Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) FY 2023 update

Matt MacGregor had an interesting post on the state of DoD innovation funds, but the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) was a bit more difficult to track down because the funds were dispersed across service accounts in the justification books.

RDER Data

I put the data together for you in a convenient table (bottom of this post). The Senate Appropriations subcommittee on defense indicated they might cut the $358M request in half, but the Joint Explanatory Statement showed roughly a 24% cut instead. Interestingly, the largest cut was from the OSD line item (65%) rather than any of the service accounts.

A word of caution, most RDER lines are below the Program Element/Budget Line Item level, so in some cases it is hard to know exactly what congressional marks touched. For example, the Joint Staff BLI of $40 million included $10 million for RDER. This BLI was cut by appropriators by $5M. On the other hand, the Marine Corps $62M BLI included $51.6 for RDER, but this was increased by $5M for Marine Corps Warfighting Lab partnership, which may or may not be related to RDER.

RDER Background and Participation

RDER was started by USD R&E Heidi Shyu in FY 2022 to help accelerate promising new prototypes into experimentation campaigns that can then be accelerated into fielding. It focuses on joint and multi-domain kill chains based on Combatant Command priority gaps.

The official website is here. It’s not all that helpful. There’s a tag, “Ready to participate in RDER?” which provides a link to “Current opportunities,” which literally is just a link to SAM.gov with no filtering. There’s a note that FY23 submissions are delayed until appropriations are passed, at which time an industry call letter will be posted there. There is no expected timeline.

However, because FY23 projects were already justified in the FY23 budget in early 2022, it most of the effort seems to be set. Similarly, the FY24 RDER budget will be going to the Hill in early 2023, meaning that is out of reach as well. Contractors with good new ideas will have to wait for FY25 at the earliest, unless they can compete in existing projects. You can find those project details in the R-2 and R-3s of the budget justification documents under the PE/BLI numbers provided in the table above.