Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Creating and Preventing Strategic Surprise

DARPA Seeks Technology to Radically Improve Dismounted Squad Situational Awareness, Communication Effectiveness

Success on the battlefield requires warfighters to know as much as possible about themselves, their surrounding environment and the potential threats around them. Dismounted infantry squads in particular risk surprise and loss of tactical advantage over opponents when information is lacking. While squads use many different technologies to gather and share information, the current piecemeal approach doesn’t provide the integrated, real-time situational awareness needed for individual warfighters and squad leaders to anticipate situations and effectively maneuver to positions of advantage. Providing this capability would provide dismounted squads with overwhelming tactical superiority over potential adversaries similar to what warfighters enjoy at the aircraft, ship and vehicle levels. News Release

DARPA is requesting information about potential technologies that could help digitize dismounted infantry squads. DARPA seeks to enable squads to more quickly and effectively collect, synthesize and share data about squad members, their environment and potential threats. The system would share crucial data, indications and warnings in real time, with the goal of providing overwhelming tactical superiority at the person-to-person level.

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Throughout history technical challenges have inspired generations...

Choose Your Own Sociocultural Training Adventure

A U.S. Army Soldier patrols the streets in the village of Orgun in Paktika province, Afghanistan. Courtesy: U.S. Army / Spc. George Hunt

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate the strategic significance of tactical actions by junior and noncommissioned officers who interact with local populations. This kind of interaction benefits from extensive cultural training, but opportunities for such training are limited by the compression of the Department of Defense’s force-generation cycles. Virtual training simulations provide a partial solution by offering warfighters on-demand, computer-based training, but creating such tools currently requires substantial investments of time, money and skilled personnel. News Release Program Page

“Inside a Cell”: Although the cell is the smallest unit of life, it is by no means simple. The human body is made up of tens of trillions of cells like this one, that have developed a highly synchronized set of components to carry out the processes that keep the organism alive, allow it to reproduce and adapt to changing environments. Courtesy: National Science Foundation

Rapid Threat Assessment Could Mitigate Danger from Chemical and Biological Warfare

For more than fifty years, researchers have been studying exactly how aspirin affects the human body. Despite thousands of publications on the topic, our understanding is still incomplete. News Release

Quantum-assisted Nano-imaging of Living Organism Is a First

Bright-field image of a magnetotactic bacterium (top) and scanning electron microscope image of the same bacterium (bottom)

In science, many of the most interesting events occur at a scale far smaller than the unaided human eye can see. Medical researchers might realize a range of breakthroughs if they could look deep inside living biological cells, but existing methods for imaging either lack the desired sensitivity and resolution or require conditions that lead to cell death, such as cryogenic temperatures. Recently, however, a team of Harvard University-led researchers working on DARPA’s Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) program demonstrated imaging of magnetic structures inside of living cells. Using equipment operated at room temperature and pressure, the team was able to display detail down to 400 nanometers, which is roughly the size of two measles viruses. News Release Program Page

New Method Joins Gallium Nitride and Diamond for Better Thermal Management

Many military radio frequency (RF) systems, like radar and communication systems, use a class of power amplifiers (PAs) called monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MIMIC). MMIC PAs using gallium nitride (GaN) transistors hold great promise for enhanced RF performance, but operational characteristics are strongly affected by thermal resistance. Much of this resistance comes at the thermal junction where the substrate material of the circuit connects to the GaN transistor. If the junction and substrate have poor thermal properties, temperature will rise and performance will decrease. News Release Program Page

DARPA Seeks Clean-Slate Ideas For Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs)

Troops operating in forward locations without telecommunication infrastructure often rely on a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to communicate and share data. The communication devices troops use on foot or in vehicles double as nodes on the mobile network. A constraint with current MANETs is they can only scale to around 50 nodes before network services become ineffective. For the past 20 years, researchers have unsuccessfully used Internet-based concepts in attempts to significantly scale MANETs. News Release