Office of the Under Secretary of Defense(Comptroller)/Chief...

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense
(Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer
Defense Budget Overview
March 2024
https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2025/FY2025_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf

An excerpt:

Overview – FY 2025 Defense Budget
CHAPTER 4 BUILDING ENDURING ADVANTAGES
4-29
$1.5 billion, to address industrial base challenges. Key investment lines of effort include:
• Castings and Forgings (includes Machine Tools) ($368.7 million): Modernize metalworking
research and production infrastructure and conduct specific research efforts, develop, and
upskill the metalworking workforce, upstream supply chain security initiatives intended to
ensure DoD has access to the refined materials required to produce cast, forged, and
additively manufactured metal products, and support strategy development including
improved data analytics.
• Critical Materials ($192.7 million): Develop secure, resilient supply chains across the
spectrum of the rare earth element applications, including domestic processing and
separation of rare earth elements; rare earth element metallization; permanent magnet
production; and processing of critical materials waste and recycling streams. Additionally,
support the development of the critical materials workforce through partnership with technical,
academic, and outreach organizations.
• Microelectronics ($375.3 million): Establish a domestic secure advanced packaging capability
(includes tools, testing, and evaluation), develop an enterprise parts management system for
evaluating and addressing microelectronics supply chain concerns, increase capabilities for
the printed circuit board and advanced substrate DIB, establish a robust digital engineering
capability (includes access to virtual prototyping tools, cloud-based co-design, and training)
for the U.S. DIB, and increase capacity and capabilities for lower tier suppliers of advanced
radar technologies.
• Workforce ($112.2 million): Investments address defense industrial base workforce risks,
shortfalls, and skill gaps affecting the Department’s production and sustainment requirements.
For example, the Naval Sea Systems Command and Assistant Secretary of Defense
(Industrial Base Policy) are partnered to mitigate significant industrial workforce risks to the
Navy’s aggressive “1+2” strategy to produce one Columbia and two Virginia class submarines
yearly. The FY 2025 investments will continue momentum in the New England and MidAtlantic regions to expand and tailor outreach to fill training and hiring pipelines, improve
training capacity and quality, and address worker retention and wrap-around support needs.
Investments will also address similar requirements in other defense-critical supply chain
regions and locales, including but not limited to the Great Lakes, West Coast, Texas, and
Indo-Pacific areas. Data analytics investments will also underpin the portfolio’s problem
analysis and solution development activities.
• Hypersonics ($163.4 million): Research and development efforts to decrease production lead
times and increase critical sub-tier one suppliers by developing, certifying, and training the
workforce on new processes and materials for Thermal Protection and Solid Rocket Motors.
Additional efforts are to expand and enhance testing capabilities and capacity specifically for
the hypersonic operating envelope to improve transition.
• Biomanufacturing ($124.7 million): Scale emerging biotechnology for critical materials and
precursors. Efforts include converting facilities to accelerate commercialization of DoD
biotechnology design, piloting modular manufacturing facilities to mitigate logistics bottlenecks
in forward-operating environments, and integrating bio-manufactured products and
precursors into DoD acquisition pathways.
However, expansion of production capability will not be achieved simply by expanding brick-andmortar facilities. Indeed, through leveraging our national competitive advantages, we will invest
in and use modern technologies to improve production capacity and efficiency. The DoD will
embrace new initiatives like Advanced Manufacturing Forward to produce advanced technologies
domestically through inv