DoD Shifts Acquisition, Tech Efforts Toward Major Powers | Defense News | defensenews.com: After spending 13 years fighting non-state actors in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, the US Defense Department is shifting its institutional weight toward developing a new acquisition and technology development strategy that focuses more on major state competitors, the Pentagon’s No. 2 told Defense News on Nov. 21.
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said that at the top of the agenda are powers like China and Russia, both of whom have “regional and global aspirations, so that’s going to increasingly take a lot of our attention.”
Next come regional states that want to become nuclear powers, such as Iran and North Korea, and finally are transnational terrorist groups and their myriad offshoots.
“Layered on top of all three are technological advancements that are happening at a very rapid pace,” Work said, which has given rise to a global competition for the latest in stealth, precision strike, communications and surveillance capabilities over which the United States no longer holds a monopoly.
The new Defense Innovation Initiative that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently announced is “really focused on state actors,” Work said, “and looking at the capabilities that could potentially hurt our nation the most and how [the Pentagon can] prepare to address those capabilities and deter their use.”
A major part of this push is the new “offset” strategy, which is looking to identify new technologies that the United States can use in order to deter or defeat those threats.
But whereas previous offset initiatives in the 1950s and 1970s focused on nuclear, stealth and precision technologies with the Soviets, the threats of today are more diffuse.
