Congress Should Move to Establish and Strengthen a Permanent SBIR Authority.

• Author: Sennott, Daniel
• Position: Viewpoint

* Victory in war is not always guaranteed to the biggest force, but more often it's the military with more innovative capabilities and a commitment to utilizing modern technologies.

Recent advancements by near-peer competitors, such as Russia and China, have called for historic funding levels for Pentagon research, development, test and evaluation. President Joe Biden's budget request for fiscal year 2022 includes the largest ever funding for RDT&E at $112 billion, and, based on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees markups of the National Defense Authorization Act, that number is certain to grow by several billion dollars.

While the challenges from emerging threats are new, the necessity for utilizing innovation on the battlefield is not. From the Union Army's use of the telegraph in the Civil War, the machine guns employed in the trenches of World War I, the Higgins boats carrying troops to storm the beaches of Normandy in World War II, to the current multibillion-dollar push for a more lethal and technically integrated military, innovation has been and will remain at the heart of the capabilities that give warfighters a winning edge on the battlefield.

Like the military and the service members who fill its ranks, if a small business is not competitive and adaptive, it fails. Driven by competitiveness and agility, small businesses are an essential source of innovative technology. The U.S. military has long recognized the critical role small businesses play in this regard.

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, established in 1982, was designed to ensure the scientists and innovators so prevalent in small business have a meaningful way to access federal funding. It has been a tremendous pipeline for ingenuity, and the defense marketplace has been a particular beneficiary of this program. Success stories abound regarding the mutual benefit the program has for both the small business community and the federal government.

ML Mackey, chair of NDIA's Small Business Division and chief executive officer of Beacon Interactive Systems, noted: "As the CEO of a nontraditional defense contractor, we found the SBIR program to be a small business friendly gateway into the defense marketplace, enabling us to successfully bring our commercial sector expertise to bear on DoD needs."

Although the program has been reauthorized in the National Defense Authorization Act periodically, now is the time to make it permanent and improve...