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 a total of 30 black start exercises and four 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 DHA-eligible hires while further understanding the additional use of other priority authorities (to include veteran, military spouse, Schedule A, and intern program authorities), initiate test pilots to modify hiring processes that will reduce Time-to-Hire from 98 days to 85 days, improve hiring manager satisfaction by 5% to achieve a satisfaction rate of 80% or higher, double the current use of hiring and retention incentives, improve hiring selection rates by 3%, and assess impacts of these efforts by reducing civilian workforce attrition from 13% to 10%.