In December 2019, the Office of Industrial Policy’s Small Business Program submitted the DoD Small Business Strategy to Congress.  The Strategy focuses on three strategic goals: creating and implementing a unified management structure across the Department’s small business workforce; aligning the Department’s small business activities with the National Defense Strategy (NDS), National Security Strategy, and Executive Order 13806; and strengthening DoD’s ability to support the warfighter and serve small businesses.

In the strategy, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper states, “A unified management structure will consist of both the Under Secretaries of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and Research and Engineering working together to ensure the United States retains technical superiority over its adversaries. This structure will assist the Department in assessing priorities across stakeholders, identifying opportunities for enhancement, and leveraging the significant efforts of other departments and agencies that also focus on supporting small businesses. Meanwhile, alignment of the Department’s small business activities with the objectives of the NDS will ensure our work has a meaningful impact on securing our allies and nation’s future. The Department is also working to identify opportunities to improve its day-to-day support of small businesses, maximize the utility of each individual program, and replicate our most successful tactics across lines of effort. These goals and objectives aim to leverage the might of the millions of entrepreneurs and small business owners across the nation to help secure our future.”  

The participation of dynamic, robust, and modern small businesses in the industrial base is critical to the United States’ efforts to maintain its technological superiority, military readiness, and lethality. The strategy pursues a wide variety of methods to unlock small business capabilities, change the acquisition culture of the Department towards small businesses, and improve acquisition processes to simplify and enhance how small companies do business with the Department of Defense. In the execution of this strategy, the Department will increase and improve small business workforce training, focus key innovation programs on small business participation, increase commercialization, develop the right tools for acquisition professionals, and streamline policy and regulations where appropriate. This multi-faceted effort will encourage every organization of the Department of Defense to support and promote these initiatives to create a more synchronized, modernized, and agile small business industrial base.

You can download the DoD Small Business Strategy here.