DARPA announces program to improve understanding of gray zone activities

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced a new program that seeks to develop software that would help decision-makers better understand gray-zone action, subtle conflicts that fall somewhere between peace and conventional warfare.

This gray zone conflict is not openly declared or defined and uses social, psychological, religious, information, cyber and other means to achieve physical or cognitive goals with or without violence. The lack of clarity of intent makes it difficult to detect, characterize, and counter these actions.

DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office’s Collection and Monitoring via Planning for Active Situational Scenarios (COMPASS) program plan to use artificial intelligence technologies, game theory, modeling and estimation to identify stimuli that yield the most information about an actor’s intentions and provide decision makers intelligence on how to respond with positive and negative tradeoffs for each course of action.

“The ultimate goal of the program is to provide theater-level operations and planning staffs with robust analytics and decision-support tools that reduce ambiguity of adversarial actors and their objectives,” Fotis Barlos, DARPA program manager, said. “As we see increasingly more sophistication in gray-zone activity around the world, we need to leverage advanced [artificial intelligence] (AI) and other technologies to help commanders make more effective decisions to thwart an enemy’s complex, multi-layered disruptive activity.”

The COMPASS program is seeking experts in AI, machine learning, game theory, modeling and simulation, control systems, estimation and other related fields. A Proposers Day is scheduled for March 30 in Arlington, Virginia. A Broad Agency Announcement solicitation is expected to be posted on FedBizOpps prior to the Proposers Day.