The goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) “Plan X” cyber-offense research program is to help make the offensive aspect of cyber warfare more manageable and controllable, according to DARPA’s chief.
DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar told reporters Wednesday at the Pentagon that Plan X, formally known as Foundational Cyberwarfare, is specifically about building the technology infrastructure to help launch cyber warfare from where “you hope that it’s going to do what you think it’s going to do,” as she described cyber warfare’s current state, to where the Defense Department can predict, measure and assess the effects.
“We need to move from there to a future where cyber is a capability like other weapons capabilities, meaning that a military operator can design and deploy a cyber effect, know what it’s going to accomplish, do battle damage assessment and measure what it has accomplished,” Prabhakar said.
“What we’re trying to do in cyber is to change the trajectory of our response,” Prabhakar added.
According to a Nov. 20, 2012, broad agency announcement (BAA) posted on Federal Business Opportunities, the formal goal of Plan X is to measure, quantify and understand cyberspace. DARPA said in the BAA current research is just beginning to answer specific questions about the cyber domain, like where in a network topology should military platforms be deployed for a given mission, or from which deployed units should capabilities be used in a network topology to optimize connection speed or robustness. Another question is what is the expected network path that data will take versus the actual path that data takes due to private and non-advertised routing agreements and tunnels.
Prabhakar said Plan X is being delayed due to sequestration budget cuts, the nearly $500 billion in defense spending cuts over the next decade. Though she didn’t say how long Plan X was to be delayed, Prabhakar chalked it up as “great example” of the negative effects of sequestration.
Prabhakar said “there’s a lot of hard technology build to get from here to there,” but she said it would “be fantastic” if DARPA could develop battle damage assessment.
DARPA requested $2.9 billion for fiscal year 2014, according to President Barack Obama’s budget request, which was released April 10. DARPA wants $259 million for network-centric warfare technology.