Data-backed review exposes urgent friction points threatening U.S. defense research enterprise

The Pentagon’s new comprehensive report on the state of America’s defense research enterprise spotlights severe structural, logistical and bureaucratic vulnerabilities undermining the military’s technological edge.

“The average age of laboratory facilities across all the Services is greater than 45 years, with most built during the Cold War era,” it states. “These facilities are past their traditional life expectancies and the methods and requirements of conducting research in the 21st century is beyond their capabilities.”

Produced by a team inside the Defense Department’s recently reorganized Research and Engineering undersecretariat, the 68-page Defense Research Enterprise Review presents 14 data-informed recommendations for multiple government components that aim to “have the greatest impact on the ecosystem.”

“We spent a lot of effort and energy on doing that lab review with an eye towards — now that we do have a single [chief technology office led by CTO and Under Secretary of Defense for R&E Emil Michael] — how can we make all these pieces work together better, deliver more impact, and also pursue things quickly?” said Assistant Secretary of Defense for Science and Technology Joseph Jewell, who steered the study.

In an interview last week on the sidelines of the Pentagon’s Manufacturing Technology Exhibition, the S&T chief shared new details with DefenseScoop about that review and related modernization shifts DOD is eager to enable.

‘Deep concern for the future’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum in January to reshape the U.S. defense innovation ecosystem, which included an instruction for Jewell’s team in the CTO’s office to conduct an in-depth 90-day assessment “evaluating the current capabilities and future trajectory” of the department’s vast research enterprise.

“That was one of the first things I was tasked with” at the Pentagon, Jewell said.

Before his nomination for the role was confirmed by the Senate in December 2025, the aerospace engineer and hypersonics expert served as a professor at Purdue University and a research scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory, as well as in other positions in academia and defense.

Now, Jewell is the Pentagon’s principal advisor on science, technology, developmental prototyping, and experimentation initiatives. 

In that capacity, he oversees several of DOD’s high-priority, forward-looking research portfolios, and also supervises the department’s in-house laboratories, federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), and university affiliated research centers (UARCs).

“There’s almost 90 distinct entities that we were able to identify” in the review, Jewell told DefenseScoop.

To complete it, his team issued an enterprise-wide data call and garnered input from an independent panel of experts convened through the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. According to the Pentagon’s review, the assessment team also visited 30 distinct sites — comprising 33% of UARCs, 30% of FFRDCs, and 30% of DOD’s laboratories — to supplement its more than 200 data submissions.

“The unprecedented data collection associated with this assessment shows the DRE is fundamentally sound and reflects mission-aligned institutional differentiation but needs to rapidly adapt to a new environment moving at the accelerating pace of commercial technology and driven by a broader set of global security threats,” officials wrote.

Questions swirled about the fate and future of the defense research enterprise (DRE) during the first year of the second Trump administration.

At the time, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiated sweeping and disruptive federal spending freezes, contract terminations, and mass grant cancellations across U.S. science and defense agencies — cutting billions in R&D funding and triggering widespread uncertainty across the national research ecosystem. 

Aligned with those aims, the DRE review was meant to drive faster, higher impacts across the department’s science and lab ecosystem. 

“If you figure out that a path is not one that’s going to be productive, cut it off. But here, we don’t want to do that too early. We’re cognizant of the fact that research often has these serendipitous, unexpected outcomes — and that’s really part of the joy of it for me as a researcher,” Jewell told DefenseScoop. “But it’s also part of the utility of it for the department. I mean, so many things have come out of technology investments that weren’t necessarily aimed at what they ended up producing, but they’re still very useful things.”

He pointed to several examples including the internet, laser tech, and hypersonics.

“That comes from the space program developing reentry systems,” Jewell said, regarding hypersonics. “And now we’re able to manipulate the aerodynamic properties that we discovered and mastered in the Apollo era [of human spaceflight], and we’re able to take some of that technology and use it for national defense.” 

DOGE is less active in 2026, but results of the Pentagon’s comprehensive report reveal how the Trump administration’s accelerated campaign to purge what they viewed as wasteful government spending had drastic ripple effects across the U.S. Science and Technology Reinvention Laboratory (STRL) base.

Congress selects key DOD and military R&D hubs — including the services’ major research labs — for that special STRL designation. 

“Due to the Federal hiring freeze, Federal Government lapse in appropriations, the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), and lack of ability for STRLs to fully use the authorities granted in statute, nearly every STRL lost a significant number of employees,” the DRE report stated.

DOD-wide, the reduction represented approximately 14 percent of the total STRL workforce, according to the review, which referred to “much of the loss” as “indiscriminate” and not shaped by lab directors.

“During the site visits that accompanied the data call, many organizations expressed deep concern for the future of their workforce, not only for the inability to hire, but the plethora of second- and third-order consequences,” officials wrote in the report, such as decreasing morale of employees at the labs who are working extra to support the missions, and a decline in expert staff.

They also warn that “without a swift and sustained reversal” of those workforce policies, the Pentagon’s “innovation engine is at risk of stalling, with potentially grave consequences for the future of national defense and the Warfighter.”

Outdated rules and funding pipelines, siloed data architectures, and aging and depleting infrastructure were among other serious challenges highlighted in the review.

Officials further noted that the department’s capability-to-development timelines face “predictable obsolescence” as commercial tech advancements are occurring much faster than the government’s modern procurement cycles. Industry’s development and production cadences are now far outpacing standard technology transition timelines — particularly in fields like AI, cloud computing and microelectronics.

Exchanges at DOD laboratories, UARCs, and FFRDCs for the evaluation demonstrated that the defense research enterprise has been transitioning critical capabilities to the joint force for real-world deployments, including most recently in Operation Epic Fury against Iran. 

“However, frontline personnel report significant challenges in sustaining this pace of rapid fielding,” the review said. “Compounded by critical DRP losses, the remaining workforce is absorbing unsustainable workloads, relying on extended hours and sheer individual resilience to bridge expanding personnel gaps and ensure these systems are successfully integrated in the field.”

The way to reform

Evidence uncovered in the S&T-led evaluation did not support consolidating or eliminating the Defense Department’s research hubs and military labs.

“The findings suggest that the way to reform the DRE is to fix the system around its institutions — how authority, money, and decisions flow, and how the institutions are funded, measured, and governed,” officials wrote.

The review therefore outlines 14 action-oriented recommendations that are broadly organized into three categories: infrastructure, workforce, and efficiency. 

“We have teams working on each of those now,” Jewell told DefenseScoop. “Some of them are very ambitious. Some of them are more administrative — like we just need to change a policy. So, I think some of them you’ll see happen quickly.” 

He said that some of the fixes could require legislative actions or policy changes at the defense secretary’s level. 

Jewell pointed to the minor “MILCON limit” — or the cost threshold for smaller-scale military construction efforts — as an example. For a long time, the statutory limit has been set at $9 million or less per project, allowing DOD components to use expedited funds for those without individual congressional line-item authorizations.

“A lot of inflation has happened in 20 years. So, one of our recommendations was to increase that to $20 million because the labs can’t maintain or build even what are now relatively small construction projects [without basically entering the paperwork] gauntlet of getting it approved, when really that shouldn’t be necessary,” Jewell said. “Now, the Department of Energy has similar regulations — but theirs has increased with inflation over time.”

Among the diverse directions in the review, the team also urged the department to advocate for congressional action to acquire budget certification authority for the S&T portfolio and recommended that the Pentagon’s R&E directorate launch a searchable database and consolidated list of specialized infrastructure and testing facilities that span the defense research enterprise.

“Other things that we’re getting against involve tools to better socialize — particularly inside government, but also to include outside government — the capabilities that the labs have that are available for outside entities to use and leverage,” Jewell noted.

For instance, the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM), headquartered at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, houses unique DOD lab capabilities that industry taps into, including large test areas for wheeled and tracked military vehicles and environmental chambers that can simulate extreme cold and hot desert temperatures under full sunlight.

Jewell described his experience recently inside one of the Arctic simulation rooms at DEVCOM. 

“I think they were running it at –20°F, and it can go down to like –40°F or –50°F. So we were in there for about a minute, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, this isn’t so bad,’” he said. “Then I stepped out, and actually — this is an interesting materials problem — the cold had made its way through my shoes. And so after we exited my feet were suddenly really soaked.” 

America’s private sector has access to cutting-edge testing facilities and environments, but compared to the military, they typically can’t simulate conditions that are nearly as realistic or extreme.

“In most cases, to their credit, the labs do have ways of making these available to outside sponsors or outside users. But we don’t have a good kind of one-stop shop for looking up those capabilities. So we’re working on them with that,” Jewell told DefenseScoop.

Moving forward, the Pentagon’s R&E team will produce an implementation plan to execute on the recommended reforms.