The extent of DARPA's genius in defense of the United States is breathtaking and was again unveiled at DARPA's recent Demo Day held at the Pentagon center courtyard.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the brains that create the U.S. military's secret weapons, showcased 60 of its military purposed projects covering the "ABCs" of its tremendous reach.

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On display were projects or weapons spanning every military domain: air, biology, counterterrorism, cyber, ground warfare, maritime, microsystems, seeds of surprise, space and spectrum. These ABCs are explained here.

"DARPA really is the disruption engine behind our technology enterprise ... working on cutting-edge technologies that are going to fundamentally shape our future, and working to bring that future into today," said Stephen Welby, assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. He also described DARPA as an engine of innovation.

DARPA said its Demo Day gives the Department of Defense community an up-close look at the agency's diverse portfolio of innovative technologies and military systems at various stages of development and readiness. DARPA's mission is creating the breakthrough technologies that advance the national security interests of the U.S.

"DARPA Demo Day is our chance to demonstrate the collective energy that not only propels DARPA but also invigorates people across the wide community with which we work," said DARPA director Dr. Arati Prabhakar.

"It is a team that revels in the opportunity to attack pressing, nearly intractable problems - all in the context of public service."

She said Demo Day is the day "we bring some of those crazy technologies into the Pentagon (to) get them in front of our customers and our partners -- people across all the military services and across DoD and the intelligence community."

Among the ABCs DARPA's working on to ensure U.S. military superiority in the future is the "Z-Man" programs to develop biologically inspired climbing aids that enable warfighters to scale vertical walls while carrying a full combat load, and without the use of ropes or ladders.

There's also "Plan X," a foundational cyberwarfare program to develop platforms for the DoD to plan for, conduct and assess cyberwarfare in a manner similar to kinetic warfare. For the infantry, DARPA has launched the "Squad X Experimentation (Squad X) program." Squad X seeks to design, develop and validate system prototypes for combined-arms squads.

The U.S. Navy will benefit from DARPA's work on "Hydra," a distributed undersea network of unmanned payloads and platforms that complement manned vessels. The system will innovatively integrate existing and emerging technologies to deliver various capabilities above, on and below the ocean's surface.

The Vanishing Programmable Resources (VAPR) program seeks to develop "transient electronics systems" capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner so these systems aren't captured, examined and used against U.S. forces by its foes.

In space, DARPA is busy with the "Phoenix Program" that seeks to reduce the cost of space-based systems by developing and demonstrating new satellite assembly architectures and delivery systems.

Phoenix currently focuses on two primary technical areas of research: satlets, a new low-cost, modular satellite architecture that can scale almost infinitely, and the Payload Orbital Delivery (POD) system, a standardized mechanism designed to safely carry a wide variety of separable mass elements to orbit (including payloads, satlets and electronics) aboard commercial communications satellites. 

TagsDARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Demo Day, Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Stephen Welby