South Dakota · National Security Research Center of Excellence
Advanced Research in Materials, Operations & Resilience
“Assure U.S. sovereign capability, from raw material to operational effect, by building South Dakota into a national leader in defense materials, critical infrastructure resilience, and secure defense supply chains, with provenance science and AI/ML woven throughout as a unifying analytical core.”
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Mission
SD-ARMOR's mission is to establish South Dakota as a nationally competitive hub for national security research, commercialization, and workforce development — converting the state's converging defense assets, agricultural economy, and critical infrastructure into a self-sustaining R&D ecosystem that serves both state and national security.
A multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary center spanning three interlocking pillars, unified by an AI/ML detect-and-attribute core, and operationalized through the Governor's Resilient Infrastructure Taskforce (GRIT) as its proving ground — part of the South Dakota Governor's Research Centers of Excellence program, administered by SD EPSCoR and the SD Board of Regents.
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