Darpa Pushes ‘Mosaic Warfare’ Concept

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2018/11/16/darpa-pushes-mosaic-warfare-concept

by sahin-boydas • 8 years ago

59 44 8 years ago

Mizza• 8 years ago

Then why the hell did we build the entire next generation around the F35? It's like we went all in on production to build carriers but our base is already full of zerglings.

sahin-boydas• 8 years ago

HankB992• 8 years ago

Aren't parts of the F35 built in all congressional districts? That provides the major motivation for anything related to building more of them.

Phlarp• 8 years ago

I've always hear this applied to the B-52 but the F35 may be similarly dispersed.

tomjakubowski• 8 years ago

Not quite, at least not according to Lockheed's propaganda page. No "economic impact" listed in Hawaii, Nebraska, Wyoming or Alaska.

https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact-map

Edit: this source says ~350 districts build components for the F-35. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/artic...

zitterbewegung2• 8 years ago

Because every weapons program is also a jobs program .

chii• 8 years ago

Why not just create a jobs program directly, rather than inefficiently and with many middleman taking their cut?!

PavlovsCat• 8 years ago

It's a taxpayer subsidy to the military-industrial complex. That some of that money ends up in the pockets of workers is a sad reality that cannot yet be avoided, but it's hardly "the reason".

That would imply a level of care that is completely incompatible with a lot of things. Take the use of low-IQ troops in Vietnam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g

But the defense budget is so people can "put food on their family"? It doesn't even begin to add up.

adventured• 8 years ago

Before we get around to building half the planned F35s, they'll cancel the program and move on to the next shiny new program. That's how every big defense project works.

Here's how it works. You start out with a giant estimate, for 3,000 planes. That giant estimate is mostly caused by the lifetime cost of maintaining 3k planes. As the years roll by, you start chopping production numbers off, while trying to get some cost inflation per unit somewhere. You end up spending 1/3 less, for 1/2 the planes in the end. 20 years after the first F35 flight, you've moved on to the next big thing. Conveniently justified by an inevitable, possibly dramatic, change in what the military needs.

nradov• 8 years ago

If "mosaic warfare" actually becomes a thing then the F-35 is actually pretty well suited to participate in it. At least better than legacy platforms which are increasingly difficult to upgrade.

jorblumesea• 8 years ago

This actually feels similar to Russia's hybrid warfare doctrine, albeit without some of the more sinister political manipulation parts. But there is a fair amount of influence here, I think.

azernik3• 8 years ago

Except not at all - it's more about cooperation between different branches of the military (a problem America has more severely than most other countries) than about combining "civilian" and military tactics a la Russia.

vkou2• 8 years ago

So, someone at the DoD re-discovered the Combined Arms doctrine?

all23• 8 years ago

Combined Action/Arms Groups are stupid effective. Armor working with Infantry and Cavalry (light armor) that also have close air-support is a thing to behold.

The thing is, the US military re-tools its organization every 10 to 20 years or so, looking ahead at the conflicts to come. In the late 80s that re-tooling began and the result was methodologies that came to fruition in Iraq and Afghanistan. We take notes from past examples (see Russian occupation of the latter), examine the fight we see coming (insurgent warfare in WWII), and rebuild doctrine to fit.

The special operations groups were part of the process. While we were creating our own future enemies in the 60s and 70s (mujahideen turned into Al-Qaeda and others) we were also getting a first hand look at guerrilla warfare and how ineffective symmetric war concepts were at facing a guerrilla opponent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare

[edit]grammar![/edit]

eaandkw2• 8 years ago

I don't know. The Marine Corps seemed to figure a lot of that out in its Small Wars Manual from the 1940's. Here is the FMFRP 12-15.

https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/FMFRP%2012-1...

eaandkw2• 8 years ago

Except for in this case all vehicles, aircraft, and equipment can communicate with each other. For an adversary that would make it pretty convenient to exploit. One ransomware attack and the battle is finished.

I'm just joking...sort of. It's usually the things that we didn't think of that bite us in the butt.

vkou2• 8 years ago

So, the pilot episode of the Battlestar Galactica reboot?

Given the random hodge-podge of software and firmware that modern military tech runs on, you're not going to see much success in building a magic one-size-fits-all virus that will spread across the entire system.

drharby• 8 years ago

Rebranded

fenwick67• 8 years ago

I always thought of it more like conjoined triangles

tlear• 8 years ago

It is all great till you face an opponent with high end tech capability. The more communications you use the more connected you are the more things to jam, intercept and misdirect. This seems to be the Russian approach.

We will see the preview of the future whenever Israel decides to face their new systems in Syria. No GPS, jamming up the vazoo etc. US is already playing with Russians there to a degree. I think the quote was: "The most hostile EW environment in the world"

kijin• 8 years ago

They're already taking that into account.

Retired Navy Adm. Scott Swift, former U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, said at the conference that in future conflict, communications will be degraded. “Windows of communication will open and close rapidly in times that are not under the control of the commander,” he said. That is why the autonomy and the unmanned piece of mosaic warfare is important. Systems must be able to act independently when they are cut off from higher headquarters, he said.

Coming soon to a battlefield near you: drones equipped with AI that can distinguish friends from enemies 85% of the time, combatants from civilians 61% of the time, and capable of firing at will when the satellite link is down.

azernik3• 8 years ago

DARPA being DARPA, they came up with a buzzword to sell it to the brass and to Congress. Read into the actual content, and it's the related ideas that a) military communications equipment should interoperate better than it does now, and b) that command and control mechanisms should be better optimized for combined-arms (and cross-branch) warfare.

starbeast3• 8 years ago

Have they provided an API for the meat eating robots?

ryandvm• 8 years ago

Lord, "meat eating robots" has to be the most dystopian phrase I've ever heard.

ape4• 8 years ago

Not to be confused with the Mosaic browser.

Terr_• 8 years ago

At first I expected the subtext to be "monocultures are risky", but now it seems more like "good munitions but weak management".

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

A tile in a mosaic is one small part of a bigger picture. “If you lose one tile, not a big deal,” he said. In this metaphor, a tile equals an individual weapon.

So like microservices, but for killing people.

int0x80• 8 years ago

Exactly my thoughts :)

Also: the F22 datalinks are incompatible and can not easily interoperate with the F35 ones. That problem sound familiar too.

mxxx• 8 years ago

"More deadlier"...?

dqpb• 8 years ago

Imagine if we spent as much money researching how to combat entropy as we do researching how to induce it.

insideYourMind• 8 years ago

So, taco bell programming with coca cola recipes.

jnurmine• 8 years ago

Figuring out "innovative ways to overwhelm adversaries", "create multiple dilemmas" and "get inside and disrupt its leaders’ decision-making processes" sounds like a re-discovery of maskirovka and reflexive control.

Darpa Pushes ‘Mosaic Warfare’ Concept

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