Engineering and Applied Science Lecture

DARPA, established in the wake of Sputnik to prevent technological surprise, has instigated many major defense capabilities that our military has used to reshape U.S. warfighting. Today, current and potential adversaries ranging from nation states to individuals, all with ready access to powerful commercial technologies, create a national security landscape that poses new, diverse, and fast-changing threats. Severe fiscal pressures mean "more of the same" is not an option for this future.  Working with Science and Technology (S&T) across the Services and with universities, companies, and labs across the country, DARPA is pursuing efforts to catalyze the next generation of air dominance, extract deep insights from enormous masses of data, and even understand and harness that most complex and essential component of the Warfighter, the human brain. Pursuing these and other emerging opportunities and integrating their full impacts into our armamentarium will challenge current approaches to how we buy, deploy, support, and employ our national security and warfighting systems. But that disruption will be modest compared to the disadvantages it will wreak on our adversaries, and a worthy investment to achieve our ongoing goal of protecting against and fostering technological surprise.