DARPA extends call for new tech in Mosaic Warfare project

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has extended the deadline on a broad agency announcement to gather promising technologies that will increase the lethality of U.S. warfighters.

But DARPA isn’t looking for another big, bad weapon. This BAA is instead an extension of DARPA’s Mosaic Warfare project to create weapon packages that mitigate the weaknesses of large, standalone weapons systems.

As DARPA wrote, the U.S. military has enjoyed overwhelming dominance over many years but that advantage is being challenged by adversaries who over decades have developed counters that degrade U.S. dominance.

“It is becoming evident that the U.S. cannot solve this dilemma by continuing legacy practices of building the next bigger, faster, more powerful, more survivable version of what came before,” DARPA wrote in the BAA.

Mosaic Warfare is a strategy to incorporate fast, scalable and adaptive lethality.

“It is the disaggregation of effects chain functions – find, fix, target, track, engage and assess (F2T2EA) – across a heterogeneous mix of manned and unmanned platforms from all domains,” DARPA says.

All elements that make up the pieces of the solutions or weapons package can be moved in and out and recombined depending on the mission. Hence, the use of the term "mosaic."

“The result presents an adversary with an overwhelming, diverse set of kinetic and non-kinetic effect decision dilemmas without common counters of failure modes,” DARPA says.

To achieve this, DARPA has been developing technologies that enables a distributed network of capabilities. The technologies that DARPA is looking at fall into three functional areas: planning and composition, interoperability, and execution.

DARPA is looking for tools around force composition, strategy and mission planning.

Some of the challenges DARPA wants to address include resource management, task planning and training.

Responses to the BAA are due Oct. 31.