The U.S. government has developed hundreds of approaches to promote and protect critical technologies and their associated industrial base, and the sheer number and diversity of these programs, policies, and initiatives present a logistical challenge for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Upon discovering a risk or vulnerability to a critical technology, DoD must be able to quickly and effectively determine relevant approaches that can mitigate the problem, and the approaches' related implementation considerations.

To assist DoD in this approach selection, the authors of this report developed a selection framework that (1) identifies relevant approaches based on features of the technology and strategy, (2) provides details on approach implementation considerations, and (3) is instantiated by an interactive tool for use by government entities to inform approach decisionmaking. In this report, they describe the selection framework and provide supporting documentation for the associated tool.