The technologies under development today will transform the experience of the warfighter tomorrow, offering enormous potential to make them more effective at their missions at a lower human cost. Leadership on this frontier, therefore, represents both a national security imperative and a moral responsibility for the United States.
With foreign actors constantly challenging U.S. military technological superiority, all different branches of the U.S. government and the companies comprising the defense industrial base need to step up. Yet, there’s no one outside of government effectively focusing concerted attention on these critical issues and bringing together the right players from industry, the Department of Defense, appropriators, academia, and the national laboratories to come up with common-sense recommendations for accelerating the deployment of these technologies into the hands of warfighters.
Representing the full array of private-sector enterprises that will ultimately manufacture and supply the products incorporating these technologies, the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) is uniquely positioned to help fill this void. Our members are eager to engage and learn more about these issues. Our staff and board of directors see a need for the warfighter and an opportunity for NDIA. Consequently, we are launching the Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI)—an in-house institute—to help accelerate progress on the development and deployment of these technologies.
ETI draws on NDIA’s existing strengths to execute on this bold vision. In particular, the credibility and subsequent impact of ETI derive from a set of long-standing organizational attributes that help define NDIA’s identity, now and in the future:
Honest-broker reputation
Convening authority
Access
Expertise
Depth and breadth
Building on these strengths, ETI will pull together cross-sectoral teams of members, government officials, and other essential partners to address a carefully curated set of technology issues at any given time. The composition, scale, and scope of these teams will be adapted according to the nature of the technology in question. These teams will generate and disseminate a range of high-quality research products and recommendations with the goal of framing the debate over a particular issue and/or advocating for actions that might accelerate the development and deployment of these technologies.