Defense Sciences Office

The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) works to identify and create the next generation of scientific discovery to fuel innovation throughout the Agency and beyond.

Known as “DARPA’s DARPA,” DSO develops and manages an aggressive and forward-leaning portfolio that expands the art of the possible across a broad set of technical areas. By pushing science toward fundamental operational limits, our programs create a strategic advantage for the DOD. Our work is global in scale, as we monitor and drive the technological landscape and potential impacts on our military and our nation.

The DSO portfolio ranges from early idea development and scientific validation to prototype demonstration. Our primary solicitation mechanisms include Advanced Research Concepts (early idea scouting), Disruption Opportunities (validation of scientific and technical challenges), and Broad Area Announcements (capability demonstrations).

Thrust Areas

Materials, Manufacturing, and Structures
Breaking the tension between performance and efficiency for critical parts, production processes, energetics, superconductors, and propulsion.

Sensing, Measuring, and Affecting
Bringing new science to overcome existing frontiers currently limiting the performance and/or practicality of sensing, measurement, and control, to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvement in operational capabilities.

Math, Computation, and Processing
Enabling quantum, reimagining classical, and developing entirely new forms of computing for enhanced efficiency and new capabilities. Solutions may range from new approaches to hardware (implementation), algorithms (including representations), and computation.

Complex, Dynamic, and Intelligent Systems
Developing new methods, measures, and standards for a class of problems that elude our current approaches of study, analysis, and control. These are highly complex, dynamic, and often recursive systems that evolve over time and for which statistical methods fail. Applications range from dynamics of homeostatic systems to the foundations and emergence of intelligence for human-AI ecosystems, for the purposes and to enable warfighter capabilities.

DSO R&D Opportunities

Opportunities to engage include R&D programs and efforts, challenge competitions, and technology transition efforts for the Defense Sciences Office.
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