DARPA looks to solutions for speeding contracting, transition processes

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking at technological fixes and other investments to help quicken defense contracting and bolster existing transition strategies, one of a series of future priorities officials are working on to make progress.

Those processes, DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins said during the Potomac Officers Club’s online defense research and development summit today, are among those where the COVID-19 pandemic “has highlighted some fragile areas.”

“I think like everyone else, we’ve recognized the weight of slower contracting,” she said.

Among the potential technological holes DARPA could fill are ones involving scaling. That includes scaling up from demonstrations, when products are made in low-rate quantities, Tompkins noted, to manufacturing.

“Sometimes there are actual technological barriers to doing that and processes that need to be changed and even invented,” she said. “So, we’re looking at being able to invest more in bridging those gaps to move more and more of our technology to earlier and more easy adoption.”

Beyond those transition and business-related efforts, Tompkins said DARPA is looking toward or has already begun work in a host of other future priority areas, including creating resilient supply chains “writ large,” beyond the realm of microelectronics; fostering more extensive modeling and simulation capabilities; and addressing energy and climate impacts.

On the final point, she cited “a hunger and a clamoring among our program managers to think even more creatively in this space,” though she didn’t share details about what the agency is working on.

“If there is a direction or a vector for strategic surprise that we have not been thinking enough about at DARPA, it’s going to be in this area,” she said of the energy and climate realm, adding later: “This is a space that has a number of key high-performance, high-proficiency military requirements that we need to be thinking hard about.”