Air Force wants resilient software

WHAT: A broad agency announcement from the Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate seeking research and development of software that can keep operations going in contested information environments.

WHY: Air Force officials, like their counterparts in other military services, believe warfare is increasingly multifaceted and involves the ability to disrupt an information environment. In the event that a command and control system is hindered by anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) efforts, the service wants its software to keep operations running.

Specifically, the Air Force wants software components that "autonomously assess the progress of their operations, identify deviations from expected activities and outcomes, and recommend adjustments" so that operations can continue in the face of A2/AD efforts, according to the announcement.

"By developing these capabilities and achieving this goal, AFRL expects an order-of-magnitude improvement in the duration of maintaining continuity of air, space and cyber operations at a forward node subject to contested communications," the document states.

Respondents are asked to consider the Air Force's Theater Air Control System and Theater Air Ground System as examples of operational environments for candidate technologies.

The goals of the broad R&D efforts described in the announcement, dubbed the Distributed Operations program, are to fill technology gaps for planning, execution and assessment and to apply those capabilities within a distributed architecture to boost resiliency.

The program’s total funding is expected to be $9.9 million through fiscal 2019, with close to half ($4.5 million) being awarded in fiscal 2018.

Click here to read the announcement.