
Investing in the Future: Trends in the Defense Department's Science & Technology Funding
Download the report here.
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 technologies. 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 capabilities 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 strategic 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.