DARPA announces COMPASS programme
DARPA has announced a new programme called Collection and Monitoring via Planning for Active Situational Scenarios (COMPASS) to better understand and respond to adversary grey-zone engagement.
The grey zone sits in an undefined area between peace and conventional warfare. Action in this zone is not openly defined; it’s slower, and is prosecuted more subtly—using social, psychological, religious, information, cyber and other means to achieve physical or cognitive objectives with or without violence. The lack of clarity of intent—the greyness—makes it challenging to detect, characterise, and counter an enemy fighting this way.
COMPASS aims to develop software that will help clarify enemy intent by evaluating an adversary’s responses to various stimuli. COMPASS will leverage advanced artificial intelligence technologies, game theory, and modeling and estimation to both identify stimuli that yield the most information about an adversary’s intentions, and provide decision makers high-fidelity intelligence on how to respond-with positive and negative trade-offs for each course of action.Current military decision-making follows a process of observe, orient, decide and act (OODA). But this process is not effective in grey zone warfare. Signals in the environment are not rich enough to draw conclusions. COMPASS aims to add a dynamic, adaptive element to the OODA loop for complex, grey-zone environments.
Fotis Barlos, DARPA program manager, said: ‘The ultimate goal of the programme is to provide theatre-level operations and planning staffs with robust analytics and decision-support tools that reduce ambiguity of adversarial actors and their objectives. As we see increasingly more sophistication in grey-zone activity around the world, we need to leverage advanced AI and other technologies to help commanders make more effective decisions to thwart an enemy’s complex, multi-layered disruptive activity.’
The programme seeks experts in AI, machine learning, game theory, modeling and simulation, control systems, estimation and other related fields. A Proposers Day is scheduled for 30 March 2018 in Arlington, Virginia.
You may also like
More from Digital Battlespace
-
![Australia looks towards space with force restructure, investment and training]()
Australia looks towards space with force restructure, investment and training
Australia is looking to improve its presence in space with a focus on communications and creating a dedicated segment of its defence forces committed to the domain.
-
![EID to unveil new vehicle communication system at DSEI]()
EID to unveil new vehicle communication system at DSEI
The Portuguese company’s naval communications system is in service across more than a dozen countries. It has turned to its home nation for support in developing a new vehicle based C2 system.
-
![Chess Dynamics successfully demonstrates Vision4ce AI-driven tracker]()
Chess Dynamics successfully demonstrates Vision4ce AI-driven tracker
The Vision4ce Deep Embedded Feature Tracking (DEFT) technology software is designed to process video and images by blending traditional computer vision with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to present actionable information from complex environments.
-
![Wave Relay devices cleared for security use on commercial systems in industry trend]()
Wave Relay devices cleared for security use on commercial systems in industry trend
Persistent Systems has been cleared by National Security Agency (NSA) to transmit sensitive data on commercial networks. The devices are added to the NSA’s Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) component list which also includes other companies’ products providing the same security.
-
![UK teases cyber spending boost in Strategic Defence Review ahead of “imminent” release]()
UK teases cyber spending boost in Strategic Defence Review ahead of “imminent” release
The release of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) has been long promised as mid-year. It is possible it could be as early as 2 June although the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) continues to play its cards close to its chest.
-
![Intelsat emphasises SATCOM resilience for SOF in contested domains (video)]()
Intelsat emphasises SATCOM resilience for SOF in contested domains (video)
Intelsat outlines how its multi-orbit SATCOM architecture is enhancing connectivity and resilience for special operations forces operating in degraded and contested environments.
