Pentagon Lab Review Targets Bureaucratic Barriers to Military Tech

The Pentagon is reviewing its laboratory network as part of a broader assessment of the War Department’s innovation ecosystem, Science and Technology officials told reporters Wednesday during a media availability at the department’s annual Lab Day event. Officials said the review aims to identify and eliminate bureaucratic barriers that have historically slowed the transition of experimental research into combat-ready capabilities.

“The secretary signed a memo on Jan. 9 directing review of the defense innovation infrastructure,” Assistant Secretary of War for Science and Technology (ASW S&T) Joseph Jewell said Wednesday. “One important part of [the innovation ecosystem] is both the internal labs, which we celebrate here at Lab Day.”

The Pentagon’s Lab Day is an annual pop-up event “showcasing the latest technology explorations happening across the department’s network of laboratories, warfare centers and engineering centers.”

Jewell added that while the War Department has a vast network of service-specific labs and academic partnerships, these organizations and their output are often siloed.

“One of the things that we’ve discovered is each service has a lab, we have universities [and other research partners],” Jewell said. “Sometimes they aren’t as integrated as they could be, and they don’t leverage each other’s resources in the way they could be.”

Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and War Department CTO Emil Michael said the review is focused on accelerating the delivery of capabilities to warfighters while maintaining safety and operational effectiveness.

“Are we pulling things out of the labs fast enough with the least bureaucracy possible with the same safety and combat effectiveness sort of measurements being done to get into the field faster?” Michael said.

Scaling Technology and Supporting Vendors

Michael added that fundamentally, the review is about changing how the military buys and tests new systems. He pointed to War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s acquisition modernization strategy, which prioritizes helping domestic vendors and the innovation ecosystem survive the “valley of death” — the period between prototyping and securing a formal program of record.

Michael added that centralized testing is essential for scaling, citing the Defense Autonomous Working Group (DAWG) — the successor to the Replicator program — as an example.

“The idea with DAWG was to pull [innovative solutions] in [and] evaluate them, so we know which ones work best,” Michael told reporters. “It’s likely to yield better results than a distributed evaluation because you can measure them against the same criterion, and then you can say to the Army, Navy or Air Force, ‘Here’s something that works across these criteria.'”

Michael said the department can establish clear benchmarks to move toward “bulk buys” that are more cost-effective and provide small tech firms with the financial stability to remain viable partners.

Accelerating the ‘Invention-to-Field’ Timeline

The lab review would introduce a sense of urgency into the defense bureaucracy, mirroring the “sprints” that Michael proposed for the department. Michael said these compressed timelines are vital in high-stakes areas like generative AI and counter-unmanned aerial systems.

“Any part of the lab review is [DOW asking], ‘How do we remove hurdles so that the timeframes from invention to prototype to being combat effective is shortened?’” Michael told reporters. “That’s very consistent with the notion of sprints inside the critical technology areas … so that we can sort of measure ourselves.”

Jewell did not provide a timeline for the lab review’s findings.

“It’s still underway. As a scientist myself [I know] the hypothesis is not the conclusion,” Jewell said. “We’re analyzing the data, and we’ve been working very hard to deliver this on a fast timeline.”