critical Areas
To guide its vast research and development enterprise, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering has identified 14 Critical Technology Areas. These areas serve as the strategic roadmap for DoD investment, experimentation, and prototyping.
This portfolio represents a deliberate strategy that balances different types of technological risk and opportunity. The areas are grouped into three strategic pillars:
Seed Areas of Emerging Opportunity are high-risk, high-reward fields where the science is still nascent and the DoD aims to drive foundational discovery to prevent future technological surprise.
Effective Adoption Areas are domains where the commercial sector is often the primary driver of innovation. Here, the DoD’s challenge is less about invention and more about being a “fast-follower”—rapidly and securely adapting commercial technologies for military use.
Defense-Specific Areas are uniquely military domains where there’s little to no commercial market. The DoD must lead and fund nearly all development in these areas.
The Complete Technology Portfolio
| Technology Area | Brief Description |
|---|---|
| Seed Areas of Emerging Opportunity | |
| Biotechnology | Using living systems and synthetic biology for new capabilities, from advanced materials and fuels to enhanced medical treatments and sensors |
| Quantum Science | Harnessing quantum mechanics for revolutionary advances in computing, ultra-secure communications, and highly precise sensing and timing |
| FutureG Wireless | Developing next-generation (beyond 5G) wireless technologies to ensure secure, high-speed connectivity for a networked military |
| Advanced Materials | Discovering and manufacturing materials with novel properties, such as higher strength, lighter weight, and extreme temperature resistance |
| Effective Adoption Areas | |
| Trusted AI and Autonomy | Engineering intelligent and autonomous systems that are reliable, effective, and ethically aligned with DoD principles |
| Integrated Network Systems-of-Systems | Creating a fully networked force where any sensor can connect to any shooter across all domains |
| Microelectronics | Designing, manufacturing, and securing the advanced computer chips that power every modern military system |
| Space Technology | Developing and deploying resilient space-based capabilities for communication, sensing, and navigation |
| Renewable Energy Generation & Storage | Enhancing energy resilience for military installations and improving operational endurance through new power sources and advanced batteries |
| Advanced Computing and Software | Modernizing software acquisition and development practices and leveraging high-performance computing for modeling and simulation |
| Human-Machine Interfaces | Designing intuitive ways for warfighters to control and team with increasingly complex and autonomous systems |
| Defense-Specific Areas | |
| Directed Energy | Developing weapons that use high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves to engage targets at the speed of light |
| Hypersonics | Creating offensive weapons that can fly at speeds greater than Mach 5 with high maneuverability |
| Integrated Sensing and Cyber | Fusing data from a wide array of sensors with cyber operations to create a comprehensive and resilient understanding of the battlespace |
The Hypersonic Arms Race
Among the most publicized of the DoD’s modernization priorities is the pursuit of hypersonic weapons—ultra-fast, maneuverable missiles designed to overcome advanced enemy air defenses and strike high-value, time-critical targets anywhere in the world.
The strategic urgency to field these systems is driven by reports that peer competitors like China and Russia have already deployed their own versions, creating a perceived gap in U.S. capabilities.
Speed Plus Maneuverability
Hypersonic weapons are defined as platforms that travel at speeds of at least Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound—roughly 3,800 miles per hour. While ballistic missiles also reach these speeds, what distinguishes hypersonic weapons is their ability to maneuver within the atmosphere.
This makes their flight paths unpredictable and extremely difficult for traditional missile defense systems to intercept.
The DoD is primarily developing two types:
Hypersonic Glide Vehicles are unpowered vehicles launched from a rocket to high altitude. After detaching from the booster, they glide to their target at hypersonic speeds, performing maneuvers along the way.
Hypersonic Cruise Missiles are powered throughout their flight by advanced, high-speed, air-breathing engines known as scramjets (supersonic combustion ramjets).
The Joint Army-Navy Program
In an effort to accelerate development and reduce costs, the Army and Navy have partnered to create a common hypersonic missile, including a shared glide body and booster. This “All Up Round” will be fielded in two distinct systems:
Army Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon: “Dark Eagle”
This is a ground-based, road-mobile system designed to be launched from a Transporter Erector Launcher. An LRHW battery consists of four launchers (with two missiles each), a command-and-control vehicle, and support vehicles.
Its primary mission is to provide a strategic strike capability to defeat adversary anti-access/area denial defenses. The Army has already delivered the ground equipment for the first battery to the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.
Navy Conventional Prompt Strike
This is the sea-based variant of the common missile. The Navy plans to first deploy CPS on its Zumwalt-class destroyers before integrating it into its Virginia-class submarines.
To ensure safety on a ship, the Navy has developed and successfully tested a “cold-gas” launch system that ejects the missile from its launch tube before the powerful rocket booster ignites.
Air Force: The Scramjet Path
The Air Force is pursuing its own air-launched hypersonic capabilities, most notably the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, a scramjet-powered weapon being developed by Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
Much of the foundational science behind these service programs comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For decades, DARPA has pushed the boundaries of high-speed flight with programs like:
Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept: A recently completed joint program with the Air Force that successfully demonstrated critical technologies for an affordable, air-launched scramjet cruise missile.
Materials Architectures and Characterization for Hypersonics: An ongoing program focused on developing new materials and thermal management systems that can withstand the extreme temperatures and pressures experienced at Mach 5+.
Tactical Boost Glide: A program that developed and demonstrated technologies for air-launched HGV systems, building on lessons learned from earlier test vehicles.
Development Challenges
Despite being a top modernization priority, the path to fielding operational hypersonic weapons has been fraught with difficulty. The joint Army-Navy program has experienced a series of highly public test failures and delays, including a scrubbed test in March 2023 and another failure in June 2022.
While a successful end-to-end flight test was conducted in late 2024, these setbacks have delayed the planned fielding of the first operational missiles.
The Government Accountability Office has documented these struggles, noting in a June 2025 report that the Army’s LRHW program has seen its costs increase by $150 million due to testing issues and subsequent investigations.
The Air Force’s HACM program is also behind schedule, forcing a reduction in the number of planned flight tests from seven to five.
These challenges underscore the immense technical difficulty of hypersonic flight. Shielding sensitive electronics and predicting aerodynamics at temperatures that can exceed 3,000° Fahrenheit requires extensive, and expensive, flight testing where failure is often part of the learning process.
The Thinking Battlefield: AI and Autonomous Systems
Artificial Intelligence and autonomy represent perhaps the most transformative and far-reaching of the DoD’s modernization priorities. No longer the domain of science fiction, AI is being integrated into nearly every facet of the military enterprise.
The Pentagon’s vision is to move beyond AI as a simple tool for automation and toward true human-machine teaming, where intelligent systems act as trusted partners to warfighters, augmenting their cognitive abilities and accelerating decision-making speed.
Project Maven: The AI Pathfinder
The flagship effort that ignited the DoD’s modern AI push is Project Maven, officially known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team. Launched in 2017, its initial goal was to use machine learning algorithms to automatically scan, detect, and track objects of interest in the vast amounts of full-motion video collected by surveillance drones.
This was intended to relieve human analysts from the tedious and time-consuming task of watching thousands of hours of footage.
Maven was designed to be a pathfinder, proving that the DoD could rapidly develop and field AI capabilities by partnering with the commercial tech sector. In 2022, operational control of key elements of the program was transferred to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, signaling its maturation from experiment to institutionalized capability.
The user-facing platform, the Maven Smart System developed by Palantir, provides a common operating picture that fuses data and displays AI-detected targets to warfighters. The system has seen explosive growth, with its user base more than doubling to over 20,000 in early 2025.
Maven isn’t just a lab experiment. It has been used in live-fire exercises like “Scarlet Dragon” to dramatically shorten the “kill chain”—the process of detecting, identifying, and engaging a target—and has been deployed in real-world operations to support U.S. forces.
The Ethics Framework
The rapid advancement of AI has raised profound ethical and legal questions, particularly regarding the use of autonomy in weapon systems. The DoD’s foundational policy in this area is DoD Directive 3000.09, “Autonomy in Weapon Systems”.
First issued in 2012 and significantly updated in January 2023, the directive establishes the framework for responsible development and use of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons.
The core principle is ensuring that commanders and operators can exercise “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” It doesn’t ban Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems—defined as systems that can independently select and engage targets without further human intervention—but it does establish a rigorous senior-level review, testing, and validation process.
The 2023 update explicitly links this process to the DoD’s five AI Ethical Principles: Responsible, Equitable, Traceable, Reliable, and Governable. This requirement reflects a deep-seated commitment to ensuring that even the most advanced AI-enabled systems operate in a manner consistent with U.S. law, policy, and values.
DARPA’s AI Frontier
While the services focus on fielding current AI technologies, DARPA is focused on inventing the next generation. Building on its 60-year history of AI research, the agency’s “AI Next” campaign aims to move beyond today’s pattern-recognition systems toward “third-wave AI,” where machines possess contextual reasoning and can function as true partners to humans.
Key DARPA programs are tackling the fundamental challenges of making AI trustworthy and reliable:
Explainable AI: This completed program sought to create AI systems that can explain their decisions and rationale to human users, a critical component for building trust and enabling effective management of autonomous partners.
Artificial Intelligence Quantified: This program is developing the mathematical foundations and rigorous testing methods needed to guarantee an AI system’s capabilities and limitations, moving beyond simple performance metrics to provide true confidence in their behavior in high-stakes situations.
AI Forward: DARPA’s newest initiative explores new research directions to ensure future AI systems are trustworthy, focusing on foundational theory, robust AI engineering, and effective human-AI teaming.
The Implementation Challenge
Despite technological progress, the DoD faces a massive institutional battle in its quest to become “AI ready.” In its 2021 final report, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence delivered a stark warning: “America is not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era.”
The commission identified the government’s “human talent deficit” as the “single greatest inhibitor” to fielding AI-enabled technologies and called for dramatic increases in R&D funding, creation of a Digital Service Academy, and immigration reform to recruit and retain top AI talent.
Government Accountability Office reports have reinforced these findings. A December 2023 GAO report found that the DoD cannot fully identify who is part of its AI workforce or which positions require AI skills, making strategic workforce planning nearly impossible.
Another GAO report noted that while many DoD components are acquiring AI, the department lacks overarching guidance on how to do so consistently and effectively, creating risks of fragmented and inefficient efforts.
This reveals a critical disconnect: while pockets of excellence like Project Maven and DARPA are pushing the technological envelope, the broader institution is struggling to build the human capital, policies, and processes needed to adopt AI at the scale required for strategic competition.
The Connected Battlefield: JADC2 and Networking
The ultimate goal of the DoD’s modernization effort is creating a fully networked force, where information flows seamlessly across every domain of warfare—land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace—and between U.S. forces and their allies.
This vision is encapsulated in Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control. JADC2 isn’t a single piece of hardware but rather an ambitious strategy to connect every sensor to every shooter, leveraging a “combat cloud” of data and artificial intelligence to enable commanders to make faster, better decisions than any adversary.
Breaking Down the Silos
The core idea of JADC2 is to break down the traditional information silos that separate the military services and their platforms. For decades, an Air Force jet, a Navy ship, and an Army ground unit might all see a piece of the battlefield, but they often couldn’t share that information quickly or easily.
JADC2 aims to change this by creating a cloud-like environment where data from any sensor—whether on a satellite, a drone, a ship, or a soldier’s helmet—is immediately available to any “shooter” or decision-maker in the network.
This data-centric approach is intended to move the military away from “swivel chair” analysis, where an operator has to manually pull data from multiple different screens and systems, to a truly integrated picture of the battlespace.
By applying AI and machine learning algorithms to this vast pool of data, JADC2 promises to automate target recognition, recommend the optimal weapon for an engagement, and dramatically accelerate the speed of command and control.
The DoD requested over $1.4 billion for JADC2-related activities in its fiscal year 2025 budget, underscoring its importance.
Service Contributions
While JADC2 is a joint concept, each military service is responsible for developing its own key components that will eventually plug into the larger architecture:
Army: Project Convergence
This is the Army’s primary contribution, best described as a campaign of continuous, hands-on experimentation. At large-scale events like Project Convergence Capstone, the Army brings together soldiers, equipment, and joint and multinational partners to test and refine new technologies and concepts in live, operational environments.
These experiments focus on data-driven decision making and integrating effects across all domains.
Air Force: Advanced Battle Management System
ABMS is the Air Force’s effort to build the technical backbone for its part of JADC2, which it calls the DAF BATTLE NETWORK. The goal is ensuring that its aircraft, command centers, and space assets can seamlessly share data to execute missions.
Navy: Project Overmatch
This is the Navy’s initiative to develop the networks, infrastructure, and tools needed for naval forces to operate in a distributed and highly connected manner. It aims to link ships, submarines, aircraft, and unmanned systems to deliver lethal and non-lethal effects from any platform in the fleet.
The Space Backbone
The global connectivity required for JADC2 will rely heavily on a new generation of space systems. The Space Development Agency is building the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a constellation of hundreds of small, relatively inexpensive satellites in low-Earth orbit.
This proliferated architecture is designed to be more resilient than traditional, exquisite satellites; an adversary would have to disable hundreds of satellites to degrade the network, rather than just a few.
The PWSA consists of two primary layers:
The Transport Layer is a mesh network of data-relay satellites that use optical (laser) links to pass huge amounts of information around the globe with very low latency. This is the communications backbone of JADC2.
The Tracking Layer consists of satellites equipped with advanced infrared sensors to provide global, persistent detection and tracking of advanced missile threats, including hypersonic weapons.
The PWSA is being deployed in two-year “tranches.” While the initial demonstration satellites are on orbit, the first operational layer has faced delays due to supply chain bottlenecks for critical components like optical inter-satellite links.
Ground Networks: 5G and Beyond
On the ground, the DoD is leveraging fifth-generation (5G) and developing future-generation (FutureG) wireless technologies to provide the high-speed, low-latency connectivity needed for modern operations.
The DoD’s strategy involves:
Deploying Private 5G Networks for mission-critical operations or in areas where commercial networks are unavailable or insecure. The DoD will build its own private, standalone 5G networks tailored to unique security and performance needs.
Leveraging Commercial 5G to accelerate the rollout of commercial 5G on bases to support routine mission needs and improve quality of life for personnel.
Promoting Open RAN technology allows for interoperability between equipment from different vendors, preventing the DoD from being locked into single proprietary systems and allowing for greater flexibility and security.
These networks will enable new capabilities, from “smart warehouses” that automate logistics to immersive AR/VR training environments and command and control of vast numbers of unmanned systems and sensors.
Implementation Challenges
Despite the ambitious vision, the GAO has raised significant concerns about JADC2 management. A 2025 report found that after six years, the DoD has yet to establish a clear framework to guide investments or track progress toward its goals.
The report warned that in the absence of clear, top-down direction, the military services are pursuing their own projects “largely in isolation,” which risks creating duplicative and incompatible systems—repeating the very stove-piping problems that JADC2 was meant to solve.
Weapons at Light Speed: Directed Energy and Electronic Warfare
Beyond traditional munitions, the DoD is heavily investing in technologies that control and weaponize the electromagnetic spectrum. This includes directed energy weapons, which use focused beams of energy to destroy or disable targets, and electronic warfare systems, which sense, protect, and disrupt an adversary’s use of the spectrum.
After decades of being “just a few years away,” these technologies are now maturing into deployable prototypes, driven by the urgent need to counter new threats like drone swarms.
Directed Energy Advantages
Directed energy weapons offer several game-changing advantages, including speed-of-light delivery, precision, and low cost per engagement compared to expensive kinetic interceptors like missiles.
The two primary types being developed are:
High-Energy Lasers focus intense beams of light on a target, heating it until it’s damaged or destroyed. They’re particularly well-suited for defensive missions like shooting down unmanned aircraft systems and countering incoming rockets, artillery, and mortars.
High-Power Microwaves emit powerful bursts of radiofrequency energy to disrupt, disable, or destroy a target’s internal electronics. Because they can affect a wider area than a laser’s narrow beam, they’re seen as promising solutions for defeating swarms of drones.
Systems Moving to the Field
The DoD and its service branches are now fielding several directed energy prototypes for operational testing and evaluation:
Army DE M-SHORAD (Guardian)
This program integrates a 50-kilowatt class laser onto a Stryker armored vehicle, creating a mobile air defense system to protect maneuvering forces. In early 2024, the first platoon of four DE M-SHORAD prototypes was deployed to the Middle East for real-world testing against aerial threats.
Air Force THOR
Developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory, THOR is a transportable high-power microwave system designed specifically for airbase defense against drone swarms. Its wide-beam, non-kinetic effect can disable multiple drones simultaneously and instantaneously.
Navy HELIOS
The Navy has begun installing the 60+ kilowatt HELIOS system, built by Lockheed Martin, on its Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. HELIOS is integrated with the ship’s Aegis combat system and can be used to destroy small boats and drones. It also has a “dazzler” function that can blind or confuse enemy optical sensors without destroying them.
Scaling Up Power
To build on these initial successes, the DoD has launched the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative. This effort aims to push laser power levels from the current 50-150 kilowatt class up to 300 kilowatts and eventually 500 kilowatts, which would provide the power needed to defeat more challenging targets like cruise missiles.
Electronic Warfare Modernization
Electronic Warfare is the art of controlling the electromagnetic spectrum. It encompasses three main functions: Electronic Attack to disrupt enemy signals, Electronic Protection to safeguard friendly signals, and Electronic Support to detect and identify signals in the environment.
As modern militaries become ever more dependent on the spectrum for everything from communication and navigation to radar and targeting, the ability to dominate it has become a prerequisite for success in any domain.
Recognizing that peer adversaries have invested heavily in electronic warfare capabilities designed to counter U.S. strengths, the DoD is undertaking significant modernization efforts.
This isn’t just about building better jammers. The focus is on developing cognitive electronic warfare systems that use AI and machine learning to autonomously detect, characterize, and counter novel enemy signals in real-time, adapting faster than human operators could.
It also involves deeper integration of electronic warfare and cyber operations, using electronic warfare to create access for cyber effects and vice versa.
Production Challenges
While these technologies show immense promise, the GAO has warned that the DoD faces significant challenges in transitioning directed energy weapons from successful prototypes to full-scale production programs.
A 2023 report found that the Navy and Air Force lacked documented transition agreements for the directed energy programs it reviewed, and that the defense industrial base and testing infrastructure aren’t yet capable of supporting deployment at scale.
This highlights a critical “valley of death” for directed energy systems, where the leap from a handful of demonstrators to a widely fielded capability remains a major hurdle.
The Foundation Technologies
Underpinning the development of advanced weapon systems are foundational technologies that serve as building blocks for nearly every modernization priority. The DoD is making massive strategic investments in four key areas—microelectronics, advanced materials, quantum science, and biotechnology.
Microelectronics: The Silicon Foundation
Modern military power is built on silicon. Advanced microelectronics—computer chips—are essential components in everything from F-35 fighter jets and AI algorithms to 5G radios and hypersonic missile guidance systems.
For decades, the DoD has grown increasingly reliant on a globalized supply chain, with the majority of advanced chip manufacturing concentrated in Asia, creating what’s now seen as a critical national security vulnerability.
The CHIPS Response
In response, the U.S. government has launched a whole-of-nation effort to revitalize the domestic semiconductor industry. The centerpiece is the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, allocating over $52 billion in federal incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, R&D, and workforce development.
The DoD’s direct stake in this initiative is the Microelectronics Commons, a $2 billion program establishing a national network of regional innovation hubs. These hubs are designed to bridge the “lab-to-fab” gap, helping universities and small businesses transition innovative chip designs into large-scale production.
Trusted Supply Chains
Alongside the push for onshoring, the DoD continues to rely on its Trusted Foundry Program. Managed by the Defense Microelectronics Activity, this program accredits domestic suppliers to handle design and fabrication of sensitive microelectronics for defense systems.
This ensures a secure “chain of custody” that protects chips from tampering, reverse engineering, or malicious modification by adversaries.
Next-Generation Chips
DARPA is focused on the next generation of chip technology. Its Electronics Resurgence Initiative is funding programs like Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing, which aims to perfect 3D Heterogeneous Integration.
This technology allows chips made from different materials and in different foundries to be stacked and packaged together, enabling revolutionary improvements in performance and functionality.
Advanced Materials: Engineering the Impossible
The performance of any military platform is ultimately limited by the materials from which it’s made. The pursuit of advanced materials that are lighter, stronger, more resistant to heat and corrosion, or possess entirely new properties is a key “seed area” of DoD research.
DARPA is at the forefront with several innovative programs:
Materials with Controlled Microstructural Architecture
This program seeks to design materials from the bottom up, precisely controlling their internal structure at the micro-scale to achieve properties impossible with traditional bulk processing. The goal is creating materials with, for example, the strength of steel but the density of a polymer.
Engineered Living Materials
In a truly revolutionary approach, the ELM program is developing biomaterials that combine the structural properties of traditional materials with the attributes of living systems. Imagine building material that can grow to fill a space, self-heal when damaged, or sense and respond to its environment.
Real-World Breakthroughs
This research is already yielding tangible results. Scientists supported by DARPA have developed a new 2D polymer with a “chainmail-like” interlocked structure, creating a material with exceptional strength and flexibility that could be used for next-generation lightweight body armor.
Other researchers are creating self-healing polymers that can repair themselves after being punctured by a projectile, with potential applications for aircraft and spacecraft.
Quantum Science: Harnessing the Strange
Quantum science, which operates on the strange principles of subatomic physics, is one of the most profound and potentially disruptive areas of long-term research for the DoD. While full-scale quantum computers are still years away, other quantum technologies are maturing more quickly.
Quantum Sensing
This is the most mature quantum application. Because quantum states are extremely sensitive to their environment, they can be used to make sensors of unprecedented precision.
Potential military applications include creating hyper-accurate clocks and inertial navigation systems that can operate without GPS signals, detecting minute gravitational or magnetic disturbances caused by submarines or underground structures, and developing new intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.
DARPA’s Robust Quantum Sensors program is working to make these delicate lab-based devices rugged enough for deployment on military platforms.
Quantum Communications
Leveraging a quantum property called entanglement, it’s theoretically possible to create communication networks that are immune to eavesdropping, as any attempt to intercept the message would disturb the system and be instantly detected.
This could provide ultra-secure command and control for military forces.
Quantum Computing
The ultimate prize in the quantum race is a fault-tolerant quantum computer. By using “qubits” that can exist in multiple states at once (superposition), quantum computers promise to solve certain classes of problems that are intractable for even the most powerful classical supercomputers.
Potential applications include breaking modern encryption, discovering new materials and pharmaceuticals, and optimizing complex military logistics.
Recognizing the immense hype and technical challenges, DARPA has launched the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative to rigorously test and validate different approaches to building useful quantum computers.
Biotechnology: Engineering Life
The convergence of biology and engineering is opening up another “seed area” of revolutionary potential for the DoD. The military is looking to leverage synthetic biology to develop new capabilities, from on-demand manufacturing of critical supplies to enhancing warfighter health and performance.
Living Foundries
DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office is the hub for much of this research. A key focus is on turning biology into a reliable manufacturing platform.
The Living Foundries program aims to engineer microorganisms to serve as adaptable “factories” that can produce a wide range of defense-relevant molecules on demand, such as pharmaceuticals, fuels, coatings, and adhesives.
This could dramatically reduce the military’s logistical tail by enabling production at the point of need.
Novel Materials
Other research is exploring the use of synthetic biology to create novel materials with properties like self-repair or adaptive camouflage.
The Army and Air Force research labs are also heavily involved, pursuing biotechnology to monitor and enhance human performance, develop new biosensors, and improve resilience to environmental and combat stressors.
The Human Factor: Interfaces, Training, and Power
Even as the DoD develops increasingly autonomous and technologically complex systems, the human warfighter remains the central element of the fighting force. A critical aspect of modernization is ensuring that humans can effectively control, trust, and team with these new technologies.
Human-Machine Teaming
As a single operator becomes responsible for controlling not just one platform but potentially a swarm of autonomous drones, the traditional keyboard-and-mouse interface becomes a critical bottleneck.
The DoD has made Human-Machine Interfaces a critical technology area, with the goal of creating simplified, intuitive control systems that reduce cognitive load on warfighters and allow them to manage complex systems effectively under stress.
The ultimate vision is moving beyond simple control to true human-machine teaming, where AI-powered systems act as intelligent partners that can understand a commander’s intent, anticipate needs, and proactively assist in completing missions.
Advanced Interface Research
DARPA is leading research in this area with several forward-looking programs:
Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams seeks to imbue AI agents with a rudimentary “theory of mind,” allowing them to infer the goals, beliefs, and situational awareness of their human teammates and interact more naturally and effectively.
Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology explores the potential of brain-computer interfaces. The N3 program aims to develop high-performance, non-invasive neural interfaces that could one day allow a service member to control complex systems, such as a drone swarm, directly with their thoughts.
Virtual Training Revolution
The complexity of future warfighting concepts like JADC2 makes them nearly impossible to train for at scale in the real world. The cost and logistics of assembling joint and multinational forces across multiple domains are prohibitive.
The solution is creating a virtual world. The Army is leading this effort with its Synthetic Training Environment, a system designed to converge live, virtual, and constructive training into a single, immersive experience.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
STE leverages commercial gaming and simulation technologies, including Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, to create realistic, repeatable, and accessible training scenarios.
Virtual Reality is used for fully immersive simulations, allowing pilots to practice flight maneuvers, medics to treat battlefield trauma, and entire units to rehearse complex missions in a risk-free digital environment.
Augmented Reality overlays digital information onto a user’s real-world view. Systems like the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System can display navigation points, friendly and enemy locations, and even a weapon’s sight directly in a soldier’s field of view.
Cross-Domain Integration
The STE allows a soldier in a live training exercise at Fort Irwin to interact with a virtual F-35 piloted by an Airman in a simulator in Nevada, while fighting against a constructive (AI-driven) enemy force, all within the same shared digital environment.
This isn’t just an upgrade to existing simulators; it’s a necessary enabling capability for practicing the multi-domain operations the DoD expects to conduct in the future.
Energy: Powering the Future Force
All of these advanced technologies—from high-power lasers and data centers to swarms of drones—are voracious consumers of energy. Recognizing that energy is both a critical enabler and significant vulnerability, the DoD has made Renewable Energy Generation and Storage a key modernization priority.
Installation Resilience
The DoD is the U.S. government’s largest energy consumer, spending over $10 billion on bulk fuel in FY2022 alone. Its reliance on the civilian power grid makes installations vulnerable to disruption from cyberattacks, physical attacks, or extreme weather.
To mitigate this risk, the DoD is aggressively pursuing energy resilience. The Army has a goal to deploy microgrids—localized power grids that can operate independently from the main grid—on all its installations by 2035.
These microgrids are increasingly incorporating on-site renewable energy generation, such as solar and wind, coupled with large-scale battery storage systems.
Battlefield Power
On the battlefield, the demand for portable power is exploding. The DoD is investing in new battery technologies to provide warfighters and their equipment with longer endurance in smaller and lighter packages.
This includes robust, high-energy-density thermal batteries for missiles and munitions, and advanced lithium-ion batteries with features like bullet resistance and the ability to be safely discharged to zero volts for soldier-worn applications.
Wireless Power
In a truly futuristic effort, DARPA’s POWER (Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay) program is exploring the concept of beaming power wirelessly over long distances using high-energy lasers.
The program recently set a new record by transmitting over 800 watts of power across a distance of 8.6 kilometers, demonstrating a potential future where platforms like UAVs could be powered indefinitely without needing to land for fuel.
This focus on energy resilience is a clear indicator that the DoD anticipates future conflicts where the homeland is no longer a sanctuary and the civilian infrastructure it has long relied upon is a primary target.
The Pentagon’s technological transformation represents one of the most ambitious military modernization efforts in American history. From hypersonic weapons that travel at unimaginable speeds to AI systems that can outthink human analysts, the technologies emerging from this effort will reshape warfare for decades to come.
Success will depend not just on technological breakthroughs but on the Pentagon’s ability to reform its own bureaucracy, attract and retain top talent, and build the partnerships necessary to compete in an era where innovation happens at commercial speed.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. In a world where China and Russia are rapidly modernizing their own militaries, America’s technological edge is no longer guaranteed. The decisions made today about which technologies to pursue, how to field them, and how to use them responsibly will determine whether the United States can maintain its military advantages in an increasingly competitive and dangerous world.
The future of warfare is being written in laboratories and test facilities across the country. Whether America can turn science fiction into military reality while staying true to its values will define not just the future of the U.S. military, but the future of global security itself.
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