Although U.S. national security used to be ensured through a near-monopoly on access to the world's most advanced technologies, the landscape is shifting and with this shift comes an increase in novel and unanticipated security threats.
In order to fight the increase in self-made technologies built from existing products and designed to pose serious security threats, the Defense Science Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is calling on people with innovative weapons created from commercially available products to come forward.
The new program is called Improv and is accepting ideas from both U.S. and non-U.S. researchers, developers and hobbyists who have ideas for the fast and cheap production of prototype weapons.
Ideally, DARPA wants proposals from concepts that can reach the working prototype stage within 90 days and are designed with components from non-military products such as those from construction, salvage or surveying.
DARPA is focusing on products that are built from products that are easily attainable within local laws, although it is also encouraging the development of new technology.
"DARPA's mission is to create strategic surprise, and the agency primarily does so by pursuing radically innovative and even seemingly impossible technologies," said John Main, program manager of the new effort. "Improv is being launched in recognition that strategic surprise can also come from more familiar technologies, adapted and applied in novel ways."
Through this project, DARPA hopes to better anticipate adversaries that pose security threats through uncommon and resourceful methods. Getting people from a wide range of disciplines to view the technology marketplace "with an inventor's" eye will help them achieve this and better grasp the prototyping of cheap and effective military weapons,
The agency will be separating the applications based on their abstracts, product description, components in the design and the threat that they pose to various military operations.
Applicants that are accepted will be rewarded with up $40,000 for a feasibility study, up to $70,000 for the creation of a prototype and up to $20,000 for an evaluation of this prototype.
Those who want to apply need to do so by April 13. More information will be discussed at the Proposers Day webinar on March 29.
