The Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Heidi Shyu, has announced plans for increased collaboration with Australia on technology experiments. The US will work with Australia this year on the next round of Technology Readiness Experimentation (TREX), which will inform the DoD’s Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) initiative. RDER aims to address joint capability gaps and deliver emerging technologies more quickly to warfighters. Shyu also stated that there will be another meeting of the Defense Management Acquisition Group to assess successful technologies from a previous RDER experiment. The technologies that prove useful will be presented to the DMAG for evaluation and potential deployment.
Alongside the technology experiments, Shyu also highlighted biomanufacturing as an area of increased focus for the DoD this year. The DoD will release a request for proposals for its distributed bio-industrial manufacturing investment program. This is part of the Biden administration’s objective to build a sustainable, safe, and secure American bio-economy, and follows an executive order issued by the White House in September 2022.
