What project 353 buys
To combat the evolving threat and development of critical technologies, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) to leverage dual-use technological advances in Allied centers of innovation to achieve the Alliance’s operational requirements, including accelerating the development, testing, and fielding of security technology solutions to achieve an advantage over the evolving threat. The NATO DIANA program only provides non-traditional business partners from Alliance nations with funding to accelerate new technical solutions and commercialization specifically where the technology holds a dual use (commercial and defense in nature) potential. Advanced development and testing to facilitate adoption into U.S. defense programs requires supporting funding for our own labs and test centers to pull that technology into our Defense acquisition ecosystem. This project enables the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (OUSW(R&E)) to assist in accelerating military capability development for U.S. forces as well as our NATO Allies and will expose new U.S. industries to the European markets. Fielding of critical technologies in the proposed areas will have significant positive impact on detecting the enemy first, ensuing effective communications and data exchange between coalition partners, as well as systems developed by different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and enabling robotic and autonomous systems to remain on station longer periods of time for greater operation impact. NATO DIANA advances access to technology across larger security challenges. These enhancements will contribute to increasing lethality across the U.S. and NATO military capabilities. The NATO DIANA initiative will fund dual-use technologies identified through the NATO DIANA challenges found sufficiently mature with the potential for meaningful impact for U.S. forces on the battlefield for continued development, testing, integration, and experimentation and proposes to fund each technology for capability maturation.
Project 353 funding, FY2025–FY2026
Prior years are actuals, the budget year is the request, and the outyears are the FYDP plan. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure. Projects carry the full five-year plan; the activities inside them stop at the budget year.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 0.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 37.5 |
1 accomplishment / planned program
The R-2A exhibit — the only level of the budget that describes work that has not happened yet. Activities carry the prior, current and budget year only, no five-year plan. Coverage is partial across the corpus, so count activities, never total them.
FY2026 to FY2027 change The decrease of $37.507 million from FY 2026 to FY 2027 is due to an internal funding realignment within the Critical Technologies portfolio. This funding increase supports high-priority DoW research for AHI (PE 0603375D8Z Technology Innovation - Anomalous Incidents Research).
FY2026 plans — current year Fund evaluation of dual-use technologies identified through the NATO DIANA 2024-2025 challenge problems found sufficiently mature with the potential for meaningful impact for U.S. forces on the battlefield for continued development, testing, integration, and experimentation and proposes to fund each technology for capability maturation. Each identified technology investments will be supported by mission and operational analysis, due diligence assessment, testing, and productization to assess the viability of the proposed technical approach and the mission impact of the technology in relevant operational scenarios; to assess the risks associated with the selected technology companies prior…
FY2025 accomplishments This project will annually fund dual-use technologies identified through the NATO DIANA challenges found sufficiently mature with the potential for meaningful impact for U.S. forces on the battlefield for continued development, testing, integration, and experimentation and proposes to fund each technology for capability maturation. These technologies will be identified under challenges based on a strategic direction developed with input from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Each of the identified technology investments will be supported by end-to-end enablers, including mission and operational analysis, due diligence assessment, testing, and…