Show, Don't Tell: Emerging Tech Needs Funding, Not Rhetoric.

• Author: Wostenberg, Rebecca

Several years ago, the National Defense Industrial Association board of directors responded to calls from both our membership and Pentagon leadership to increase its activities to help win the ongoing technology race with the People's Republic of China.

NDIA enthusiastically embraced this call by standing up the Emerging Technologies Institute, an internal research organization focused on providing leadership, bolstering public awareness and offering high-quality, nonpartisan research and analysis that informs the development and integration of emerging technologies into the defense industrial base.

Since its founding, ETI has convened workshops, published research and hosted regular technical webinars on technologies such as hypersonics, directed energy, microelectronics, quantum computing and supporting activities including defense budgeting and acquisition policy.

Throughout these efforts, some overarching themes have begun to emerge. The most consequential theme is the lack of consistent programming and budgeting demand signal from the Defense Department for emerging technologies. This has frankly come up in almost all of ETI's work, but it especially stood out in the hypersonics and directed energy supply chain studies and in ongoing efforts focused on microelectronics.

Hypersonics is an area where this challenge is particularly stark. It is not a new technology, and U.S. research and development stretches back decades. However, the hypersonics industry has weathered cyclical funding, resulting in very fragile supply chains for certain components. One example is carboncarbon, a lightweight, strong and stiff material that remains durable even at very high temperatures and is the only option for coatings for higher speed hypersonic systems.

And supply chain component challenges extend beyond just carboncarbon. During a series of industry working groups, business leaders raised supply chain challenges repeatedly, illustrating the impact of uneven demand at every level of the hypersonics supply chains. From the industry perspective, companies have a fiduciary obligation to see a return on investment. While industry is eager to invest in hypersonics technology, the business case must exist for companies to make their own internal investments in the necessary infrastructure and personnel.

Directed energy weapons are another critical technology where a lack of demand signal is hurting supply chain resiliency and the technology's unit cost...