WASHINGTON — An internal Pentagon review published Wednesday warns that decades of underfunding has led to alarming deterioration in facilities doing military research.
“RDTE [Research, Development, Test, & Evaluation] infrastructure is deteriorating and weakening its ability to maintain a technically advanced warfighting capability … forcing RDT&E organizations to operate in facilities that pose documented safety risks and technical limitations,” reads the report, entitled “Supporting the Warfighter,” the result of the review led by Assistant Secretary for Science & Technology Joseph Jewell. “Authorized major MILCON [Military Construction] projects for modernization of critical joint-mission RDT&E infrastructure continually slip due to the Services’ reprioritizing of scarce MILCON funds toward other operationally relevant priorities.”
The review’s number one recommendation? Ask Congress to change the law on Military Construction appropriations by creating a special fund for research infrastructure — one that’s fenced off so that the armed services can’t “reprioritize” (i.e. raid) it to address urgent short-term problems like fixing moldy barracks or inadequate on-base childcare.
The review’s number two recommendation is also about budgetary process: It asks Congress to raise the threshold on so-called “minor MILCON” projects, which are subject to less oversight and bureaucracy, from $9 to $20 million. “Laboratories must have agility to meet urgent and rapidly changing laboratory needs for modifying facilities or to construct new facilities,” the report says.
It’s not entirely clear how much the fixes will cost, but the report recommends the fenced-off fund be fed with just under $5 billion over five years, starting with $650 million in the first year and ramping up to almost $952 million in year five. It does not explicitly say how big an increase this would be over current funding for lab infrastructure, and it’s difficult to calculate a baseline because, to date, there is no single line in budgets for the labs.
Instead, Military Construction funding is currently appropriated by Congress in 13 different categories — essentially, one for each service, Reserve or National Guard component, plus special funding lines for items like family housing and NATO — with lab projects scattered across multiple categories. Counting all thirteen, MILCON appropriations for fiscal 2026 total $19.7 billion. So allocating $650 million for labs would be just 3 percent. Complicating matters further, the Trump administration is asking for a $350 billion increase that could change the denominator in this equation, if an increasingly reluctant Congress passes it.
What the study does make clear, however, is that a lot of labs are in poor shape. Many facilities are so old and poorly cared-for that researchers can’t work with cutting-edge technologies, have to divert millions of dollars meant for their experiments to cover ever-growing maintenance bills, or even face physical hazards to their health and safety, the report says.
Especially for labs on military bases, which have plenty of other aging-infrastructure problems, there may not be adequate bandwidth to share large datasets, sufficient stable electricity to run AI and other power-hungry tech, or even adequate air conditioning to operate delicate equipment.
“The average age of laboratory facilities across all the Services is greater than 45 years, with most built during the Cold War era,” the report says. “These facilities are past their traditional life expectancies and the methods and requirements of conducting research in the 21st century is beyond their capabilities.”
The study was commissioned by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in January, as part of a much larger overhaul of the department’s technology strategy. It was conducted over 90 days, with teams visiting 30 facilities — about a third of the total — including a mix of government-run labs on government property and government-funded labs run by universities or independent research centers.
An implementation plan is currently in the works, the review says, but no expected date is given for its completion.
