Research Enterprise
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Strategic Research Areas
Preparing Future Warfighters. Advancing National Security. Driving Discovery.
The Academy’s Strategic Research Areas (SRAs) provide the framework that aligns cadet and faculty research with the Department of the Air Force’s most pressing challenges. The SRAs help bridge the gap between the classroom and the battlefield, ensuring research produces relevant, innovative and low-cost solutions to pressing operational needs.
Explore our Strategic Research Areas
The eight Strategic Research Areas capture the breadth of the Academy’s research and highlight how cadets and faculty are actively addressing challenges across the Air and Space Forces.
Domains of Conflict
Developing knowledge, technology and policy to address the evolving nature of conflict across all operational domains, from the kinetic to the cognitive.
Focus – Traditional domains, such as land, sea, air, space and cyber, along with emerging areas like the cognitive, electromagnetic and human domains, with emphasis on strategic competition and multi-domain ops.
Operational Energy, Infrastructure and Logistics
Creating agile, resilient and sustainable networks and capabilities to support military operations, national infrastructure and local communities.
Focus – Developing resilient basing and infrastructure solutions, modeling contested logistics energy and sustainment networks, adapting commercial technologies, strengthening the defense industrial base and cultivating logistics and engineering talent.
Warfighting concepts & design
Creating frameworks, theories, analytical tools and decision-making paradigms that advance our ability to deter conflict, win wars and achieve the goals of the National Defense Strategy.
Focus – Investigating future operational concepts and force design through interdisciplinary research, wargaming and modeling and simulation, with an emphasis on optimizing force structure, policy and strategy for current advisories and unforeseen future challenges.
Human Weapon Systems
Enhancing human performance and resilience through science, technology and the humanities.
Focus – Improving cognitive and physical performance, decision-making under stress, human-machine teaming, training systems, as well as understanding how the humanities sustain the human spirit in moments of personal and collective crisis.
Instruments of National Power
Exploring how diplomatic, informational, military and economic tools interact to shape policy, influence global affairs and achieve strategic outcomes.
Focus – Integrating research across disciplines, such as international relations, political science, law, economics, culture and language and strategic communication, to inform and influence whole-of-government approaches for national security, global engagement and strategic influence.
Emerging Technologies & Innovation
Accelerating the discovery and application of breakthrough technologies to improve society and create competitive advantages for US forces in deterrence, competition and conflict.
Focus – Innovation and advanced technologies impacting society and military operations, including artificial intelligence, autonomy, quantum systems, biotechnology, directed energy, hypersonics, UAS and counter-UAS systems and novel materials.
Foundational Discovery & Science
Expanding knowledge through fundamental research across all disciplines.
Focus – Pursuing basic research to generate new understanding, theories and frameworks that advance the sciences, engineering, social sciences and humanities.
Leadership, Character & the Human Condition
Investigating how leadership, ethics and the human experience shape conflicts, cultures, & humanity.
Focus – Combining scientific and humanistic approaches to analyze the personal, interpersonal and cultural facets that influence values, morality and purpose to better understand behavior, relationships and the fundamentals of human nature.
