DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office (STO) Grant: Enhancing US Military Lethality and Strategic Advantage

STO is a “systems office,” seeking to create new “proof-of-concept” mission systems. The goals are to develop and demonstrate significantly new capabilities that expand what is technically possible. We bound our solution space with mission systems technology – e.g. autonomy and control algorithms, communications and networking, sensing, and non-kinetic effects.

For decades, the United States has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. Today, every domain—air, land, sea, space and cyberspace is contested and challenged by peer competitors, who have had decades to study our strengths, and are hard at work developing counters to degrade the advantages we currently possess. We face an ever more lethal and disruptive battlefield, combined across domains, and conducted at increasing speed and reach—from close combat, throughout overseas theaters, and reaching to our homeland.

STO is developing a mission-focused technology portfolio aimed at peer competition across all phases and levels of intensity. When one looks at the full spectrum of peer competition, there are two fundamental drivers: the pace of peer military modernization and expansion, and the effectiveness of peer adversary exploitation of sub-threshold incrementalism.

STO is helping to address these challenges with two major thrust areas: (1) Mosaic Warfare (MW) and (2) Shaping the Battlespace (StB).