Tactical Technology

The Advanced Maritime Defense Technologies Concepts program explored novel technologies and concepts of operations to mature capabilities that extend freedom of access, operations, and homeland defense in all parts of the maritime domain, including waterways, arctic areas, and the seabed. The program investigated and matured technologies necessary for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) and Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) concepts for autonomous operation and domain specific warfare. Enabling technologies for advanced undersea systems, including a revolutionary propulsion concept, and novel approaches for maritime platform and fixed location self-defense were investigated. Novel technologies and concepts required for arctic and seabed operations, such as distributed sensing, navigation, and communications architectures, as well as including new technologies to enable long duration maritime platforms were also investigated. Finally, future concepts, approaches, and techniques were identified to enable contested environment operations utilizing unmanned maritime platforms.

Multi-domain operations (MDO) present complex and challenging environments to ground combat platforms. Ground combat platforms must operate in a more distributed manner in these environments to gain a sustained tactical advantage and enhance warfighter survivability. The Army intends to deploy autonomous robotic combat vehicles and optionally manned fighting vehicles to accomplish this objective. In order to meet the demands of an MDO environment, significant advances in perception, planning, and control algorithms are required to autonomously maneuver faster and more resiliently in complex and novel off-road situations. Maneuver environments are characterized by three-dimensional surfaces of highly compliant soils and vegetation, hundreds of positive and negative obstacle classes, no defined road networks or driving rules, and where use of terrain for survivability is critical. In order to achieve operationally relevant speeds and resilience to novel situations on the battlefield, while simultaneously reducing the soldier's cognitive and communications burden and increasing battle space awareness, Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) will develop and demonstrate game-changing autonomous ground combat vehicle mobility using a combination of simulation and advanced platforms. RACER will deliver autonomy algorithms using the latest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine-learning techniques, a code repository, an off-road simulation environment tailored for military off-road autonomy development, tactical route planning methods, and field-demonstrated off-road autonomous capabilities. The culmination of the RACER program will demonstrate fully autonomous maneuver on a military Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) in a variety of militarily relevant environments.

Two solutions to expeditionary energy currently exist: fuel and electric systems. Fuel has a high energy density but requires supply lines that are logistically complicated and pose strategic and tactical weaknesses. Electric systems are operationally flexible and rechargeable, but their energy density is an order of magnitude lower than fuel. The Expeditionary Carbon Utilization for Energy Resilience and Stabilization (ExCURSion) program, originally conceived under the Molecular Systems and Materials Assembly program in PE 0601101E, Project MS-01, aims to overcome key technical challenges to enable a closed-loop energy storage system with the rechargeability of electric systems and the high energy density of fuel. The program will accomplish this goal by aggressively exploring and evaluating foundational technologies of carbon dioxide reduction, capture, and storage. Technologies developed under this program will serve as key components for a future self-enclosed system, addressing the need for energy resilience in an expeditionary setting, independent of a fuel supply line, while delivering a rechargeable fuel cell with far greater energy density than batteries. Beginning in FY 2026, this program will be funded in PE 0602023E, Project ACS-01.

The Advanced Ground Technologies Concepts program aimed to surmount key challenges associated with redefining access and timely delivery of effects to the ground domain by using targeted investments that explore the feasibility of novel technical solutions, force capabilities, innovations in logistics and manufacturing. In particular, program investments encompassed technologies that promise breakthroughs in enabling actionable situational awareness across diverse environments, missionized autonomy for integration of manned-unmanned ground and air vehicle force; intelligent ground mobility systems; advanced military robotic systems; technologies expanding the effective ranges of surface-to-surface precision fires, and in situ manufacturing of tactical munitions in mass to enable rapid response to quick developing conflicts while avoiding limitations of extended logistics chains.

Oversight will develop and demonstrate a suite of autonomy technologies to provide constant custody of targets as a service for tactical operations in contested environments. Existing and emerging space systems will be evaluated. Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (p-LEO) satellite constellations and payloads will be leveraged due to their high-bandwidth, processing-on-the-edge capabilities in support of tactical, efficient, integrated missions at scale. Oversight will develop autonomous technology to enable advanced collaboration among constellations of satellites for target custody in contested environments where the numbers of targets is far greater than the number of satellites and sensors over the operating area. The Oversight program will culminate with a demonstration using existing on-orbit p-LEO assets combined with live, virtual and constructive terrestrial assets. Beginning in FY 2026, this program will be funded in PE 0602023E, Project ACS-01.

The Next Generation Electronic Surveillance Technology (NGEST) program will create a new Radio Frequency (RF) surveillance system for sensing in complex signal environments. NGEST will define a new surveillance paradigm to find critical signals of interest. Today's electronic surveillance systems are unable to handle increasing RF complexity in the spatial (emitter proliferation), power (range), and frequency (agility, congestion) dimensions due to their static hardware configuration. Additionally, today's systems need to employ exquisite hardware to overcome geometrical challenges. NGEST will overcome the complexity and geometry challenges by autonomously reconfiguring diverse frequency and spatial resources. Beginning in FY 2026, this program will be funded in PE 0602023E, Project ACS-01.

The Albatross program will create a bird-like soaring capability for small - unmanned aircraft systems (s-UAS) that leverages weather forecast-informed mission planning and real-time sensing of dynamic wind conditions to autonomously navigate s-UAS and extend flight endurance and range. Examples of soaring techniques include (1) thermal soaring on updrafts in the atmosphere, (2) ridge soaring on airflow around geographical features which causes lift conditions like slope and orographic lift, and (3) dynamic soaring on shear layer atmospheric conditions such as soaring on wave crests. Current estimates indicate that these soaring techniques could reduce average flight power by 75% for relevant missions. Albatross will also develop autonomous guidance, navigation, and controls to harness soaring sources while maintaining safe separation from terrain. Albatross will use a series of real-world flight events to mature and demonstrate capability incrementally. Technologies developed under this program will be demonstrated on mature platforms to support rapid transition to the Services. Beginning in FY 2026, this program will be funded in PE 0602023E, Project ACS-01.

The Lunar Assay via Small Satellite Orbiter (LASSO) program will optimize sensing, navigation, and propulsion to enable high-resolution sensing of accessible resources on the moon. The program will do this by capturing data about resource distribution and quantity to support future in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) exploration. LASSO will enable persistent very low-altitude autonomous orbiting around the moon. Today's approach to understanding lunar resources involves sending large orbiters to remotely measure resources at higher altitudes over the moon. Resource findings are then confirmed by sending a lander module to the generalized region to explore further and hope resources can be found in a large area. Typically, higher altitude orbits are used because lunar orbits are unstable and require frequent trajectory updates to keep from impacting the surface. With improved navigation, propulsion, and autonomous control, LASSO satellites will achieve very low orbits and remain in orbit to build a statistically significant understanding of lunar resources. Beginning in FY 2026, this program will be funded in PE 0602023E, Project ACS-01.

The Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program will design, build, and validate foundational components for effective optical energy relays. These relays will enable a ground-based laser to efficiently transmit energy over 100s of kilometers leveraging a high-altitude transmission layer which minimizes atmospheric absorption and scattering. The high-altitude energy relay nodes will redirect, correct, and selectively harvest energy from the optical energy source and then beam that energy back down to the surface for conversion to electricity. These relays are the core building blocks to construct a flexible, resilient, reconfigurable, persistent, and distributed energy network. POWER will also produce conceptual designs for new platform capabilities realized by offboarding power storage and generation. These platforms will have range, endurance, and payload power performance that is no longer tied to platform size enabling a new class of small but high-performance platforms.

The Advanced Aeronautics and Space Technologies studies examine and evaluate aeronautical and space technologies and concepts through applied research. These may include feasibility studies of novel or emergent materials, sensors and tactics for air and space platforms, launch vehicles, satellites, manufacturing and implementation approaches, and hardware demonstrations of key enabling technologies. The areas of interest range from propulsion and power, guidance and control, concepts to enable novel air platforms, to innovative technologies and platform concepts to enable new missions and resilient operations for space systems, from low earth orbit to cislunar space. Aeronautics interest areas include hybrid electric/combustion propulsion concepts, small-scale air mobility solutions, and networking of both piloted and unpiloted air vehicles. Space interest areas include advanced or novel power and propulsion systems, novel sensors, advanced lightweight structures, advanced miniature radio frequency (RF) technology, precision navigation and timing technologies, ground and space-based space domain awareness, avionics, structures, and novel approaches to support terrestrial operations. These studies may lead to the development of new programs, components or subsystems to enhance future aerospace platforms, or improvement of existing systems.

The Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) program is developing analyst-guided techniques, tools, and platforms for the Department of Defense (DoD) to detect and understand geopolitical influence campaigns in a rigorous, quantitative manner. Increasingly, competitors and adversaries are using influence operations to project soft power. Competitor and adversary influence campaigns can be overt in the form of anti-U.S. messaging, or they can be disguised in the form of complex narratives that seek to advance agendas harmful to U.S. interests. The U.S. Government and the DoD need the capability to rapidly detect and understand competitor and adversary messaging campaigns and narratives within the context of the populations and groups for whom the messaging is intended. To accomplish this capability, the program develops technologies to operationalize natural language processing, social network analysis, psychographics, and behavioral science and integrates these into a unified influence campaign modeling framework and sensemaking platform. INCAS aims to produce a suite of automated digital tools to enable analysts to better understand how information is being used by competitors and adversaries, and to quantitatively assess in real time and at scale the effects of influence campaigns across time and over multiple platforms.

The Defense Applications of Innovative Remote Sensing (DAIRS) program will enable new approaches for the persistent long-range tracking of maritime and air targets. Specifically, DAIRS focuses on the use of surface wave over-the-horizon radar (SWOTHR) with operation in low latitudes, where spread-Doppler clutter currently limits reliable target track to ranges less than 100km, and the low bandwidth precludes the use of microwave target classification approaches. The program explores passive remote sensing using endemic noise sources as a highly disruptive method for environmental and target sensing. Space time adaptive processing and polarimetric sensing provide the baseline technologies for clutter rejection and this program combines those techniques with technologies for uncovering spatial-temporal correlation that potentially provides suppression of spread-Doppler clutter. The program develops these methods for various conditions that affect SWOTHR, including the day/night cycle, sea state, forward scatter and backscatter, and bistatic range. Additionally, the program takes a first-principles approach for conducting classification at high frequency wavelengths for total disruption of the field.

The Resilient Supply-and-Demand Networks (RSDN) program is developing supply-chain risk management analytics to detect systemic vulnerabilities and improve resilience in supply and demand networks (SDN). At present, the separation of supply-chain information into confidential silos obscures a system-wide view, inhibiting comprehensive risk-focused analysis of supply and demand networks. RSDN is developing techniques for modeling and stress-testing real-world SDNs, including network analytics and visualizations, to reveal emerging fragilities and enable deep situational awareness of systemic vulnerabilities and potential disruptions. An RSDN stress-testing framework will enable repeatable scenario analysis of strategic vulnerabilities in supply and demand networks, automated analysis and discovery of risk patterns, and evaluation of alternative risk mitigation strategies.

The Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program created cross-cultural language understanding technologies to improve a Department of Defense (DoD) operator's situational awareness and interactional effectiveness. CCU natural language processing technologies recognize, adapt to, and recommend how to operate within emotional, social, and cultural norms that differ across societies, languages, and group affinities. To support diverse and emergent use cases, CCU technologies are engineered to require minimal to no training data in a local culture, while maximizing operator success during negotiations and other interactions in the field. CCU created new component technologies for sociocultural norm discovery, cross-cultural emotion recognition, and communicative change detection and incorporated these component technologies into a prototype platform.

The Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program developed technologies to defend against multimedia falsification and disinformation campaigns. Statistical detection techniques have been successful, but media generation and manipulation technologies applicable to imagery, voice, video, text, and other modalities are advancing rapidly. Purely statistical detection methods are now insufficient to detect these manipulations, especially when multiple modalities are involved. Existing media generation and manipulation algorithms are data driven and are prone to making semantic errors that provide defenders an opportunity for asymmetric advantage. SemaFor developed semantic and statistical analysis algorithms that determine if media is generated or manipulated, attribution algorithms that infer if media originates from a particular organization or individual, and characterization algorithms that reason about whether media was falsified (generated or manipulated) for malicious purposes. SemaFor created technologies to identify, deter, and understand adversary media falsification.

The Beyond Linear Signal Processing (BLiP) program performed a fundamental redevelopment of the radar signal processing chain with the intent that smaller radar apertures will operate with the performance of much larger, more expensive radar systems. BLiP focused on the software and signal processing to fundamentally enhance all radars. Multiple recent developments show that non-linear and iterative estimation algorithms can out-perform our current linear radar signal processing algorithms. BLiP developed and matured the algorithms for specific radar mission areas through rapid development, integration, real-time processing, and field testing.