2026 Top 10 Trends and Priorities for Defense and National Security
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View Our Research and Analyst ServicesTop Priorities for 2026
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01
Implement defense-grade zero trust
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02
Build a secure multi-classification cloud backbone
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03
Build AI readiness for mission advantage
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04
Reduce technical debt across mission-critical systems
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05
Develop a defense-ready IT workforce and talent strategy
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06
Strengthen defense industrial base supply chain visibility and resilience
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07
Operationalize data as a mission-critical capability
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08
Accelerate mission capability delivery through procurement modernization
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09
Enable coalition interoperability and alliance digital integration
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10
Institutionalize governance and change for digital transformation
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Implement defense-grade zero trust
The Challenge
Perimeter security models cannot protect modern defense enterprises.
Modern defense networks span cloud services, partner systems, mobile users, and operational environments beyond traditional boundaries, making perimeter controls insufficient. Persistent intrusion attempts and long recovery periods show that defense organizations must design security into every layer of their digital ecosystem.
Why It Matters
Zero trust is now essential for mission resilience across distributed environments.
Continuous verification reduces lateral movement, constrains compromise impact, and enables secure data sharing with partners. It provides a scalable model for protecting identities, devices, and workflows across large, multidomain defense enterprises.
The Solution
Establish a defense-specific zero trust roadmap.
Define target maturity levels, spanning enterprise IT, OT environments, and multi-classification networks. Use existing models where possible to benchmark target levels, and include cross-domain constraints, coalition requirements, and legacy platform integration pathways.
Build integrated governance across IT, OT, and classified domains.
Formalize architecture governance that spans all environments including weapons systems. Defense-grade zero trust requires unified control over identity, segmentation, and continuous monitoring across disparate systems that historically evolved independently.
Secure executive sponsorship and multi-year funding.
Position zero trust as a strategic transformation program. Enterprise-scale implementation requires sustained resources, measurable milestones, and cultural adoption, not isolated tool deployments.
Build a secure multi-classification cloud backbone
The Challenge
Defense cloud adoption is complex due to classification, sovereignty, interoperability, and legacy constraints.
Defense organizations must modernize rapidly but face stricter governance, national-security controls, and multinational requirements. This makes cloud migration slower and more complicated than in civilian sectors.
Why It Matters
Cloud has become the backbone for digital readiness and advanced capabilities.
Modern analytics, artificial intelligence, and resilient mission systems depend on elastic, secure cloud infrastructure. Organizations that delay cloud migration risk falling behind partners and face higher sustainment costs from outdated systems.
The Solution
Define workload placement criteria by classification level.
Establish a structured framework that determines what runs in commercial hyperscale, sovereign cloud, and on-premise secure environments. This reduces arbitrary cloud adoption, ensures compliance with national and alliance security constraints, and prevents vendor lock-in by making placement decisions transparent and repeatable.
Build cloud governance and engineering capability.
Stand up an internal cloud engineering function capable of managing multi-cloud operations. Defense organizations must develop in-house skills to negotiate enterprise agreements, ensure portability, and integrate sovereign controls, reducing hyperscaler dependence and ensuring resilience if vendors shift strategy or exit programs.
Modernize legacy systems concurrent with migration.
Prioritize application retirement and refactoring to prevent lift-and-shift technical debt. Cloud migration without modernization traps the organization in costly replication of legacy inefficiencies and undermines the benefits of cloud-native architectures.
Build AI readiness for mission advantage
The Challenge
Defense organizations see the importance of AI but remain unprepared for scaled integration.
While artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence are widely recognized as essential, many organizations lack the data foundations, platforms, and workforce needed to operationalize them. Readiness gaps slow adoption despite rising investment.
Why It Matters
AI advantages cannot be realized without foundational readiness.
Predictive maintenance, decision support, and logistics optimization depend on high-quality data, governance, and skills. Poor readiness leads to fragmented pilots, unscalable prototypes, and security exposure from poorly governed models.
The Solution
Build foundational data infrastructure and quality controls.
Establish enterprise-level data pipelines, metadata standards, and classification-aligned governance. AI depends on consistent, reliable, and secure data. Investing in data modernization before model deployment prevents downstream model drift, bias amplification, and misaligned outputs across classification domains.
Establish defense-appropriate AI governance.
Formalize rules for model usage, auditing, bias mitigation, and mission-specific risk controls. Defense contexts require heightened oversight for responsible AI, including constraints around autonomy, model explainability, and mission safety that exceed commercial norms.
Invest in workforce upskilling and AI literacy.
Allocate 15%-20% of AI program spending to skill development and cultural adoption. Expanding AI literacy and technical proficiency across roles mitigates resistance, supports experimentation, and ensures responsible model use while preparing personnel for scaled deployments.
Reduce technical debt across mission-critical systems
The Challenge
Legacy systems slow transformation and increase cyber and operational risk.
Fragmented platforms, outdated architectures, and stove-piped systems impede modernization, reduce interoperability, and constrain integration of newer technologies. Maintaining these systems diverts resources and accelerates technical debt.
Why It Matters
Retiring legacy platforms is required to achieve modernization and mission agility.
Outdated systems hinder cloud adoption, artificial intelligence deployment, and secure data exchange. Modern architectures reduce the attack surface, enable interoperability, and allow defense organizations to operate at mission tempo.
The Solution
Quantify technical debt and prioritize by exposure and mission criticality.
Develop a defensible modernization roadmap based on risk, operational dependency, and integration requirements. A structured assessment enables leaders to justify investment, retire low-value systems, and target resources at modernization areas that unlock downstream transformation.
Replace or refactor instead of rehosting.
Treat modernization as re-architecture, not lift-and-shift migration. Rehosting legacy systems in the cloud replicates inefficiencies and security issues. Refactoring enables modernization aligned with cloud-native, modular, and secure-by-design architectures.
Establish a rolling modernization funding model.
Redirect savings from legacy retirement into continuous modernization. Funding continuity prevents modernization stalls and ensures systems evolve with operational requirements rather than drifting back into legacy status.
Develop a defense-ready IT workforce and talent strategy
The Challenge
Defense organizations face accelerating shortage of digital talent.
Security-clearance workflows, rising technical skill demands, and competition with the private sector make it difficult to attract and retain expertise in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, software engineering, and data.
Why It Matters
A skilled digital workforce is a critical component of defense readiness. .
Modernization depends on personnel who can build, operate, and secure cloud, artificial intelligence, and mission platforms. Without deliberate workforce strategy, digital initiatives stall and critical systems become unsustainable.
The Solution
Build an end-to-end workforce strategy with defense-specific pipelines.
Partner with HR and education institutions to develop recruitment pipelines aligned to cleared and clearance-eligible talent. Focused pipelines address talent scarcity, reduce clearance bottlenecks, and establish a dedicated IT talent feeder system tailored to defense requirements.
Accelerate clearance and onboarding pathways.
Redesign internal processes to shorten clearance time and reduce administrative friction. Clearance delays are a major hiring bottleneck; streamlining these processes increases competitiveness against commercial employers and accelerates workforce availability.
Establish structured upskilling for AI, cloud, data, and cyber roles.
Implement continuous training aligned to emerging defense skill needs, not static job descriptions. Defense platforms evolve rapidly; without continuous reskilling, internal talent becomes obsolete and organizations become dependent on contractors for mission-critical capabilities.
Strengthen defense industrial base supply chain visibility and resilience
The Challenge
Defense supply chains lack deep visibility into sub-tier dependencies.
Multitier networks, sole-source suppliers, and global interdependencies create vulnerabilities that can be exploited or disrupted. Shrinking industrial bases intensify concentration risk and reduce redundancy.
Why It Matters
Supply-chain illumination is now essential for mission assurance.
Defense readiness relies on timely, trusted access to components and materials. Visibility enables earlier detection of disruption, counterfeit risk, and adversarial infiltration across complex supplier ecosystems.
The Solution
Deploy multi-tier supply chain visibility platforms.
Implement tools capable of mapping Tier 2–4 suppliers and identifying upstream bottlenecks. These platforms provide early-warning indicators, risk classification, and dependency mapping that enable proactive mitigation rather than reactive crisis management.
Integrate cyber, counterfeit, and compliance screening.
Extend monitoring to technology, software, and component suppliers. Modern supply-chain threats include firmware tampering, counterfeit materials, and compromised software components; establish and use screening programs to strengthen authentication and security assurance.
Support supplier diversification and allied-only sourcing.
Use visibility insights to inform sourcing decisions prioritizing redundancy and sovereign capability. Diversification strategies reduce systemic dependency, strengthen domestic industrial bases, and ensure continuity of supply in contested geopolitical environments.
Operationalize data as a mission-critical capability
The Challenge
Defense data remains fragmented and difficult to govern as a strategic asset.
Data lives across heterogeneous platforms and strict security classifications, making enterprise-wide access and reuse challenging. Without consistent governance, data stays siloed and hard to exploit.
Why It Matters
Data governance is critical for AI, interoperability, and real-time command-and-control.
Consistent semantics, metadata, and sharing frameworks enable cross-domain fusion and coalition operations. Mature governance transforms data from isolated assets into operational advantage.
The Solution
Establish enterprise data governance with classification-aware controls.
Implement governance structures that integrate security classification, data ethics, and cross-domain access controls. Defense-specific governance ensures that mission-critical data is both protected and accessible, enabling secure use of AI, advanced analytics, and multi-classification collaboration.
Build data architecture as foundational infrastructure.
Treat data pipelines, metadata management, and quality assurance as core digital infrastructure. Data maturity enables AI readiness, improves decision support, and strengthens interoperability with coalition partners.
Operationalize data sharing across allies and domestic agencies.
Implement frameworks that support classification-aligned sharing with international and domestic partners. Modern defense missions require seamless data exchange; structured data-sharing frameworks reduce friction and ensure mission alignment across partners.
Accelerate mission capability delivery through procurement modernization
The Challenge
Procurement cycles move too slowly to support modern digital capabilities.
Traditional multi-year acquisition processes cause digital solutions to arrive late, outdated, or misaligned with mission needs. Administrative burdens further constrain speed and supplier diversity.
Why It Matters
Acquisition speed directly affects modernization success and mission readiness.
Digital platforms evolve rapidly, and delays increase cost, sustainment burden, and obsolescence risk. Faster, streamlined procurement ensures that capabilities remain current and aligned to operational tempo.
The Solution
Implement agile procurement models for digital capabilities
Shift from linear acquisition pathways to iterative, outcome-driven procurement. Agile procurement reduces cycle time, lowers risk, and enables incremental capability delivery aligned with evolving mission needs.
Integrate compliance requirements at the start of projects
Embed FAR, DFARS, and ITAR considerations from project inception. Early compliance alignment reduces rework, accelerates approvals, and prevents late-stage barriers that stall or reset procurement cycles.
Expand vendor ecosystems and strengthen SME participation
Establish pathways for smaller suppliers to enter defense programs while preserving competition. Broader ecosystems improve resilience, reduce supplier dependency, and promote rapid innovation through diverse digital solution providers.
Enable coalition interoperability and alliance digital integration
The Challenge
Defense missions require seamless interoperability across allied forces, but digital fragmentation persists.
Differing systems, standards, and architectures hinder joint operations and limit the ability of nations to integrate effectively in multidomain missions.
Why It Matters
Interoperability is a strategic requirement for effective coalition operations.
Shared situational awareness, coordinated logistics, and synchronized command-and-control depend on digital cohesion. Nations unable to interoperate at scale risk reduced influence and diminished contribution to collective missions.
The Solution
Embed interoperability requirements in enterprise architecture from inception.
Define standards, data models, and interface requirements before technology selection. Early integration of frameworks prevents downstream incompatibilities and ensures that domestic systems can seamlessly connect with allied digital backbones.
Align national investments with alliance digital standards.
Map domestic IT modernization roadmaps to international interoperability expectations. Alignment ensures compatibility, reduces integration cost, and maintains relevance in multinational operations.
Engineer cross-domain and multiclassification data sharing.
Implement data-access controls, cross-domain solutions, and classification-aware APIs. Secure, classification-aligned sharing enables real-time coalition operations without compromising national security boundaries.
Institutionalize governance and change for digital transformation
The Challenge
Digital transformation stalls without cultural alignment and governance.
Organizational inertia, hierarchical structures, and risk-averse cultures impede adoption of new digital practices. Transformations fail when treated solely as technology rollouts.
Why It Matters
Culture, leadership alignment, and governance determine whether transformation succeeds.
Modernization requires clear vision, empowered teams, psychological safety, and enterprise-wide coordination. Strong governance sustains momentum, reduces fragmentation, and ensures initiatives reinforce mission outcomes.
The Solution
Establish enterprise-level digital governance structures.
Create cross-functional governance bodies that oversee transformation, spanning operations, IT, HR, and capability development. Central governance prevents siloed efforts, ensures alignment with enterprise objectives, and sets the cadence for transformation.
Embed change management into every major digital program.
Treat change management as a required program workstream, not an optional add-on. Structured change management reduces cultural resistance, improves adoption rates, and strengthens the impact of new digital capabilities.
Develop workforce capability and psychological safety as core enablers.
Build training pathways and cultural norms that enable experimentation without risk of punitive outcomes. These conditions accelerate learning, strengthen adoption of emerging technologies, and support sustained transformation across defense organizations.
