Pentagon working on new ‘modernization strategy’ for technology investments

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The Pentagon is developing a new modernization strategy, with a goal of reporting out the best areas of technology to invest in during 2018.

Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said her office is looking across the department to the services labs, OSD, federally funded research groups and outlets like DARPA to figure out where technology dollars are going, and whether they are possibilities to align that spending.

“The department leadership wants to make sure that we are aligned across the services, across all of OSD, on a strategy that gives us greater overmatch against our adversaries,” Lord told reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum.

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“And in order to do that, particularly with constrained budgets, we need to have a very tight strategy that makes choices and makes sure we’re taking all of our resources, all of our funding, and aligning those,” she said, adding that Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan is also taking part in the discussions.

One early area of focus for the review is hypersonic weapons, which Lord described herself as being “bullish” about.

“We think will be one of those technology domains, and I think we can align all these different efforts, and by aligning them really make even more strides,” Lord said.

The review process came out of the development of the upcoming national defense strategy, which drove department leaders to conclude that “we have to make choices and focus on a limited number of areas, and put our funding on it and put all of our resources.”

“We haven’t always aligned all of the federated labs on a handful of critical goals, and that’s the direction we’re going,” she added.

Lord added that she expected to release conclusions for focus areas sometime in 2018.

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