Darpa’s New Director Wants to Keep the Skies Under U.S. Control
The U.S. has total dominance of the skies above planet Earth, a defense budget five times as large as its nearest competitor, and a fleet of robotic aircraft and advanced manned planes. The newest leader of the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers says the U.S. is more vulnerable than it thinks in the skies. Maintaining America’s air supremacy may be about to become a top priority for the agency that helped give the world the Predator drone.
Arati Prabhakar has kept a low profile since returning to Darpa on July 30 as its director. But in her first public speech since returning to the agency she left two decades ago as a program manager, Prabhakar mused on a subject outside her background in applied physics and clean energy: air power.
“We’re starting to think about how we maintain the level of control we have in the air domain, as a cornerstone of how we think about warfighting,” Prabhakar said in response to a question from Danger Room at a defense-industry breakfast Friday in northern Virginia. She’s going to get along awesomely with the U.S. Air Force.
Sure, the U.S. has a large and expanding fleet of armed drones, plus stealth fighter jets more advanced than any other nation has. America is upgrading its bombers and its flying gas stations, too. But Prabhakar said keeping competitors at bay is actually “such a huge technical challenge, not just in terms of the aircraft, but in terms of the missile capabilities, the sensing capabilities, our ability to affect the cyber [element] in the air domain.” And that’s part of her renewed focus on bringing about “radical transformation” in defense tech, a mission she said has gone a bit underemphasized as Darpa’s had to help fight two present-day wars.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/new-darpa-priorities/
= new reply since forum marked as read
