Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER)

The Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) is overseen by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)). The primary goal of RDER is to support core program management and integration activities necessary to plan and execute a multi-year campaign of joint experimentation. This initiative aims to provide rapid capabilities that address complex military challenges through joint experimentation, enabling the Services, agencies, industry, and other organizations to identify and prototype best of breed capabilities. RDER focuses on establishing a body of evidence to support rapid adoption by the Services and refining the Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC) through a unique experimental design based on interconnected systems. The program also conducts integration activities with the Joint Force and recommends new projects, reviews project progress, and incorporates promising innovative prototypes into existing exercise venues.

RDER's specific objectives include planning, integrating, and overseeing joint experiments; providing assessments on project viability; delivering results to facilitate decisions on transitioning promising capabilities with the Services; establishing and coordinating experimentation venues that provide interoperability for multi-component defense planning scenarios; overseeing the cost, schedule, and performance of prototypes within functional battles such as Fires, Command and Control (C2), Information Assurance (IA), Contested Logistics, Space, and Cyber; integrating prototypes into joint experimentation events; evaluating system-of-system level architecture for integrating multiple prototypes into a single experimentation event; measuring prototype interoperability at various experimentation venues; evaluating and validating the technical maturity of each interface with the experimentation architectural design; and collecting experimental system performance for evaluation against Measures of Effectiveness (MOE) and Measures of Performance (MOP).