The Department of Defense Research and Engineering released its 2007 Strategic Plan this week. It’s pretty high-level and doesn’t appear to contain any surprises. The DDR&E strategy focuses on countering four different types of threats with research and engineering efforts: traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive. The plan acknowledges that the DOD has a pretty good handle on dealing with the traditional (ie, Cold War-oriented) threats, but has much work to do to counter the other three. As a result, DDR&E is shifting its priorities slightly to focus more effort on addressing irregular threats (urban operations, war on terror, etc), catastrophic threats (WMDs), and disruptive technologies (“those that could render our most significant weapons systems less effective”).
Fortunately, the Department still sees both basic research and research in information technologies as critical to all four efforts. In its list of “enabling technologies that should receive the highest level of corporate attention and coordination,” information technology, persistent surveillance technologies, networks and communications, software research, “organization, fusion and mining data,” cognitive enhancements, robotics, autonomous systems technologies, and large data set analysis tools all figure prominently. In fact, IT figures in almost all the DOD’s “desired capabilities” in the plan.
The whole plan can be found here and is worth a read.