The Joint Force in a Contested and Disordered World

lead to new means of signature control, the development of low-probability intercept active
sensors, the application of high-resolution planar lenses, and the use of compact antennas.
Exploitation of unique material properties at the nanoscale. The ability to make and modify
materials at the nanoscale will allow manufacturers to take advantage of many new properties.
Anticipated advances in nanomaterial technologies (combined with parallel improvements in
metamaterials) suggest that more complex composites and bespoke materials will emerge with
properties engineered precisely to optimize performance.
Fuels and batteries with increased energy density. Advances in energy systems (particularly
those based on hydrocarbons) will likely be evolutionary, and expected improvements in
energy density may enable advances in directed energy weapons, increase the loiter time of
unmanned vehicles, lead to more effective sensors, and reduce the size and weight of manportable
systems.
Biochemistry and biological engineering. New techniques to edit and modify the genome
may allow scientists to harness organisms or biological systems as weapons or to perform
engineering tasks typically impractical with conventional methods. Future advances might
include the construction of new biological parts, brain-computer interfaces, or the re-design
of natural biological systems to manufacture drugs, chemicals, materials, or food.
Economic and military advantages will accrue to those nations with dense university clusters, a
community of businesses that transform primary research into usable prototypes, and education
systems that encourage collaboration, experimentation, and innovation. Furthermore, because
research clusters are frequently international in nature, novel scientific advances may not be
claimed by single nations. The United States must focus on understanding the areas that research
clusters are investigating and be willing to explore how the application of multidisciplinary
scientific discoveries might augment and upgrade (or erode and obsolesce) its current portfolio of
capabilities. Future force development activities must be capable of interacting with research
clusters, and encouraging these clusters to research technologies that may lead to distinct U.S.
military advantages.
The Significance of Systems and Systems Integration
The corollary to change in multidisciplinary basic research at the engineering level is the
importance of systems integration to make emerging technologies economically or militarily
useful. Effective technology integration into military operations requires the capacity to bring
together many different capabilities into a coherent, purposeful whole. Even today, the largest,
most capable states struggle to match their ability to develop individual technologies with the
ability to integrate these technologies into a single system. By 2035, improvements to individual
devices, tools, or platforms will likely become less important than the system architectures which
allow dissimilar capabilities to work together coherently.
The significance of systems and systems integration is likely to result from several important
trends:
Additive manufacturing goes global. Additive manufacturing processes in both the
commercial and government sectors will likely grow and proliferate to an array of competitor
states, terrorists, and criminals. These capabilities will permit the mass customization of parts,
the development of lighter and stronger components, the use of rapid reverse-engineering, and
a reduced need for expensive and vulnerable supply chains and warehousing facilities.
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