U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, director of the Defense Health Agency, welcomed the employees of the newly established DHA Research and Development organization during an event at Fort Detrick in Maryland, DVIDS reported Thursday.

DHA Research and Development is led by Brig. Gen. Edward Bailey, who also oversees the agency’s Research and Engineering Directorate, and has more than 1,500 scientists, acquisition experts, program managers and support staff at offices and laboratories worldwide.

The newly created organization includes the Army’s Medical Research and Development Command, which was transferred to DHA in accordance with the National Defense Authorization Act.

“You know how your mission set gets after improving health and building readiness or the capability of the force. Whether it’s what you do connecting with the FDA, or in product development, or fielding and equipping—all feeds into the National Defense Strategy. Which includes improving clinical readiness—work that supports combat care. If you think about what the technology you are developing is going to do for increasing frontline clinical capabilities, that’s critical to growing and increasing clinical readiness in a demonstrable way,” Crosland, a 2024 Wash100 awardee, told personnel of the new DHA organization.

DHA Research and Development also includes medical research labs conducting studies on military infectious diseases, military chemical and biological defense, combat casualty care and other biomedical research areas.

War is constantly changing, and today, shifts are driven by “the accelerating pace of technology,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.

Offering land power as an example, Hicks, a 2024 Wash100 Award winner, told Army War College graduates that change will not bring an end to this element of warfighting, but transform how it looks, the Department of Defense reported on Friday.

She emphasized the importance of being a “change agent” as the United States responds to the challenges of the evolving geopolitical landscape.

According to Hicks, the war in Ukraine has shown that Russia is “an acute threat to the international system.” China, she said, is the pacing challenge for the U.S., and she expects this relationship to continue in the foreseeable future.

She also noted climate change and pandemics as “threat multipliers” that influence national security issues.

Hicks highlighted individuals “who are seizing opportunities to innovate every day — like using data and [artificial intelligence] to improve our decision advantage, leveraging commercial technologies to deliver capabilities to the warfighter at greater speed and scale, and crafting novel operational concepts for how to use those capabilities in ways that confound our competitors and achieve our missions in the battlespace.”

The military, she said, is just one part of deterrence.

“Today’s complex security challenges require whole-of-government solutions. In every region of the world, preserving and promoting peace demands that America also has a robust diplomatic corps, well-resourced development agencies, and a world-class intelligence community,” she explained.