The Department will improve all-hazards resilience of military installations through developing updated policy, tools, plans, testing, and resourcing. These initiatives are critical to achieving one of the Secretary of Defense’s four strategic National Defense Strategy goals: strengthening the resilience and adaptability of our defense ecosystem. As a significant step towards meeting that goal, the Department will conduct five black start exercises and two cyber resilience readiness exercises by September 30, 2025. These exercises will be instructive to the Department as it continues to refine tracking, measuring, and resourcing requirements to achieve installation resilience.

The Department’s ability to deliver relevant and timely talent is critical to building enduring competitive advantages and achieving national security objectives. Attracting and retaining civilian candidates is vital to fulfill DoD’s mission. To address these challenges, by September 30, 2025, the Department will continue to advance the use of direct hiring authorities to maintain a minimum of 80% usage rates for Direct Hire Authority (DHA)-eligible hires while further understanding the additional use of other priority authorities (to include veteran, military spouse, Schedule A and intern program authorities), improve hiring manager satisfaction incrementally up to 10% or higher over a baseline of 75%, initiate test pilots to modify hiring processes that will reduce Time-to-Hire from 85 days to 65 days, maximize the use of hiring and retention incentives and student loan repayments each quarter, and assess impacts of these efforts by reducing civilian workforce attrition by 10%.