Department of War tech office partners with In-Q-Tel to speed nontraditional innovations to troops

The Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, working through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War for Critical Technologies, announced an agreement to partner with the Central Intelligence Agency and In-Q-Tel (IQT), a not-for-profit strategic investor that has served the national security community since 1999.

The partnership provides structured access to IQT’s global technology-scouting platform and its portfolio of early-stage companies, with the objective of accelerating the transition and rapid fielding of mature commercial solutions from non-traditional performers to the warfighter.

The Department of War has designated six Critical Technology Areas as priorities for investment and transition: Applied Artificial Intelligence, Biomanufacturing, Contested Logistics Technologies, Quantum and Battlefield Information Dominance, Scaled Directed Energy, and Scaled Hypersonics. Under the agreement, IQT will conduct technology scouting and technical due diligence across all six areas and enabling technologies, while the Department identifies transition sponsors and pathways for validated technologies.

“In a contested global threat environment, technological superiority will not be determined by who invents a capability first, but by who delivers it to the warfighter fastest. The Department is fundamentally shifting its posture: we are moving from acting solely as a long-cycle technology developer to operating as an agile, credible, and rapid customer for America’s most innovative non-traditional performers. Our partnership with In-Q-Tel eliminates bureaucratic friction across our six CTAs. Over the next 12 months, our benchmark for success is simple and unambiguous: moving validated commercial prototypes out of the lab and into active operational field evaluations with our combatant commands,” said Hon. Michael Dodd, Assistant Secretary of War for Critical Technologies.

The integration leverages IQT’s venture capital methodology to vet early-stage commercial solutions that align with urgent mission requirements. By combining CT’s strategic transition pathways with IQT’s deep-tech scouting infrastructure, the effort aims to de-risk integration of commercial hardware and software for national security applications and signal to the commercial tech sector that the Department of War is open for business.

Joint pilot programs are slated to begin in the coming weeks, targeting immediate battlefield bottlenecks. The organizations aim to establish a permanent bridge that converts commercial ingenuity into deployed military capability at the speed of relevance.