War Department's Science Enterprise Maintains Tight Focus on Half-Dozen Key Areas

Last year at this time, the War Department identified 14 technology areas as priorities. Since then, that list has been pared down to a more realistic, warfighter-focused set of goals, the department's chief technology officer said.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, Emil G. Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and War Department chief technology officer, outlined his vision for ensuring America's warfighters always have the tools they need to fight and win before 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 said.

If the U.S. doesn't maintain technological dominance, Michael said, American service members could pay the price with their lives. U.S. adversaries are investing heavily in areas like artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and munitions production, and the U.S. will do the same. But he also said the U.S. has an advantage that adversaries don't.

"We have a dynamic innovation ecosystem comprised of unmatched talent and unlimited creativity, and lots of capital markets to support those industries," he said. "My office remains focused on harnessing the full potential of our innovation ecosystem to serve the American warfighter."

At the start of 2025, the War Department's research and engineering apparatus had prioritized more than a dozen areas of development, from wireless technology to renewable energy generation and storage - too many to pursue effectively, Michael said.

"My first order of business was [to] restore focus on technologies that we need to maintain dominance on the battlefield," Michael said. "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 military services and using data-driven analysis, he said, the department has refocused its efforts on artificial intelligence, biomanufacturing, contested logistics technologies, quantum technology for battlefield dominance, scaled directed energy 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 told senators.

Other important areas, such as space and microelectronics, remain priorities, he said, and will get funding. But the department's top priorities have been redefined.

A big example of that is AI. Last year, the department launched the GenAI initiative, bringing unique AI capabilities directly to department employees in a real, hands-on way.

"We rolled out GenAi.mil, which was the department's first departmentwide AI platform, which didn't exist before," Michael said. "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 said, GenAI is only on unclassified networks. But that is going to change, he said.

"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 said.

The War Department is also focused on the production and acquisition of conventional weapons, including low-cost unmanned combat attack systems, he added.

On May 13, Michael said, the department 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 said.