The recently announced Fundamental Research Security Initiatives and Implementation Memorandum, intended to strengthen protections for Department of War (DoW)-funded research, represents a crucial evolution in how the United States (U.S.) secures innovation enterprise within the defense industrial base (DIB). This initiative affirms that security and innovation are equal, co-foundational components of national defense and activities of the DIB. These new measures, aimed at safeguarding research from exploitation and disruption through malign foreign influence and intellectual property theft, are strategic force multipliers that reinforce research, development, and acquisition of critical technologies as mandated in the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Indeed, we have argued that “security-by-design” approaches should be central pillars of all phases of technology readiness if the US is to maintain decisive advantage across multiple domains of global power competition.
Strategic Context: Competition in Disruptive Technologies
The FY26 NDAA reaffirms Congressional intent to accelerate U.S. technological leadership in critical areas including advanced materials, artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous systems, biotechnology, and quantum information science. These areas are central to future warfighting and deterrence and are instrumental to international economic leverage. Recent assessments emphasize that U.S. advantages in AI and biotechnology are being actively challenged by peer competitors in ways that engage innovation ecosystems, supply chains, intellectual property (IP), and research infrastructure.
Maintaining superiority in this environment requires both funding and assurance that investments remain secure, resilient, and aligned to meet defense objectives. The DoW’s new research security directives are an operational expression of this imperative, establishing mechanisms for continuous vetting, automated monitoring, and standardized reporting of foreign support in research programs.
To be sure, innovation and risk are inextricably linked. Disruptive technologies promise unprecedented capabilities but can be exploited by adversaries for tactical effect and strategic advantage. This is especially influential in bioengineering, AI, and quantum technology, where national security and public health concerns are entwined with initiatives for commercial profit. Our prior work has highlighted how dual-use technologies create complex challenges for both deterrence and defense, necessitating agile, integrative frameworks that go beyond traditional regulatory constructs. The newly proposed research security measures recognize this challenge. By prohibiting funding to entities linked to foreign military interests, establishing a department-wide risk review repository, and investing in automated vetting and continuous monitoring capabilities, the DoW prioritizes vigilance without undermining collaborative efforts that drive technical progress.
The Strategic Imperative of Security-by-Design
For military research and development communities (inclusive of the DIB), “security-by-design” must evolve from being an ethical and regulatory preference to becoming a core operational construct that is inherent to every phase of the creation-to-deployment cycle. Historically, security has often been appended only after design completion, which has left critical vulnerabilities at prior technologic readiness levels (TRL) unaddressed and exploitable. Current strategic reality demands that security considerations be initiated at the earliest stages, and maintained throughout all levels of technology conception, development, and engagement.
This should entail and obtain the following four constructs and practices:
1. Threat-Informed Research Planning: To understand competitors’ and adversaries’ capabilities, intent, and exploitation vectors in order to more specifically inform US military and DIB research, development and security priorities.
2. Continuous Risk Assessment: To extend beyond initial vetting, programs should exercise full life-cycle risk evaluation to anticipate adversarial exploitation of emerging technologies, either through unauthorized access to sensitive technologies or data, or in terms of how an adversary could defeat such technology (especially when technologies intersect with digital infrastructure or supply chains).
3. Assurance and Trustworthiness Metrics: For AI and iteratively autonomous systems, such metrics should enable evaluation and assurance(s) that systems perform as intended without unintended behaviors; similar assurance frameworks should be implemented within biotechnology workflows and other highly dually-usable scientific and technologic domains. This requires bias mitigation, human oversight, and ethical frameworks. (We note that similar assurance frameworks and benchmarks should be implemented within biotechnology workflows and other highly dually-usable scientific and technologic domains, as emerging biotechnology has a specific strategic call-out in the NDAA).
4. Whole-of-Nation Collaboration: Government, academia, and industry must collaborate to develop standards and shared protocols to (a) facilitate threat-informed research planning and projects in accordance with (b) ongoing risk assessment and assurance protocols to uphold security, while (c) preserving scientific freedom and innovation.
We opine that such security-by-design is not over-regulation; rather, it is a process of proactively anticipating how technological advantages can be sustained and vulnerabilities mitigated while accelerating capability and operational delivery.
Operational Implications
The new DoW memorandum has several important implications, namely:
• Expedited Identification of Strategic Vulnerabilities: The establishment of a risk review repository and automated monitoring systems will enable more rapid detection of suspicious foreign influence and/or IP leakage. This, in turn, fortifies and accelerates protective action and resource reallocation.
• Enhanced Workforce Preparedness: Expanded training for research security personnel is critical. Both military and civilian researchers must develop proficient in adhering to compliance requirements, and identifying indicators of foreign influence, and domestic and foreign risk(s) and threat(s).
• Alignment with Acquisition Reform: Security measures that reinforce recent acquisition goals by ensuring that investments in critical technology areas afford (and can actually deliver) assured, resilient capabilities. Accelerating fielding without integrating security can lead to deploying capabilities that adversaries can more easily compromise.
• Protection of Scientific Integrity: By standardizing reporting of current and pending foreign support, the policy preserves scientific integrity and public trust in defense-focal research, thereby maintaining the attractiveness of U.S. institutions as global partners while concomitantly regulating and restricting exposure and vulnerability to antagonistic actors.
Taken together, and when successfully implemented, these actions can protect the pace and scope of innovation, the security and integrity of the DIB, and the prominence of U.S. technical enterprise in both the international economy, and soft and hard domains of global power.
Conclusion: Toward Technological Primacy
Strategic competition in disruptive technologies is a cornerstone of the contemporary theater of global power balance. Preserving US leadership in critical technologic areas demands acceleration of innovation and robust security postures that can ensure that innovation(s) cannot be co-opted by peer-competitors (and adversaries) and leveraged against national interests. These postures also ensure protection against technological surprise; pushing innovative technology harder and faster provides a necessary component of preventing technological surprise, which cannot be achieved by forecasting only. Thus, the DoW’s strengthened research protections should be seen as defensive necessity and strategic opportunity.
By situating them within broader efforts to implement security-by-design, the DoW can promote innovation, cutting-edged capabilities, and technologic advancement, and concomitantly safeguard those capabilities and the asymmetric advantage they confer. We opine that innovation without security is vulnerability; security without innovation is irrelevance. The imperative moving forward is to harmonize these imperatives in order to wield disruptive technologies with foresight, integrity, and strategic resolve so that the US remains ahead of peer competitors and fully prepared for the challenges of future conflict.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States government, Department of War or the National Defense University.
Dr. Diane DiEuliis is an Expert Consultant of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.
Dr. James Giordano is Director of the Center for Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.