DARPA's "Bio-Revolution"
Rips from the DARPA Overview PDF:
1.
This document describes the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) current Purpose strategic plan, as required by Section 2352, title 10 of the United States Code. It provides a top-level view of DARPA’s activities for Congress, the research community, and various elements of the Department of Defense (DoD).
DARPA’s original mission, established in 1958, was to prevent technological surprise like the launch of Sputnik, which signaled that the Soviets had beaten the U.S. into space. The mission statement has evolved over time. Today, DARPA’s mission is still to prevent technological surprise to the US, but also to create technological surprise for our enemies. Stealth is one example where DARPA created technological surprise.
2.1.
DARPA’s mission implies one imperative for the Agency: radical innovation for national Mission, Management, and Organization security. DARPA’s management philosophy reflects this in a straightforward way: bring in expert, entrepreneurial program managers; empower them; protect them from red tape; and quickly make decisions about starting, continuing, or stopping research projects.
There are two basic technical offices at DARPA: technology offices and systems offices. The technology offices focus on new knowledge and component technologies that might have significant national security applications. These offices are the Defense Sciences Office, Microsystems Technology Office, and Information Processing Technology Office. The systems offices focus on technology development programs leading to products that more closely resemble a specific military end-product; i.e., an item that might actually be in the military inventory. These offices are the Tactical Technology Office, Special Projects Office, Advanced Technology Office, and Information Exploitation Office. As a practical matter, a fair amount of overlap exists between the two types of offices; the work in the technology offices often shapes the work of the systems offices, and vice versa. In addition, DARPA currently hosts the Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) Office, which is focused on developing a specific set of unmanned combat air vehicles for the Department of Defense.
2.2.
DARPA is a Defense Agency with a unique role within DoD. DARPA is not tied to a specific DARPA’s Role operational mission: DARPA supplies technological options for the entire Department, and is designed to be the “technological engine” for transforming DoD. Near-term needs and requirements generally drive the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force to focus on those needs at the expense of major change. Consequently, a large organization like DoD needs a place like DARPA whose only charter is radical innovation. DARPA looks beyond today’s known needs and requirements. As military historians note, “None of the most important weapons transforming warfare in the 20th century – the airplane, tank, radar, jet engine, helicopter, electronic computer, not even the atomic bomb – owed its initial development to a doctrinal requirement or request of the military.”7 None of them. And to this list, DARPA would add unmanned systems, stealth, global positioning system (GPS) and Internet technologies.
DARPA emphasizes what future commanders might want and pursues opportunities for bringing entirely new core capabilities into DoD.
3.
Strategy is the evolving pursuit of a central mission through changing circumstances.
Current Strategic Thrusts Consequently, over time, DARPA changes much of what it is doing in response to the different national security threats and technological opportunities facing the United States.
DARPA currently emphasizes research in eight strategic thrusts:
•Detection, Precision ID, Tracking, and Destruction of Elusive Surface Targets
•Urban Area Operations
•Detection, Characterization, and Assessment of Underground Structures
•Robust, Secure Self-Forming Tactical Networks
•Assured Use of Space
•Cognitive Computing
•Networked Manned and Unmanned Systems
•Bio-Revolution
3.1.
The Department of Defense has steadily improved its ability to conduct precision strike against both stationary and moving ground targets. The timely, accurate and precise delivery of bombs and missiles has given the U.S. military tremendous advantages. Yet, experience shows that major challenges remain in target detection, identification, and tracking. It is still difficult to strike targets that are hiding, use evasive tactics such as frequent starts and stops, or that require a rapid reaction by U.S. forces in order to be destroyed.
To provide a focused response to these challenges, DARPA is assembling sensors, exploitation tools, and battle management systems to rapidly find and destroy ground targets in any terrain, in any weather, moving or stopped, with minimum accidental damage or casualties. To do this, we must seamlessly meld sensor tasking
with strike operations to use platforms or a network of platforms that carry both capable sensors and effective weapons.
In the first stage, networks will connect more and more sensors, platforms, and weapons with a variety of communications links (Figure 7). In the second stage, computers and commanders will take advantage of the massive amounts of data available to increase the speed, accuracy, agility, and capability of our combat forces. For example, changes in images generated by DARPA’s foliage-penetrating radar can be used to engage elusive targets. The radar itself operates at frequencies that penetrate the forest’s canopy.
Algorithms, run either on an aircraft or by the network at a ground station, compare images taken at different times to detect changes that signify either departures or arrivals. Because radars operate in all weather and at long ranges, this technique can discover the location of potential targets over very wide areas.
3.2.
The DoD is in the middle of a transformation to what is often termed “Network-Centric
Robust, Secure Self-Forming Tactical Networks Operations” (see Figure 10). In simplest terms, the promise of network-centric operations is to turn information superiority into combat power so that the U.S. and its allies have better information and can plan and conduct operations far more quickly and effectively than any adversary.
The heart of many networks is a common clock time. In many cases, this is provided by GPS. Hence, if an adversary jammed GPS, they might be able to take down the network. DARPA’s Chip-Scale Atomic Clock program will cope with this vulnerability. Microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology will be used to place an entire atomic clock onto a single chip, reducing its size and power consumption by factors of
200 and 300, respectively (Figure 11). These wrist-watch-sized atomic clocks
will greatly improve the mobility and robustness of military communication and low-power, navigation devices by atomic time and frequency reference units providing a network clock if the GPS signal is lost.
To help provide bandwidth, the Optical and Radio Frequency Combined Link Experiment program (Figure 12) will combine large-bandwidth, free-space optical communications with radio frequency communications to demonstrate compact, robust, high bandwidth mobile communications for the military. This hybrid of optical and radio frequency technologies will provide more reliable high-data-rate communications than either could achieve on its own.
Spectrum is a valuable resource. The neXt Generation (XG) Communications program will increase spectrum availability and utility for the U.S. military 10 to 20 fold by dynamically allocating spectrum across frequency, time, and space without interfering with use by the spectrum owner (Figure 13). XG will allow networks to be set up much more quickly, without waiting for someone to allocate spectrum, and has been described as “tuning for daylight.”
In the area of information assurance, the threat to military networks from computer worms that have never been seen before, and that exploit previously unknown network
vulnerabilities (“zero-day worms”), has exceeded commercial industry’s ability to mount an adequate defense. DARPA’s Dynamic Quarantine of Worms program will develop an
integrated system of detection and response devices to quarantine zero-day worms and stop them from spreading until other parts of the network can be protected.
3.7.
Many elements of the information technology revolution that have vastly improved the
Cognitive Computing effectiveness of the U.S. Forces and transformed American society (e.g., time-sharing, personal computers, and the Internet) were given their impetus by J. C. R. Licklider, a visionary scientist at DARPA some 40 years ago. Licklider’s vision was of people and computers working symbiotically. He envisioned computers seamlessly adapting to people as partners that would handle routine information processing tasks, thus freeing the people to focus on what they do best – think analytically and creatively – and greatly extend their cognitive powers.
As we move to an increasingly network-centric military, the vision of intelligent, cooperative computing systems responsible for their own maintenance is more relevant than ever. Despite the enormous progress in information technology over the years, information technology still falls well short of Licklider’s vision. While computing systems are critical to U.S. national defense, they remain exceedingly complex, expensive to create, insecure, frequently incompatible, and prone to failure. And, they still require the user to adapt to them, rather than the other way around. Computers have grown ever faster, but they remain fundamentally unintelligent and difficult to use. Something dramatically different is needed. In response, DARPA is revisiting Licklider’s vision as its inspiration for the strategic thrust, “Cognitive Computing.” Cognitive computers can be thought of as systems that know what they’re doing. Cognitive computing systems “reason” about their environments (including other systems), their goals, and their own capabilities. They will “learn” both from experience and by being taught. They will be capable of natural interactions with users, and will be able to “explain” their reasoning in natural terms. They will be robust in the face of surprises and avoid the brittleness and fragility of expert systems. The benefits from this cognitive computing thrust will be profound. The increasing complexity of military systems means that the level of expertise needed to maintain them is also increasing – as are the staffing requirements for virtually every military function that uses computing and communications technology. By creating systems that know what they are doing, and that can configure, maintain, and adapt themselves, we will be able to drastically reduce the staff needed for operations centers, forward command posts, and even in support of small dismounted units and special operations teams. Cognitive computing technology will also help us to deal with the increasing tempo of operations and the complexity of plans, such as Air Tasking Orders and joint hostage rescue operation plans, by allowing computers to tap into the accumulated knowledge of past experience on behalf of their human partners. Along these lines, DARPA’s Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program will create
intelligent personalized assistants for many tasks, such as a commander’s assistant, an
intelligence analyst’s assistant, or a decision-maker’s executive assistant. These assistants will interact with their human partners by accepting direct, naturally expressed guidance to learn their partners’ preferences and procedures. Then, they will be able to anticipate the human’s needs and prepare materials to be ready just in time for them. These new and unprecedented artificial helpers should reduce military staffing needs in many key places and will help ensure decisions are made in a timely fashion and with the best possible preparation.
To meet these challenges and seize these opportunities, DARPA has structured its work
in cognitive computing to catalyze innovative work in single cognitive systems,
collaborative teams of cognitive systems, and collective cognition from large
numbers of small non-cognitive elements (Figure 21). Each area will demonstrate the power of merging reasoning, learning, perception, and communication technologies. These areas will be supported and complemented by broad-based technology efforts in the hardware, software, and integration techniques needed. The strategic thrust of cognitive computing is a template shaping DARPA’s core technology foundation work in information technology (see Section 4.3).
3.8.
DARPA’s strategic thrust in the life sciences, called Bio-Revolution, is a comprehensive effort to Bio-Revolution harness the insights and advances of modern biology to make U.S. warfighters and their equipment safer, stronger, and more effective. This thrust stems from several developments. For more than a decade, the U.S. and many other nations have made enormous investments in the life sciences – so much that it has become commonplace to say that the world is entering a “golden age” of biology. One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of the Far side than the plethora of fundamental new discoveries in the life sciences reported every day. DARPA is mining these new discoveries for concepts and applications that could enhance U.S. national security in revolutionary ways. This has been coupled with a growing recognition of synergies among biology, information technology, and micro-/nano-technology. Advances in one area often benefit the other two, and DARPA has been active in information technology and microelectronics for many years. DARPA’s programs to thwart the threat of biological attack brought significant biological expertise into the Agency. This expertise led towards a major exploration of the national security potential of cutting-edge research in the life sciences. The Bio-Revolution thrust has four broad elements, as shown in Figure 22: