4. Department of Defense · Minor · Needs Congress
Rebuild Cold War-era RDT&E infrastructure
Printed page 99 4. Department of Defense
“Rebuild RDT&E infrastructure that resides in Cold War–era facilities and is not well-suited to the current era of rapid development and testing of advanced technology and concepts to the maturity level necessary for acquisition and operational fielding.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The FY2026 NDAA sec. 220 requires the Director of the Test Resource Management Center to establish and maintain a digital test and evaluation environment for developmental and operational testing, built on commercially derived tooling, a modular open system approach and real-time iterative data collection, and to run a pilot with the Defense Innovation Unit on using commercial software to accelerate testing. This modernizes RDT&E infrastructure digitally; no rebuilding of the Cold War-era facilities the Quote names is on the record.
- Partially done
Public Law 119-21 sec. 20006 appropriates $124 million for improvements to Test Resource Management Center artificial intelligence capabilities, alongside $500 million to expand defense advanced manufacturing techniques and $170 million for an advanced radar depot for repair, testing and production of radar and electronic warfare systems. Test infrastructure money, aimed at capability rather than at replacing ageing facilities.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
The Quote asks for physical rebuilding of Cold War-era research, development, test and evaluation facilities. What Congress and the reconciliation act delivered is modernization of test infrastructure by other means — a digital test and evaluation environment and artificial-intelligence tooling at the Test Resource Management Center. An object achieved by other means than the one asked for counts as partial, with the alternative reading recorded.
This item was also covered by one negative search run across its whole cluster of related asks in this Chapter.
- Action
- restore
- Object
- DOD RDT&E infrastructure
- ID
- 155