Last 12 months at the moment, the War Department recognized 14 expertise areas as priorities. Since then, that checklist has been pared all the way down to a extra lifelike, warfighter-focused set of objectives, the division’s chief expertise officer stated.
On Capitol Hill yesterday, Emil G. Michael, undersecretary of protection for analysis and engineering and War Department chief expertise officer, outlined his imaginative and prescient for guaranteeing America’s warfighters at all times have the instruments they should struggle and win earlier than the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“My mandate as the department’s chief technology officer is to ensure delivery of tangible, decisive and battlefield-ready technology to our military, and to do it at velocity and scale,” Michael stated.
If the U.S. would not preserve technological dominance, Michael stated, American service members might pay the value with their lives. U.S. adversaries are investing closely in areas like synthetic intelligence, quantum applied sciences and munitions manufacturing, and the U.S. will do the identical. But he additionally stated the U.S. has a bonus that adversaries do not.
“We have a dynamic innovation ecosystem comprised of unmatched talent and unlimited creativity, and lots of capital markets to support those industries,” he stated. “My office remains focused on harnessing the full potential of our innovation ecosystem to serve the American warfighter.”
At the beginning of 2025, the War Department’s analysis and engineering equipment had prioritized greater than a dozen areas of growth, from wi-fi expertise to renewable power technology and storage — too many to pursue successfully, Michael stated.
“My first order of business was [to] restore focus on technologies that we need to maintain dominance on the battlefield,” Michael stated. “I inherited a list of 14 critical technology areas, which really didn’t prioritize anything. They were a laundry list that diluted our resources and inevitably slowed progress.”
Working with the army providers and utilizing data-driven evaluation, he stated, the division has refocused its efforts on synthetic intelligence, biomanufacturing, contested logistics applied sciences, quantum expertise for battlefield dominance, scaled directed power and scaled hypersonics.
“The department is focusing its investments, its talent, its leadership around these areas, while the private sector crowds in capital to supercharge the process,” Michael informed senators.
Other essential areas, akin to house and microelectronics, stay priorities, he stated, and can get funding. But the division’s prime priorities have been redefined.
A giant instance of that’s AI. Last 12 months, the division launched the GenAI initiative, bringing distinctive AI capabilities on to division staff in an actual, hands-on method.
“We rolled out GenAi.mil, which was the department’s first departmentwide AI platform, which didn’t exist before,” Michael stated. “In just a few months, we’ve got 1.4 million of our 3 million members … [who] have used our GenAI tool.”
Right now, he stated, GenAI is simply on unclassified networks. But that’s going to vary, he stated.
“We signed agreements with virtually all leading AI frontier models and infrastructure companies in the last few months to deploy their capabilities directly onto the department’s classified networks,” Michael stated.
The War Department can also be targeted on the manufacturing and acquisition of standard weapons, together with low-cost unmanned fight assault methods, he added.
On May 13, Michael stated, the division inked new framework agreements to develop low-cost cruise missiles and low-cost hypersonic missiles.
“These are evidence of our openness to new industry that will do fixed price, fixed cost and fast delivery,” he stated.