Economic Defense Unit

The mission of the Economic Defense Unit (EDU) is to support some of the DoW's Economic Competition activities by providing analysis, recommendations, insights, and other support to ensure alignment with DoW objectives and in support of the DoW’s National Defense Strategy, National Military Strategy, and National Defense Industrial Strategy. Additionally, the office will develop requirements for Economic Competition activities that may include access, basing, and overflight; countering mobilization of adversaries; countering defense industrial base activities by adversaries; and ensuring access for the United States to critical materials and capabilities. It will also provide economic analysis and advisory input on DoW contracting and other commercial approaches meeting criteria developed by the Director of EDU, and sponsor and conduct regular tabletop exercises and activities to assess the economic impacts of DoW decisions during crisis and conflicts. The EDU's economic weapon system will integrate economic competition workflows into a single system in order to (1) Enable data-driven coordination across economic competition activities; (2) Improve collaboration via recurring system usage by EDU; (3) Establish an enduring operating model for data acquisition and integration; (4) Support planning and execution of economic competition activities at scale.