Instead of augmenting super-soldiers, DARPA wants to boost troops’ natural defenses against engineered diseases — and even undo gene-editing altogether.

The near-term payoff for military AI isn’t replacing human soldiers in the physical world, but empowering them to understand the world of radio waves. That’s an invisible battlefield which Russia’s powerful electronic warfare corps is poised to dominate in a future war, unless the US can catch up.

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon will ramp up research on hypersonic weapons with a stunning 136 percent increase in the 2019 budget request. Here’s the breakdown of the $257 million: $139.4 million, the lion’s share, goes to the Air Force-DARPA collaboration on rocket-propelled hypersonics, Tactical Boost Glide (TBG), which will produce an “operational prototype” by 2023; $14.3… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Trust your robots. Trust your tech industry. Trust your troops. Let go of traditional mechanisms of control — be it a human pilot in the cockpit or a formal requirements document for a program — that increasingly serve to slow you down. That was the message between the lines when Defense Secretary Ashton Carter… Keep reading →

ARLINGTON: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing artificial intelligence that can help humans understand the floods of data they unleashed 50 years ago with the Internet and make better decisions, even in the heat of battle. Such “human-machine collaboration” — informally known as the centaur model — is the high-tech holy grail… Keep reading →