National Defense Strategy
THE DATA IMPERATIVE IN AN ERA OF GREAT POWER COMPETITION
An issue Analysis by
GREAT POWER competition—not terrorism—has reemerged
as the central challenge to U.S. national security. China’s and
Russia’s military modernization initiatives are eroding the
Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) conventional deterrent. The
2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) addresses this problem
by directing DoD to ensure the Armed Forces are sufficiently
lethal to effectively deter Chinese or Russian aggression against
U.S. interests. By its own admission, DoD must change the way
it conducts its business to do so. Making resource tradeoffs is
no longer an aspirational goal for DoD—it’s an imperative.
Aligning resources with priorities is particularly challenging
for large bureaucracies. If DoD were its own nation, it would
rank in the top 20 countries by GDP, with an annual budget
of over $700 billion. Its sheer scale makes change of any
kind—let alone a strategic reorientation—exceedingly difficult.
DoD’s ability to make the necessary resource tradeoffs to
execute the NDS depends on data—data that allows DoD
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leaders to measure lethality, performance, innovation,
and affordability. It is this data that illuminates the path
forward by shedding light on the choices confronting DoD
along with the implications and consequences of each.
Top Pentagon leaders are striving to find ways to leverage data
and glean valuable insights for their missions despite siloed
organizational functions and datasets. Non-interoperable
data schemas from multiple disparate systems lack common
elements and formats, which makes integration difficult. To
accomplish this integration, DoD must leverage ever-expanding
volumes of data within these silos to create decision-grade
information. Accomplishing this enables data-driven analysis to
inform strategy and planning amid resource tradeoff decisions.
Govini, an Arlington-based data and analytics firm,
leverages cutting-edge data science and machine learning
technologies as well as an expansive dataset to assist