No longer ‘experimental’: Navy to deploy drone boats this year, official says
A Navy official said he expects by 2045 for nearly half of all naval surface vessels to be unmanned.
DARPA backs Diffraqtion to demo ‘quantum camera’ for space, Earth surveillance
Only recently emerging from stealth, the MIT-UMD spinout is planning constellations of small, low-cost ISR satellites for multiple military missions.
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Keeping sensitive information safe in a new AI era
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
DARPA seeks universal translator between different kinds of quantum computer
With rival tech giants building different kinds of “quantum bits,” from superconductors to photonics to trapped ions, DARPA program manager Justin Cohen worries no one approach will work for every purpose — so he wants to find a way to make them work together.
Small but mighty: DARPA’s new Lift competition wants drones to carry much, much more
A drone capable of carrying four times its own weight "can actualize the dreams that a lot of people have of using drones in both the military and civilian sectors," DARPA Program Manager Phillip Smith told Breaking Defense.
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Innovating for impact: An inside look at BAE Systems’ FAST Labs™ organization
Stewart Coulter talks transition and disruptive technology in defense R&D.
AI for ATO: Pentagon seeks AI to streamline cumbersome cybersecurity processes
“Like Frank's Red Hot Sauce, we should be trying to put AI on anything that you can," said David McKeown, a senior cybersecurity official.
The state of play in military space
The military space sector is evolving fast. Get the latest from Space Force and industry officials on what’s next for acquisition, policy and training in a new Breaking Defense eBook.
How the Pentagon plays into Trump’s sprawling artificial intelligence ‘Action Plan’
America's AI Action Plan features 19 recommendations that involve the DoD, including the creation of a "virtual proving ground."
With demos to begin next year, DARPA’s COFFEE project brews potential leap for spectrum sharing
The program's goal is to isolate or suppress specific signals, which could allow DoD and commercial tech to safely share congested portions of the spectrum.
DARPA picks Bell Textron to build runway-independent X-Plane
Bell will now proceed in DARPA’s Speed and Runway Independent Technologies program, which has eliminated Aurora Flight Sciences from the running.
DARPA’s DRACO nuclear propulsion project ROARs no more
DRACO began life in 2020 with the moniker "Reactor on a Rocket," or ROAR — a name agency scientists later decided might garner negative attention.
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Data overload threatens decisionmakers as autonomy expands
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
EVADE: DARPA pivots shipboard drone program to rapidly field tech later this year
“By forcing a missionization really quickly before you get to that 100 percent product ... we're getting a lot of really good interaction,” DARPA Program Manager Phillip Smith told Breaking Defense in an interview.
DARPA aims to make defense firms ‘much, much harder’ to hack with ‘formal methods’ push
Right now, DARPA's Kathleen Fisher said, much of the defense industrial base is "choosing to leave the doors open, leave the windows up and not use the locks" in cyberspace.
Hegseth slashes $5.1B in Pentagon contracts for IT consulting, ‘non-essential’ activities
A memo from the secretary of defense also directs the Pentagon's Chief Information Officer to prepare to negotiate more favorable cloud computing service deals.
DARPA adds 18 companies to spooky science Quantum Benchmarking Initiative
"The number of companies that we're announcing is a surprise to me," program manager Joe Altepeter told Breaking Defense. "I did not expect we would get this many.”