Funding to investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems for national security applications.
The mission of the DARPA DSO is to identify and spearhead the next generation of scientific discovery to fuel innovation in research and development (R&D) for the Department of War (DoW). DSO serves DARPA by developing and executing an aggressive and forward-leaning portfolio that expands the art of the possible across a broad set of technical areas. DSO aims to create strategic surprise advantage for the DoW by pushing technology toward its fundamental scientific limits. We work to prevent technological surprise by understanding the path commercial R&D is taking, anticipating that our adversaries will exploit available technology to develop new capabilities in the coming decades. Additionally, DSO looks for transformative trends at the global scale and their potential impact on our nation.
In support of this mission, the DSO Office-wide BAA invites proposers to submit innovative basic or applied research concepts or studies and analysis proposals. Proposals in novel areas DSO has not considered are welcome. However, if the proposal addresses one or more of the following technical thrust areas, please indicate which one(s) in your submission: (1) Materials, Manufacturing, and Energy Systems, (2) Sensing, Measuring, and Affecting, (3) Math, Computation, and Processing, and (4) Complex, Dynamic, and Intelligent Systems. Each thrust area description below (in Section B) includes a list of example research topics highlighting several (but not all) potential areas of interest. Proposals must investigate innovative research approaches that enable revolutionary advances. DSO is explicitly not interested in approaches or technologies primarily resulting in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice or are for manufacturing scale-up.
