US Navy research office to stop funding work industry already backs, refocus on undersea and energy
Defense tech firms now have a clearer line on Navy money: the Office of Naval Research says it will stop funding research commercial investors already back, redirecting its roughly $3B budget toward undersea tech and new energy. Source: Defense One.
The US Navy's central science office is rethinking what it pays for. At the Defense One Tech Summit, Chief of Naval Research Rachel Riley described a coming strategy that would pull the Office of Naval Research back from research areas commercial investors are already funding on their own. Private money flowing into defense technology has grown, and ONR does not want to spend its roughly $3 billion annual budget competing for work the market will fund anyway. Instead the office plans to point its roughly 1,100 scientists at problems industry tends to skip, the ones with payoffs a decade or more away. Riley named undersea technology and new approaches to power and energy as examples. A second piece of the plan targets ONR's own process. The stated aim is to remove layers of bureaucracy so the limiting factor on a project becomes the underlying physics rather than paperwork and policy reviews. The strategy also calls for tighter work with the Defense Innovation Unit and the warfighters who eventually field the technology. Riley said work that fits commercial investment theses would be deprioritized in favor of long-horizon research in neglected fields. The strategy document was described as still being finalized, so the specific funding priorities are not yet public. Source: Defense One.