More than 190 commercial companies have participated in an industry engagement day hosted by the Department of Defense to discuss the vision and technical priorities of the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve initiative.
Participants of the event held at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory gained first-hand knowledge of how the RDER enables prototyping and experimentation to support joint warfighting concepts, the Pentagon said Monday.
“RDER is part of a Defense-wide effort to engage our innovative industry partners to rapidly develop and field capabilities needed to build an enduring advantage, and support campaigning as well as the Joint fight,” said Bruce Juselis, division chief for RDER technical accession and proposal development.
The industry engagement day included several classified briefings on the RDER program, proposal criteria and technology capability requirements.
The RDER program is a multi-year campaign that solicits feedback from the services and combatant commands to address capability gaps in joint warfighting.
In November, Heidi Shyu, undersecretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, said her office has selected 32 ideas for funding that could address the identified warfighting challenges.