Agencies should be doing the analogous work now, for their own missions, regardless of where the hardware ends up.

Federal agencies are building real momentum in quantum computing, and the scope of that effort is genuinely thoughtful. The Air Force Research Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory recently signed a cooperative agreement in 2023 to exchange technical expertise and collaborate on quantum computing capabilities for the Defense Department, one of several such efforts exploring how quantum-accelerated modeling and simulation can support aerospace and defense missions. The White House’s June executive order directs the secretaries of Commerce, Defense and Energy, along with the NASA administrator, to develop five-year plans for deploying quantum-enabled sensors and networks. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative has moved more than a dozen companies into staged evaluations of whether a genuinely useful quantum computer can exist by 2033. By nearly every measure, the government is treating quantum as a serious, long-term priority worth building on.

The opportunity now is to make sure this momentum translates into mission capability, not just experimentation.

The Government Accountability Office offered a constructive data point on this earlier this year. In a report examining roughly $200 million a year in federal quantum computing spending across multiple agencies, GAO pointed to a chance for the National Quantum Initiative’s implementing strategy to more clearly assign roles and responsibilities, build out performance measures, and knit individual agency plans into a coherent whole. In other words, agencies have already done the hard part, running rigorous experiments. The next step is building the connective tissue that turns those experiments into acquisition-ready programs.

That’s a solvable problem, and agencies are well-positioned to solve it, especially if they start defining mission-specific problems now rather than waiting for a single hardware milestone to arrive.

The instinct inside a lot of agencies, understandably, is to hold off on procurement decisions until quantum hardware clears some threshold such as fault tolerance, error correction at scale, or whatever the milestone happens to be. That instinct gets the sequencing backward. DARPA’s own benchmarking framework, which evaluates whether an “industrially useful” quantum computer can exist within the decade, doesn’t start with the hardware. It starts by asking what a computation needs to look like before it’s worth paying for. Agencies should be doing the analogous work now, for their own missions, regardless of where the hardware ends up.

That means DoD program offices, NASA mission directorates and their contractor base need to get specific about which mission problems are bottlenecked by computation in a way that a quantum or quantum-assisted approach might actually address. Not “quantum computing” as a category. A named problem, with a named cost of not solving it, and a named classical baseline to beat.

Agencies already have technology readiness levels for hardware maturity. What’s missing is an equivalent framework for application readiness, whether a specific use case, on specific data, is far enough along to justify a procurement decision rather than another grant-funded pilot. In our own work with a national defense research laboratory on quantum-accelerated engineering simulation, four questions have proven useful for separating real progress from pilots that go nowhere.

• Is the mission problem defined narrowly enough to benchmark? A contractor claiming a “quantum advantage” in the abstract is not offering anything an agency can act on. A contractor who can point to a specific simulation, optimization or dataset, with a documented classical baseline and a documented result against it, is.
• Does the approach work today, on today’s hardware, or does it require hardware that doesn’t exist yet? Agencies should ask contractors to be explicit about this distinction. Quantum-inspired and hybrid classical-quantum approaches can deliver measurable value on current systems while research toward fault-tolerant machines continues in parallel. Conflating the two, or letting a pitch imply near-term results depend on a computer that’s still years out, sets agencies up to cancel programs when the underlying hardware timeline slips.
• Does the quantum technique integrate into an existing workflow, or does it require replacing one? A capability that only works as a standalone demonstration, disconnected from the design, engineering or operational software an agency already runs, will not survive contact with a real program office. Contractors should be able to show integration into existing toolchains, not just a result in isolation.
• Is the result reproducible by someone other than the contractor? This is the one question agencies skimp on most often. Independent validation through a government lab, an academic partner, or a competing benchmark is what separates a durable capability from a compelling slide.

None of this requires an agency to become a quantum computing expert. It requires acquisition and program staff to ask contractors for the same rigor they’d expect on any other emerging technology: a defined problem, a measured baseline, a reproducible result, and a credible integration path. Agencies that build this into their requirements now, before the hardware is ready, will have a real pipeline of vetted, mission-relevant applications when more capable quantum systems arrive. Agencies that wait will have a stack of pilot reports and no acquisition vehicle to act on them.

The Pentagon’s recent Post-Quantum Cryptography Strategy is instructive here; not because it’s about quantum computing applications directly, but because of what it demonstrates about sequencing. DoD didn’t wait for cryptographically relevant quantum computers to exist before setting a 2030 deadline for legacy systems to support post-quantum standards. It worked backward from mission risk to a concrete timeline and a concrete acquisition requirement, years before the threat fully materializes. That’s the model. Mission problem first, timeline and requirement second, hardware maturity as a variable to track rather than a prerequisite to wait on.

Quantum computing’s timeline is genuinely uncertain, and agencies are right to be skeptical of premature claims. But uncertainty about when fault-tolerant hardware arrives is not the same as uncertainty about which mission problems are worth solving with it. Agencies and their contractors can resolve the second question now. The ones that do will be ready to buy when the technology is ready to deliver. The ones that don’t will keep collecting pilots.

Rut Lineswala is chief technology officer of BosonQ Psi (BQP). 

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