DARPA, one of the Pentagon’s premier R&D organizations, aims to create “technological surprise” and game-changing capabilities for the U.S. national security community. It has been credited with aiding major technological breakthroughs, including precision weapons, stealth technology, the internet and GPS, among others.

The agency has six technical offices overseeing biological technologies, defense sciences, information innovation, microsystems technology, strategic technology and tactical technology.

Winchell is coming to DARPA from the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, where he served as the AI and autonomy portfolio leader.

Other high-tech organizations where he’s held leadership or technical roles include chief engineer with the Defense Department’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team (Project Maven), Presidential Innovation Fellow at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and program manager at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Winchell is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and served as a nuclear engineer in the activity-duty submarine community. He currently holds the rank of commander in the Navy Reserve.

His academic background includes a B.S. in physics and an M.S. degree in applied physics from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, as well as an M.S. degree in systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

He’s expected to officially take the helm at DARPA on May 19.

Winchell will take over for Rob McHenry, who has been serving as DARPA’s acting director in the early months of the second Trump administration. Stefanie Tompkins led DARPA during the Biden administration.

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There’s said to be no survivors in the aftermath of the tragic crash, which happened around 9:00 p.m. local time on a notoriously highly-congested flight path in the National Capital Region. The Army is closely supporting the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board-led investigation into the incident, officials said.

In statements, press briefings and one-on-one conversations Thursday, several defense officials shed new light on the mid-air collision. Their comments confirm that — despite the Army’s unfolding experimentation with AI and autonomous software — the helicopter involved was not equipped with or deploying any such systems.

“It did not have any AI capability,” Jonathan Koziol, who serves as chief of staff at the Headquarters Department of the Army Aviation Directorate, told DefenseScoop during a media call.

“With any testing like that — with new systems — it’ll be away from populated areas. Just in case a tragic incident happens, we want to reduce the risk of impacting or hurting anyone else in and around that area, so we definitely wouldn’t be testing that type of equipment in this area,” Koziol said.

He emphasized that the latest trends show that the Army had “greatly reduced accidents over the last year.”

Koziol told reporters that he views this incident as a tragic circumstance where two aircraft tried to “occupy the same space at the same time.”

In separate conversations earlier Thursday, three defense officials speaking to DefenseScoop on the condition of anonymity also noted that this specific Black Hawk mission, known colloquially as a “tech flight”, would not incorporate any experimental AI software. 

They suggested that those sort of “gold-top” helicopters, as well as other craft flying in those specific air corridors, would most likely not be employing AI.

Over the past few years, the Army has been exploring how to integrate autonomy and AI-enabled capabilities across its aviation portfolio as part of a larger effort to modernize its fleet. However, many of those efforts are still in nascent research-and-development phases. The service has focused both on fielding new platforms such as the manned Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), as well as upgrading legacy helicopters with the technology.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is slated to begin experiments this year that would integrate an autonomy system developed by Sikorsky onto an experimental UH-60M “optionally piloted” Black Hawk, designated MX. The modernized version of the aircraft features fly-by-wire controls — a semiautomatic system that replaces an aircraft’s conventional manual flight controls — and serves as a flying testbed.

Under the $6 million contract awarded to the helicopter’s manufacturer Sikorsky in October, the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) is expected to test and mature applications for a range of autonomous flight capabilities, including fully unmanned operations.

The effort builds upon Sikorsky’s previous autonomous flight research conducted over the last few years under DARPA’s Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program. In 2022, the Lockheed Martin subsidiary first flew the MX Black Hawk without any humans onboard during the Army’s annual Project Convergence experimentation event. The company later demonstrated the aircraft’s ability to be controlled by operators in the cabin or on the ground via a tablet. 

Sikorsky did not immediately respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment regarding the Black Hawk’s autonomous flight capability.

The investigation continues

On the call Thursday, Koziol told reporters that once the investigation is complete, the government will hopefully have retrieved and gained access to flight recorders that were onboard both aircraft that could provide the “real truth” behind the wreck.

“And as long as the black box is recovered and the information is able to be downloaded, which it normally is, we’ll be able to get the voice communications of all the radios and the crew members talking to each other, along with all of the aircraft information itself — how the engines were running, or speed of the rotors, the altitude of the aircraft — so we should be able to have all of that data for the investigation team to come to a conclusion,” he said. 

Among a wide variety of safety concerns now emerging about that D.C. airspace, the collision is also raising questions about how night-vision eyewear could impact military pilots’ flight performance. 

“It was a fairly experienced crew that was doing a required annual night evaluation. They did have night-vision goggles,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a recorded video from his office that aired Thursday morning.

Briefing the media, Koziol said that in his view, it would be acceptable — and possibly even standard — for the military pilots to not have physically worn the goggles even if they had them on hand.

“It does help the air crew members, but we also have requirements to fly. We call it ‘night unaided,’ where we don’t have aided night-vision goggles helping us fly. I don’t know if they were — we’re speculating now, we’ll leave that to the investigation. But they can easily fly at night without the goggles, especially in this environment with all the bright lights and no lights on the river, they could definitely know where they’re at,” he said.

Wednesday’s fatal collision comes after a spike in aviation accidents and mishaps featuring Army aircraft, as fiscal 2024 saw the service’s highest number of Class A flight mishaps — designated for incidents resulting in fatalities, permanent disabilities or destruction of the aircraft — in 10 years.

According to an Army newsletter published earlier this month, there were 15 Class A flight mishaps over the year, compared to nine recorded in fiscal 2023 and four in fiscal 2022. Only one of those incidents involved a UH-60M Black Hawk, the document stated.

Koziol noted that an Army Aviation Safety Stand-Up initiated in April 2024 allowed the service to reinforce and review both its policies and training protocols. Separately from Wednesday’s accident, the Army is looking to publish additional training material and leader development materials related to aviation safety, he said. 

“This is planned well ahead of that, to show how important safety is for Army aviation and trying to curb that trend that we had last year, which we hope was an anomaly because the previous five years were probably the safest in Army aviation we had in a long time,” Koziol said.

During his confirmation hearing Thursday to serve as President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Army, Daniel Driscoll pledged to focus on aviation safety and prevent any future accidents from occurring again.

“It’s an accident that seems to be preventable. From what we can tell today, that should not happen. I think [there should be] a focus from the top down, on a culture of safety. There are appropriate times to take risk and there are inappropriate times to take risk,” Driscoll told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I don’t know the details around this one, but after doing it, if confirmed, and working with this committee to figure out the facts, I think we might need to look at where is an appropriate time to take training risk. And it may not be near an airport like Reagan.”

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Pentagon officials see quantum sensors as promising capabilities for alternative positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

However, there are challenges involved in deploying the technology that DARPA aims to tackle with a new program that it’s looking to kick off, dubbed Robust Quantum Sensors (RoQS).

The initiative “seeks to bring quantum sensors to DoD platforms. While quantum sensors have demonstrated exceptional laboratory performance in a number of modalities (magnetic and electrical field, acceleration, rotation, and gravity, etc.), their performance degrades once the sensor is placed on moving platforms due to electrical and magnetic fields, field gradients, and system vibrations. RoQS seeks to overcome these challenges through innovative physics approaches to quantum sensing. The forthcoming RoQS program aims to develop and demonstrate quantum sensors that inherently resist performance degradation from platform interferers and demonstrate them on a government-provided platform,” officials wrote in a special notice and future program announcement recently posted on Sam.gov.

DARPA, which reports to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, hopes to transition RoQS-developed sensors onto U.S. military platforms with associated programs of record to help fulfill requirements. To that end, the agency intends to work with contractors and platform builders to identify systems for quantum sensor integration and also government platform owners to facilitate integration and testing at the end of the program, per the notice.

Pentagon officials and others have been working to mature quantum technology for real-world applications.

Quantum tech “translates the principles of quantum physics into technological applications,” a recently updated Congressional Research Service report explained, including concepts like superposition — or the ability of quantum systems to exist in two or more states simultaneously — and entanglement where “two or more quantum objects in a system can be intrinsically linked such that measurement of one dictates the possible measurement outcomes for another, regardless of how far apart the two objects are.”

Although DOD officials see potential uses for quantum-enabled capabilities in other areas like computing, encryption and communications, sensing is considered by many observers to be the most mature application for near-term use by the Pentagon.

That’s the one “that we know by far the most about,” John Burke, principal director for quantum science in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said in June at a tech summit hosted by Defense One.

Such capabilities could provide an alternative to the Global Positioning System in case GPS is denied or degraded in future operating environments.

“You’ve probably heard about jamming and spoofing concerns, for example. So we’re busily working on other quantum technologies to input positioning and timing at the edge of the warfighter so that they don’t rely on GPS all the time,” Burke said. “So that’s sort of the earliest thing we’re working on. There’s a whole slew of technologies under that umbrella. We’re really pushing out on that. So even this year [in] 2024, we’ve got about $100 million coming out to work just on that area. So we’re really pushing hard on that.”

The Pentagon has been using its Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) program to buy a new generation of atomic clocks that could be put into some “strategic assets,” he said, adding that “the first new wave of quantum technologies is really going out today.”

The CRS report noted that successful development and deployment of quantum sensors could boost detection of things like adversary submarines, underground structures, nuclear materials and electromagnetic emissions — and thereby help the U.S. military find concealed objects of interest and enemy forces.

For ISR there’s “an umbrella of remote sensing capabilities and a lot of different kinds of technologies in there. Things like magnetometers to find magnetic objects. You can imagine a lot of things that the military might care about … may have iron in them or steel, things that are magnetic. So we’re tracking trying to figure how to use those in all kinds of different ways,” Burke said.

Currently, quantum technologies are “a little bit expensive,” he noted.

“But that’s okay for certain strategic missions in the military. So we’re starting from those kinds of missions that go with anything — submarines, strategic bombers, long-range sort of missiles … these kinds of assets, to start inserting new technologies,” he said. “We have these things called magnetometers you can put in systems for like this thing called magnetic navigation. It’s extremely robust. We’re really excited about that. There’s navigation technologies. Once we get those established, we can start building up the manufacturing base, first in the Defense Department. That’s the path that we’ve taken. But I think in the long run, you’re gonna see these kinds of technologies proliferate into civilian” sectors.

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There are at least 12 AI agents currently being tested at Edwards Air Force Base, Brig. Gen. Doug Wickert, commander of the 412th Test Wing, said during a Dec. 5 briefing with reporters. The autonomous pilots were developed by a range of companies as part of the ongoing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, as well as other complementary efforts.

The autonomous agents won’t directly be used in the Air Force’s future programs, but instead are being leveraged to understand how the service will test and train AI in the future, Wickert said. The current testing will feed into how the service will put through trials the first batch of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), which are expected to arrive at the base after General Atomics and Anduril conduct first flights of their prototypes in 2025, he added.

In order to increase trust in artificial intelligence, integrating the technology onto CCA drones will be an “iterative process” featuring “varying levels of autonomy,” he said.

Edwards has been at the forefront of the Air Force’s efforts to develop and experiment with new technologies, including autonomous flight. The base is also the home of the X-62A VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft) platform, a modified F-16 Fighting Falcon operated by the Air Force’s Test Pilot School and used for both student curriculum and autonomous flight research.

While capabilities enabled by AI have shown promise for future warfare, Wickert said there’s still much to be learned. There are currently “gaps” in the Air Force’s ability to test in digital environments and the real world, and AI can sometimes do “unexpected things” during live experiments, he noted.

Wickert also pushed back on recent comments from billionaire and tech titan Elon Musk that claim manned aircraft are both antiquated and overpriced in comparison to drones and other lower-cost platforms. An influential advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, Musk has been tapped alongside Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the proposed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) aimed at restructuring the federal government and reducing wasteful spending.

“There may be someday we can completely rely on robotized warfare,” Wickert said, but projected that would likely be “centuries away” due to the growing complexity of modern combat and a slew of ethical considerations that come with using AI for military operations.

Artificial intelligence is optimal for the military’s current data fusion and situational awareness missions, according to Wickert. Moving forward, the Pentagon will need to have more trust in autonomy that will allow officials to turn towards AI-enabled solutions in the future, he said.

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She responded: “I mean, the stuff that just catches everyone’s imagination is we want to make stuff that we’ll need where we are going to need it — so making food out of plastic, or food out of thin air.”

Although the DARPA chief did not provide additional details then, a spokesperson later confirmed that Tompkins was referring to two different programs that fall within the agency’s Biological Technologies Office: Cornucopia and ReSource.

Experts involved with Cornucopia are working to enable the on-demand production of appetizing, microbial-origin food using water, air, and electricity. Those participating in ReSource are pursuing efforts to make food and other products (like lubricants, adhesives, tactical fibers, and potable water) from plastics and other military waste.

In recent, separate interviews, the two program managers overseeing Cornucopia and ReSource briefed DefenseScoop on their teams’ latest research findings and results. They each also highlighted how this work contributes to an overarching DARPA mission to help “de-risk logistics” associated with supplying food and other key items to troops in remote and dangerous locations.

“We’re always concerned about the warfighter, and there’s this whole concept of what we call contested logistics — and having access to materials at the point of need is a huge issue,” Dr. Leonard Tender, who leads ReSource, told DefenseScoop.

Cornucopia

Putting it simply, bio-manufacturing and bio-technologies are associated with a broad range of techniques, processes, and capabilities that use living organisms or biological systems to generate various products.

“I think a lot of people focus on bio-manufacturing as making small molecules. But food is a product, right?” Dr. Matthew Pava, the DARPA program manager in the biotechnology office who oversees the Cornucopia effort, told DefenseScoop. 

“Cornucopia is sort of envisioning an opportunity to create food — maybe from a less obvious source — which is microorganisms,” he explained.  

The greater aim of the program, according to Pava, is to demonstrate a system that can produce a “biomass” within a 24-hour period that can serve as a food source to sustain 14 warfighters for a single day.

“So the idea on this program is to stick, essentially, gasses — like air, that contains some carbon dioxide, a lot of nitrogen, or an exhaust stream from something like a generator, which you’re probably going to have in a [deployed situation]. Placing those gas sources into chemicals like microorganisms, simple organic molecules, sugars — performers are taking different approaches to that — but that’s where the system starts. And then the sugars need to basically get consumed by the organisms that ultimately will be your biomass,” Pava explained. 

When it first launched several years ago, Cornucopia was designed to answer fundamental research questions about whether it is possible to use such engineered microorganisms to grow a biomass (or constellation of cells) that was edible — flavorful — and could sustain military personnel.

As the first phase of the program was being conducted, researchers involved initially focused on synthesizing flavor molecules to generate a “super tasty biomass, where we could tune a flavor profile to be whatever you wanted it to be,” Pava said. 

“What was found in the first part of the program is that, first of all, that’s a really, really hard problem. Because what gives food flavor is not usually singular molecules, but it’s a profile of a large set of molecules in a very particular ratio with one another,” he said.

Therefore trying to engineer the metabolism of an organism to very precisely tune the production of each one of those molecules and get that right each and every time “is a pretty significant challenge in and of itself,” the program manager explained.

Further, the organisms don’t just produce the flavor molecules that humans want them to — they also create other molecules for their own metabolism and individual purposes, which can create off-putting flavors.

Based on such learnings in phase 1, those involved re-scoped Cornucopia to create a “blank-space” biomass that contains all the macro- and micronutrients warfighters need to be considered “nutritionally complete” by operation standards and has no taste until flavor molecules are introduced.

“And the reason why the blandness is important is because it’s really not so difficult to add flavor. It’s a lot harder to take flavor out of something. You can think about if you over-salt the soup that you’re making. To take the salt back out of the soup is a little bit more challenging than if you were adding more salt to it,” Pava said.

An example of how this work “might play out,” he added, is that teams involved could create a healthy biomass powder that can transform into a food product — “like a pudding, or shake, or jerky,” as Pava put it — and then adding “a flavor packet” to it that inspires the flavor profile or taste of a specific dish.

The scientist noted that actually creating solid food items with texture like jerky would be extremely difficult. However, Pava noted, DARPA’s “intention is to shift possible.”

He and his colleagues engaged with Army Soldier Centers and others developing food rations for the military to inform their work. One element that really stood out to Pava in those conversations was how much food’s purpose “isn’t just sustaining the warfighter — but it’s also a comfort,” he said.

“So there’s this important psychological aspect of it as well, which is really why food is sort of a complicated topic. You could imagine somebody that has to operate abroad in tough circumstances, and they’re relying on a platform to produce food for them. It would be ideal if, in a moment, they could say, ‘Today, I really feel like eating something that tastes like chicken or eating something that tastes like beef,’” Pava told DefenseScoop.

While what DARPA is trying to make would be healthier, he likened the aims to contemporary ramen noodle dishes that come with various packs of flavor powders.

“From a repurposability standpoint, I can make that taste like many, many different things, but ultimately it’s the same product that you need,” Pava said.

DARPA has two teams on contract for Cornucopia: one from SRI International, and the other from the University of Illinois, Urbana. While the originally planned program was structured across three stages, it was re-scoped down to only two. The second phase recently kicked off and there’s about one-and-a-half years left of work anticipated in the pursuit.

“One of the other things that we added in phase 2 is the revised tasking for our performers. We’re now asking them to seek [Food and Drug Administration] certification … that will greatly facilitate the ability of doing a human study, to taste this biomass” down the line, Pava said. 

ReSource

DARPA’s ReSource effort, which recently concluded after unfolding over the last four years, broadly encompassed work to create “on-demand” products — like lubricants, adhesives, tactical fibers, potable water, and edible macronutrients — on the battlefield by engineering them in self-contained units from feedstock collected there, onsite.

In a recent interview, Leonard Tender, the program manager who led ReSource in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, told DefenseScoop the ultimate aim was solving “two really hard problems at once.” 

“The first hard problem is: How do you deal with mixed plastic waste, paper waste in particular, which are a huge problem in general, but also for the military — especially when you’re in a forward deployed situation, or off the beaten path, and you have a lot of this material — how do you get rid of it responsibly? And a lot of times the logistics of getting that material off base and handling it requires extensive transport chains and high expenses,” Tender said.

The other difficult challenge envelops all that it takes for critical materials — and in particular, fuels, oils, lubricants and food — to be supplied into austere conflict environments. 

“So the notion is that we can connect the two — and that is, convert waste materials into those useful materials. Then you’re not worrying about getting those waste materials off-site, and you’re not worrying about bringing those useful materials on-site. You’re just converting one to the other,” Tender explained.

DARPA leadership selected performer teams from Battelle, Iowa State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michigan Technological University to support the ReSource program. Each team opted to tackle the program differently in terms of execution.

Broadly, the challenge directed those involved to explore and establish a low-power means to transform trash and no-longer-usable objects into food and other items within a self-contained, transportable unit that is smaller than a few cubic meters, roughly the size of a pickup truck. 

When asked by DefenseScoop what the simplest way to describe this work would be, Tender said: “We’re converting waste to value.”

“It’s very exciting to be at this point and to actually see these ideas come to fruition — at least, in the prototype form — where we actually have these built-out shipping containers, essentially that are doing the process and we actually feed in the waste one side and at the other side, you can imagine, like a spigot, where you know your outcomes are oil, your lubricant, or pancake-like bacteria that can be used by itself or to supplement food,” he explained.

On the heels of this success, the agency is now exploring transition opportunities for the technologies developed — and engaging with potential sponsors involved in more advanced research development who’ve expressed interest in driving further innovation around these concepts.

Many DARPA programs result in new technologies, concepts, and development pathways via the commercial sector for dual-use capabilities.

“The ability to convert waste materials into single-cell protein, for example, could be very impactful in the commercial sector. And so our teams are working with entrepreneurs to do that,” Tender explained.

“DARPA doesn’t like to make products that people go and buy. Our goal is to sort of de-risk the original concept — and we have done that,” he added.

De-Risking at DARPA

As the Defense Department’s top research and development hub, DARPA is deliberate and strategic about de-risking new technologies and emerging concepts to motivate the private sector and others to invest in further product development.

“Taking the de-risk idea, we think in terms of technology readiness levels, or TRLs. So at DARPA, it very typically starts at a very low number, where someone has sort of a glimmer of an idea and might have a couple of results from literature that says it’s possible, but it’s never been really attempted — then to take it to a higher level idea where you kind of like demonstrated it in a prototype form, and that’s where we are right now” with ReSource, Tender said. 

“And then there’s other sponsors to take it from the prototype form out to something that can actually be implemented, provided to the warfighter or commercialized. And so we have a lot of interest from those follow-up transition partners,” he noted.

Pava, Cornucopia’s program manager, put it another way: “Being DARPA, we’re trying to de-risk that first, critical, super hard step, and then we’re going to need to bring in transition partners [from across the military] that we hand the baton off to.”

In their separate conversations with DefenseScoop, both program managers suggested that their teams are taking an aggressive approach to de-risking solutions that might be useful in addressing significant military logistical burdens. 

“Getting food to the warfighter, especially if they’re in a location that has a very, very long logistic tail associated with it, is a challenge,” Pava said. 

He noted the power of potentially enabling new capabilities that could lead to one day having modular units that could be deployed alongside service members to provide food and sustenance at the precise place where it’s required. 

“So, you could capture carbon from air or gaseous waste, like generators’ exhaust, you can pull nitrogen out of the air and fix that and then grow up a biomass on that carbon or nitrogen, for instance, as opposed to having to ship pallets, on pallets, on pallets of [Meal, Ready-to-Eats or] MREs to tier warfare, which might not be possible,” he said.

“It’s not [about] ‘sustainment,’ I think, as we typically think of sustaining large infrastructure. But it’s sustaining our people in very particular circumstances where we’re asking them to do really hard and dangerous stuff,” Pava added. 

In a recent email after the interviews were conducted, DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins told DefenseScoop that the agency is also thinking seriously about supply chain resiliency from multiple different angles — and that’s “all driven by our program managers” like Pava and Tender.

“Along with making food, extracting water, and producing medicine when and where we need it, we’re modeling complex global supply chains to understand where the weaknesses are. And when there are things we just can’t make at the point of need, we’re looking at new ways to revolutionize delivery and transport,” Tompkins said. 

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“We are trying to flesh out the recipe environment to focus on something we call ELSI — so the ethical, legal and societal implications of our new technology,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Director Stefanie Tompkins said this week at the NATO to the Future micro-summit hosted by Capital Factory. 

DARPA has been a longtime leading innovator in AI and machine learning technologies. And more recently, officials there have been pioneering the next generation of associated algorithms. 

Looking to the future with considerations of that deep history, Tompkins said in her view, the possible unintended consequences of on-the-rise generative AI and adversarial capabilities are still too uncertain and difficult to speculate on. She cited previous ground-breaking research and development projects — like Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the first system to connect computers for information transmission — as an example of the unpredictability of the consequences of new tech.

“I think that when I look back on the ARPANET, people were actually remarkably, remarkably [prescient] about many things, including, I think, online computer gaming. But they never imagined social media, and then kind of what utilizations of that [would look like],” Tompkins said.

Now, her team is working through ELSI to help staff figure out how to appropriately prioritize applications and assess potential unforeseen risks.

While she didn’t go into much detail at the event, Tompkins spoke broadly about what the new effort is envisioned to accomplish.

“It really says, ‘If you’re successful, what does this do in this kind of very complex system? And what should we be doing in DARPA programs so that the people who are making policy have the information they need to actually craft policy?’ Because I think, a lot of times, there’s not enough information and you’re stuck with it. You’re enjoying it, or maybe banning it. You know, there are really extreme answers when you need subtlety and nuance that we don’t have. So, [we’re trying] to do more in our programs with that in mind,” Tompkins said.

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The effort was part of DARPA’s Manta Ray program, which began in 2020 and aims to advance technologies for a “new class” of autonomous UUVs that could be used by the Navy for long-range and long-duration missions.

According to the agency, the project seeks to demonstrate:

• Novel energy management techniques for UUV operations and undersea energy harvesting techniques at operationally relevant depths
• Low-power, high-efficiency undersea propulsion systems
• New low-power means of underwater detection and classification of hazards or counter-detection threats
• Mission management approaches for extended durations while accounting for dynamic maritime environments
• Unique approaches for leveraging existing maritime data sets and exploiting novel maritime parameters for high-efficiency navigation and/or command, control and communications.
• New approaches to mitigate biofouling, corrosion, and other material degradation for long-duration missions

Northrop Grumman and PacMar Technologies are the two performers for the maritime drone program. DARPA announced the awardees for phase 2 of the project in December 2021.

Northrop’s platform, which was described as an “extra-large” UUV, recently completed “full-scale, in-water testing” off the coast of Southern California in February and March, DARPA said in the release.

“Testing demonstrated at-sea hydrodynamic performance, including submerged operations using all the vehicle’s modes of propulsion and steering: buoyancy, propellers, and control surfaces,” according to the agency.

DARPA is in talks with the Navy on the next steps for testing and transitioning the technology, the organization said.

“Our successful, full-scale Manta Ray testing validates the vehicle’s readiness to advance toward real-world operations after being rapidly assembled in the field from modular subsections,” Kyle Woerner, DARPA program manager for Manta Ray, said in a statement. “Once deployed, the vehicle uses efficient, buoyancy-driven gliding to move through the water. The craft is designed with several payload bays of multiple sizes and types to enable a wide variety of naval mission sets.”

In September, the organization announced that an in-water “splash test” was conducted off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, for PacMar’s scaled prototype. The objective was to verify sensors, vehicle hydrodynamic performance and autonomy behaviors.

“Splashing a vehicle is a major milestone for an undersea program,” Woerner said in a statement after that event concluded. “This test provides important insights into key systems, allows us to validate assumptions and models, and gives us valuable data in preparation for our upcoming full-scale at-sea demonstrations.”

PacMar continues to test its full-scale energy-harvesting system, DARPA noted in Wednesday’s release.

The Manta Ray program is unfolding as the U.S. Navy pursues new robo-vessels to help fulfill its vision for a future “hybrid” fleet of manned and unmanned platforms and enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence and autonomy.

The sea service has been experimenting with a variety of UUVs, uncrewed surface vehicles and unmanned aerial systems.

Maritime drones are seen as a cost-effective means of boosting the Navy’s capacity and capabilities while reducing risks to sailors by keeping them out of harm’s way at a time when service officials view China as their main competitor and are preparing for a potential conflict in the Pacific region.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti sees robotic systems and other emerging technologies as a way to “put more players on the field.”

In December, the Navy received the first Orca XLUUV from Boeing for additional trials. The diesel-electric submarine is an “85-ton, 85-feet-long” vessel, according to Capt. Scot Searles, program manager for unmanned maritime systems. The platform underwent at-sea testing, including above- and below-surface maneuvers before delivering the system.

Officials want to field a high-endurance undersea drone with a modular payload bay that can travel long distances autonomously and lay mines or perform other missions without putting sailors at risk.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit announced that Anduril Industries, Oceaneering International and Kongsberg Discovery had been awarded contracts to prototype large undersea drones. The Navy’s program office for advanced undersea systems —PMS 394 —which falls under Naval Sea Systems Command, is teaming with DIU on the effort.

“Undersea warfare is critical to success in the Pacific and other contested environments, providing needed autonomous underwater sensing and payload delivery in dispersed, long-range, deep and contested environments is key. Crewed submarines are high-value, high-resource capital platforms necessary for crucial combat missions. In particular, the U.S. military requires a fleet of Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (LDUUVs) with diverse capabilities,” DIU said in a release.

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A few years, during DARPA’s AlphaDogFight Trials, algorithms went undefeated in computer simulated battles against a military aviator. More recently, the agency’s Air Combat Evolution program has been using a modified F-16 known as the X-62A VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft) to put machine learning agents through their paces in the skies above Edwards Air Force Base, California.

A total of 21 test flights were conducted for the project between December 2022 and September 2023, the Department of Defense said in an ACE program update released Wednesday.

“Beginning in December of 2022, that was the first application of machine learning agents to control the flight path of fighter aircraft,” Col. James Valpiana, commandant of the Air Force Test Pilot School, said in a video accompanying the update.

More than 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes were made over time to improve the tools.

Then, in September, “we actually took the X-62 and flew it against a live manned F-16. We built up in safety using the maneuvers — first defensive, then offensive, then high aspect nose-to-nose engagements where we got as close as 2,000 feet at 1,200 miles per hour,” Lt. Col. Maryann Karlen, deputy commandant of the test pilot school, said in the video.

The exercise marked “the first AI vs human within-visual-range engagement (a.k.a. ‘dogfight’), conducted with actual manned F-16 aircraft,” the DOD said in the program update.

At publication, the department had not provided information to DefenseScoop about whether the machine learning agents controlling the X-62A beat the human pilot in that encounter.

However, defense officials touted the importance of these efforts for demonstrating that artificial intelligence technologies can operate safely in a complex warfighting environments such as close-in, air-to-air combat.

“In advance of formal verification methods for AI-based autonomy, the team pioneered new methods to train and test AI agent compliance with safety requirements, including flight envelope protection and aerial/ground collision avoidance, as well as with ethical requirements including combat training rules, weapons engagement zones, and clear avenues of fire,” according to the DOD program update.

“The X-62A team demonstrated that cutting-edge machine learning based autonomy could be safely used to fly dynamic combat maneuvers. The team accomplished this while complying with American norms for safe and ethical use of autonomous technology,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in a video, adding that the capability is “transformational.”

Officials noted that human pilots were onboard the autonomous aircraft in case anything went awry during the test flights and they needed to take over, but personnel did not have to activate the safety switch during the dogfights over Edwards Air Force Base.

Other organizations supporting the program include Calspan, Cubic Corporation, EpiSci, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, physicsAI, Shield AI, the University of Iowa Operator Performance Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Kendall, a strong proponent of U.S. military adoption of AI, told lawmakers last week that he intends to fly aboard an F-16 in autonomous flight mode later this year.

Kendall has said the successes of the ACE program contributed to his decision to move ahead with the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program, an effort to develop and field next-generation autonomous drones for counter-air operations and other missions. The service plans to spend billions of dollars on that initiative in the coming years.

“The critical problem on the battlefield is time. And AI will be able to do much more complicated things much more accurately and much faster than human beings can. If a human being is in the loop, you will lose. You can have human supervision, you can watch over what the AI is doing, [but] if you try to intervene, you’re going to lose,” Kendall said during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December.

“I just got briefed by DARPA on some work that they’re doing on manned versus unmanned combat — basically aircraft fighters,” Kendall said. “The AI wins routinely with the way they structured the test … but the difference in how long it takes the person to do something and how long it takes the AI to do something is the key difference in the outcome. And we’re talking about seconds here. Just to give you a sense of parameters here, the best pilot you’re ever going to find is going to take a few tenths of a second to do something. The AI is going to do it in a microsecond — it’s gonna be orders of magnitude better performance. And those times actually matter. And you can’t get around that. But that’s the reality that we’re gonna have to face.”

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The tech was born out of DARPA’s Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception (GARD) program, which kicked off a few years ago.

“That is a program that’s focused on building defenses against adversarial attacks on AI systems,” Matt Turek, deputy director for DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, said Wednesday during a virtual event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Officials recognize that U.S. military computer vision and machine learning technologies could be tricked.

“AI systems are made out of software, obviously, right, so they inherit all the cyber vulnerabilities — and those are an important class of vulnerabilities — but [that’s] not what I’m talking about here. There are sort of unique classes of vulnerabilities for AI or autonomous systems, where you can do things like insert noise patterns into sensor data that might cause an AI system to misclassify. So you can essentially by adding noise to an image or a sensor, perhaps break a downstream machine learning algorithm. You can also with knowledge of that algorithm sometimes create physically realizable attacks. So you can generate very purposefully a particular sticker that you could put on a physical object that when the data is collected, when that object shows up in an image, that that particular … adversarial patch makes it so that the machine learning algorithm might not recognize that object exists or might misclassify that tank as a school bus,” Turek explained.

Through GARD, the agency has been working with industry partners to develop algorithms and other capabilities to thwart that type of trickery.

“Deception attacks can enable adversaries to take control of autonomous systems, alter conclusions of ML-based decision support applications, and compromise tools and systems that rely on ML and AI technologies. Current techniques for defending ML and AI have proven brittle due to a focus on individual attack methods and weak methods for testing and evaluation. The GARD program is developing techniques that address the current limitations of defenses and produce ML and AI systems suitable for use in adversarial environments,” budget justification documents state.

Plans called for transitioning GARD-related capabilities to other Defense Department components in fiscal 2024, when the project is slated to wind down, according to justification books.

“Whether that is physically realizable attacks or noise patterns that are added to AI systems, the GARD program has built state-of-the-art defenses against those. Some of those tools and capabilities have been provided to CDAO,” Turek said, referring to the Chief Digital and AI Office.

The CDAO was formed in 2022 to serve as a hub for accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence and related tech across the Defense Department. That office is a logical transition partner for DARPA, Turek said.

“DARPA’s core mission [is to] prevent and create strategic surprise. So the implication is that we’re looking over the horizon for transformative capabilities. So in some sense, we are very early in the research pipeline, typically. Products that come out of those research programs could go a couple places … Transitioning them to CDAO, for instance, might enable broad transition across the entirety of the DOD,” Turek said. “I think having an organization that can provide some shared resources and capabilities across the department [and] can be a resource or place people can go look for help or tools or capabilities — I think that’s really useful. And from a DARPA perspective gives us a natural transition partner.”

However, the agency has a “multi-pronged” transition strategy that is also intended to aid other organizations outside the Defense Department, he noted.

“We have created new algorithms — some of those actually in partnership both with the research teams that we’re funding but with researchers at Google — and then created open-source tools that we can provide back to the broader community so that we can really raise defenses broadly in AI and machine learning. But those tools [are] also provided to CDAO and then they can be customized for DOD use cases and needs,” Turek said.

The Pentagon requested $10 million in research, development, test and evaluation funding for the program in fiscal 2024. The budget proposal for fiscal 2025 includes no additional money for that because the effort is wrapping up, per the justification books.

The GARD initiative is just one example of DARPA’s pursuit of new artificial intelligence-related technologies. The agency has been working on AI for decades, going back to its early days after the organization was created in 1958, but that area of focus has ramped up in recent years. Today, about 70% of its programs have AI, machine learning or autonomy associated with them, according to officials.

Through its campaign known as AI Next, DARPA has invested more than $2 billion since 2018 to advance AI for national security purposes, according to the agency.

The president’s fiscal 2025 budget request includes an additional $310 million for DARPA’s AI Forward initiative “to research and develop trustworthy technology that operates reliably, interacts appropriately with people, and meets the most pressing national security and societal needs in an ethical manner,” according to a White House fact sheet.

“There is really broad penetration across the agency. So it’s really difficult to sum up, you know, what the agency as a whole is up to, but from an [information innovation office] perspective, we’re really looking to try and advance … how do we get to a highly trustworthy AI that we can bet our lives on and [ensure] that not be a foolish thing to do,” Turek said.

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Microelectronics are critical components of U.S. military systems and other national security-related technologies, and they’re a top priority of the Pentagon’s research-and-engineering enterprise. The Large Area Device-quality Diamond Substrates (LADDIS) program, which falls under DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, is geared toward helping to create a U.S.-located commercial source for substrates that can be used in high-power and high-temperature microelectronics for Defense Department platforms and arrays.

Great Lakes Crystal Technologies, International FemtoScience, Penn State University Applied Research Laboratory, Advent Diamond, WD Lab Grown Diamonds, and Element Six have been tapped as performers for the effort, DARPA told DefenseScoop.

Officials say that diamond, as an ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor, can enable electronics to operate in harsh environments.

“Future DoD systems will require higher power and higher temperature electronics capable of withstanding extreme operating conditions. Whereas conventional electronics relying on Si, GaAs, or wide band-gap materials are limited in breakdown voltage, power handling, and operating temperature, diamond’s large bandgap and thermal conductivity can overcome these limitations. However, the lack of reproducible, large diameter, device quality diamond substrates has hindered the demonstration of electronics with higher breakdown voltage or current compared to existing technology,” according to a presolicitation for LADDIS.

“Diamond substrates today are small (5-10 mm square) and have high dislocation density (up to 10⁵ cm^-2), which degrades device performance and manufacturability. Commercially available substrates also have large variability in material quality, and previous attempts at wafer size scaling exhibited extremely high dislocation density (up to 10⁹ cm^-2) and cracking due to stress,” it explained.

Through LADDIS, the Pentagon aims to demonstrate approaches to fabricate device grade, large diameter, single crystal substrates. The initiative will also pursue new methods for polishing diamond surfaces with “low roughness and no subsurface defects” so they can be used in microelectronics devices.

The goal is to develop techniques for creating substrates with a diameter greater than 50 millimeters, dislocation density below 10³ cm^-2, surface roughness below 0.2 nanometers, and desirable electrical, thermal and mechanical properties.

In a press release last week, Element Six, part of the De Beers Group, announced that it was tapped for the project.

“Diamond-based semiconductors have the potential for unprecedented power density, speed, and performance; however, there is a lack of industrial-size single crystal diamond wafers that are needed to commercialize these ‘super-devices’. By working with its network of partners as part of the LADDIS project, Element Six will aim to overcome these challenges,” the company said in the release.

The two-phase program is expected to last 18 months, according to DARPA.

One of the vendors selected for the program, WD Lab Grown Diamonds, recently filed for bankruptcy, according to reports. On Nov. 1, Tree Line Capital Partners announced that it launched WD Advanced Materials, which a press release described as “a new entity focused on technical diamond applications and was formed following the transition from its predecessor gemstone manufacturing entity, WD Lab Grown Diamonds.” An official with the newly launched company told DefenseScoop that the bankruptcy filing by WB Lab Grown Diamonds won’t impact work on the LADDIS program.

Updated on Nov. 1, 2023 at 2:25 PM: This story has been updated to include additional information about recent developments with WD Lab Grown Diamonds and a new entity, WD Advanced Materials.

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