The White House no longer wants America chasing a lead in every technology at once. In its new National Security Science and Technology Strategy published August 17, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) named three clear winners for federal research money: undersea systems, space, and AI with autonomy. Air superiority, long-range strike and battlefield networks rank one tier below. That hierarchy will shape defence research funding for years to come.
OSTP wrote the plan to satisfy a requirement in the CHIPS and Science Act, which obliges the office to issue such a strategy after every National Security Strategy. This one builds on the 2025 strategy.
What the Strategy Prioritises
The document argues that focus, not breadth, is what makes American defence research affordable and effective — hence the ranked list rather than a flat set of priorities.
Undersea tops the ranking, covering submarine survivability and anti-submarine warfare. Space comes next, spanning very low orbit out to the vicinity of the Moon. AI and autonomy round out the top tier.
A second tier still carries weight: stealth-enabled air superiority, long-range precision strike, and battlefield networks — what the Pentagon bundles together as C5ISR. Below both tiers sit 12 enabling technologies, including hypersonics, directed energy, semiconductors, nuclear energy and advanced sensing.
Why Washington Won’t Copy Its Rivals
The strategy opens with a warning: rivals are investing heavily in military technology, pursuing asymmetric capabilities, operating below the threshold of war, and targeting American supply chains, critical minerals and intellectual property.
Its most striking passage rejects mirror-imaging — the instinct to match every adversary weapon with an equivalent. Instead, the plan calls for cheaper counters where they exist: sometimes exquisite platforms fielded in small numbers, sometimes low-cost, expendable systems fielded in bulk, deliberately mixed. The logic cuts both ways — strong American strike capability is meant to force rivals into expensive defensive spending of their own, siphoning money away from their offensive programmes.
The strategy also endorses restraint in select areas, pointing to existing international bans on biological weapons and orbital nuclear arms.
Four Pillars
OSTP frames the plan around four pillars: focused, resilient, agile and secure.
Focus is the ranking system itself.
Allies also receive significant attention. Resilience requires redundancy. The strategy invokes the nuclear triad as an example. Submarines, silos, and bombers each create separate challenges for an adversary. The strategy extends this principle to other technologies. These include advanced-reactor-powered microgrids, AI-driven biosurveillance, post-quantum cryptography, and segmented networks.
It also means hedging against surprise: the strategy names artificial general intelligence, biotechnology and quantum information as potential game-changers America intends to lead outright rather than react to.
Agility means faster contracting and fewer regulatory delays. Security means keeping foreign rivals out of American labs and supply chains. Homeland defence — borders, nuclear deterrence, cyber defence, biological threats, and the Golden Dome missile shield — runs through all four.
A Talent Contradiction
One passage sits uneasily next to recent policy. The strategy pledges to attract and retain top global talent in security-relevant fields — a notable shift from last year’s National Security Strategy, which warned that such hiring “undercuts American workers.” President Trump also moved to restrict H-1B visas in September 2025. Nextgov’s Edward Graham flagged the inconsistency; OSTP did not immediately comment when asked about it.
Both positions are now, on paper, official policy — leaving universities and technology firms to work out which one actually governs their hiring.
Research Security and the Money Question
Research security has the strategy’s longest list of actions. The government will automatically vet research proposals and continuously monitor funded projects. It will bar fundamental-research funding from going to listed Chinese military companies. It will also introduce a universal reporting form to reduce paperwork. The Pentagon has already ordered research security audits at 30 universities, and the National Science Foundation runs its own parallel framework.
Investment screening is set to tighten as well, with the administration pushing for CFIUS to review more deals and greenfield projects, alongside broader curbs on American capital flowing into rival military sectors.
On procurement, the strategy encourages wider use of Other Transaction Authorities and milestone-based contracts with competing bidders.
Allies also receive significant attention. The strategy deepens submarine and critical-minerals cooperation with Australia and the UK. New “technology prosperity” deals will expand cooperation on AI, quantum computing, and nuclear energy.
What Comes Next
None of this moves without funding. OSTP and the National Security Council must still write technology-specific implementation plans, and Congress must authorise and appropriate the money behind them. Until that happens, the National Security Science and Technology Strategy remains, for now, a ranking on paper.
