Tantalizing Tidbits in DARPA’s 2021 Budget

​The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), established in 1958, is an agency within the Department of Defense (DoD) responsible for researching and developing technologies to advance the capabilities of the United States military.  Each year DARPA publishes a detailed line-item budget of the unclassified projects within its realm, and analysis of that document provides intriguing details of the United States government’s concerns and ambitions about national security.

The 1957 Soviet Launch of Sputnik Inspired the Creation of DARPA

President Dwight Eisenhower created DARPA in 1958, shortly after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to reach space, sparking hysteria in the United States. Concern that the Soviets were on the road to technological superiority led to the formation of the agency. Its founding mission was simple: ‘to prevent and create strategic surprise.’

DARPA funding has remained relatively steady over time and hovers around $3.5 billion (inflation-adjusted). DARPA employs 220 people in six technical offices. Nearly 100 program managers oversee about 250 research and development programs.

The  ‘DARPA model’ has some unique aspects management approach, and DARPA has achieved some impressive results. For example, each program has a program manager who works for defined and relatively short periods. In addition, Congress granted DARPA flexible acquisition and personnel hiring powers unknown in standard federal programs.  DARPA can hire people and organizations out of the normal federal contracting milieu as a result.

Although the United States military was the original customer for DARPA’s research, the agency’s advances have spawned multibillion-dollar industries.  Arguably it has the highest record of accomplishment of any organization in radical invention in history. Its innovations include:

• The Internet.
• RISC computing.
• Human Universal Load Carrier
• Siri
• Automated voice recognition
• The global positioning system technology.
• Stealth technology.
• Drones.
• Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), used in everything from air bags to ink-jet printers to video games.

DARPA fails too. For example, in 2011, the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 could not meet expectations, exploding 9 minutes into a 30-minute planned test flight when the weapon’s outer shell peeled away.  In 2020, DARPA ended its Launch Challenge without awarding a winner. Of the three teams qualifying for the final event, Astra was the only team to compete, and the company ended up scrubbing the launch because of technical issues.
 
The United States spends more on national defense than China, India, Russia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Australia combined.  DARPA’s budget at about $3.5 billion is a tiny share of that amount but has proved outsized results.  Likely the government directs emerging areas of most significant concern to DARPA for help, so the results of a detailed analysis give some insight into the government’s perceptions of the highest future risk.
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An analysis of the active unclassified research provides clues about what the United States government views as potential future issues of concern for national defense.  Aside from the standard conventional weaponry and support research, DARPA is funding research into pandemic mitigation, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and hypersonic weapons.  The classified projects they’re working on are unknowable absent a government security clearance but provide unlimited avenues of conjecture.

COVID Patient on a Ventilator

​The COVID pandemic provides graphic evidence of the vulnerability of the world to a pandemic, and DARPA’s research efforts in biological security show concern about future pandemics and biological weapons:

• The Biology for Security (BIOSEC) program seeks to investigate novel approaches to address the DoD need for rapid detection of unknown and/or emerging biological threats from state actors or violent extremist organizations (VEOs).
• Many emerging infectious disease outbreaks have origins in animal reservoirs and occur in areas with deployed DoD personnel, putting them at high risk of endemic and emerging diseases. The Preventing the Emergence of Disease (PED) program is investigating how animal pathogens transmit to humans and exploring novel approaches to prevent these events.
• The Physiological Overmatch program will investigate innovative approaches to leverage biological systems to adapt to environmental challenges during deployment. The program will initiate work in aiding the deployed soldier's ability to defend against biological pathogens and chemical contaminants, resist fatigue, and receive adequate nutrition and hydration.
• The Analysis and Adaptation of Human Resilience program explored new methods to maintain and optimize warfighter health in response to environmental insults such as new and emerging infectious diseases.
• This Biomedical Technology Program Element focuses on applied research for medical related technology, information, processes, materials, systems, and devices. Successful battlefield medical and neural interface technologies developed within this Program Element address a broad range of DoD challenges to ensure warfighter readiness, including both resilience to infectious disease and neurotechnology for improved warfighter performance.
• The Pandemic Prevention program is focusing on novel methods to rapidly accelerate countermeasure discovery, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing.
• The Gene Editing Enabled Diagnostics & Biosurveillance program will develop fieldable, low-cost gene editing-based diagnostics capabilities for rapid, specific, sensitive, and multiplexed detection of biological threats in military and public health scenarios.

The Nature of Computing and the Internet Provides Cybersecurity Concerns

​The cyber ransom attack on of Colonial Pipeline Co. demonstrated how vulnerable the United States is to foreign actors working for profit, let alone sovereign governments.  As malevolent has been adversarial election interference by numerous foreign governments, often using social media platforms as tools to sew division and disinformation.   Protection from the effects of cyberwarfare is the focus of another group of DARPA projects:

• The Cyber-Hunting at Scale (CHASE) program is developing data-driven tools for real-time cyber threat detection, characterization, and protection within enterprise-scale networks.
• The Harnessing Autonomy for Countering Cyber-adversary Systems (HACCS) program is developing safe and reliable autonomous software agents that can neutralize botnet implants and similar large-scale malware in networked devices.
• The Configuration Security program is developing technologies to analyze, monitor, and modify the configuration of composed cyber-physical-human systems to identify system vulnerabilities and minimize the attack surface while maintaining functionality and performance.
• The Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) program is developing technologies to automatically identify, disrupt and investigate social engineering attacks via bot-mediated communications.
• The Cyber Assured Systems Engineering (CASE) program is developing the design, analysis and verification tools needed to allow systems engineers to design-in cyber resiliency and manage tradeoffs as they do other quality attributes when designing complex embedded computing systems.
• The Enhanced Attribution program is developing technologies to associate the malicious actions of cyber adversaries with individual operators, and to publicly reveal these actions without compromising sources and methods.
• The Searchlight program is developing technologies to ensure quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for distributed applications operating across the Internet.
• The Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization Systems (RADICS) program is developing automated systems to enable a black start recovery of the U.S. power grid amidst a cyberattack on the energy sector's critical infrastructure.
• The Brandeis program is creating the capability to dynamically, flexibly, and securely share information while ensuring private data use only for its intended purpose and no other.
• The Extreme Distributed Denial of Service Defense (XD3) program is developing new computer networking architectures that deter, detect, and overcome distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
• The Social Simulation (SocialSim) program is developing a computational capability to simulate the spread and evolution of information in the online environment.

AI Will Change Everything

AI is an area of computer science that gives machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence.  Machine learning is the process by which a computer can improve its performance (as in analyzing image files) by continuously incorporating new data into an existing statistical model.  While both are important in the highly technical United States military, they are critical to future strategic economic vigor.
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Not surprisingly, DARPA is funding research on AI and machine learning:

• The Artificial Intelligence and Human-Machine Symbiosis project develops technologies to enable machines to function not only as tools that facilitate human action but as trusted partners to human operators.
• The Active Interpretation of Disparate Alternatives (AIDA) program is developing a multi-hypothesis semantic engine that generates alternative interpretations of events, situations, and trends from a variety of unstructured sources where there are noisy, conflicting, and potentially deceptive data.
• The Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) program is developing a new generation of machine learning techniques that can explain their rationale, characterize their strengths and weaknesses, and convey an understanding of how they will behave in the future.
• The Accelerating Artificial Intelligence (AAI) program seeks to go beyond commercially-driven advances in AI and address important national security challenge applications.
• The Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence (AI) Reasoning over Schemas (KAIROS) program is developing AI and machine learning technologies to aid a human operator in understanding complex sequences of events in the world.
• The Engineering Artificial Intelligence Systems Implementations (EAISI) program will create technologies and tools to support the development of viable and trusted system that include AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities.
• The Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) program is developing technology to rapidly field machine translation and other language processing capabilities for low-resource foreign languages.
• The Machine Common Sense (MCS) program is exploring approaches to enable commonsense reasoning by machines. Recent advances in machine learning have resulted in new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in areas such as image recognition, natural language processing, and strategy games such as Chess, Go and Poker.
• The Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception (GARD) program is developing techniques to defend against deception attacks on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
• The Learning with Less Labeling (LwLL) program is developing technology to greatly reduce the amount of labeled data required to train machine learning (ML) systems.
• The Communicating With Computers (CWC) program is advancing human-computer interaction by enabling computers to comprehend language, gesture, facial expression, and other communicative modalities in context.
• The Complex Hybrid Systems program thrust focuses on exploring fundamental science, mathematics, and computational approaches to collectives, complex hybrid (e.g., human-machine) systems and systems-of-systems across a variety of DoD-relevant domains.
• The Foundational Artificial Intelligence (AI) Science thrust will develop a fundamental scientific basis for understanding and quantifying performance expectations and limits of AI technologies.
• The Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) program will research and develop fundamentally new machine learning mechanisms, enabling machines that learn continuously as they operate.

Given the reputation of DARPA, the results of these projects could provide solutions or help inform the selection of additional measures.  The AI and Machine Learning projects could be foundational to future industries and economic welfare.  Cybersecurity is a demonstrable risk, and detecting and removing election interference protects American democratic institutions.  The horror of the recent COVID pandemic shows the vulnerability of populations to infectious disease, and there will be similar future events.  Time will tell if DARPA can provide solutions.