Center for Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare

Director: Dr. James Giordano

The INSS Center for Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare (CDTFW) assesses how the United States can leverage current and emerging disruptive technology to enhance joint force capabilities, inform defense strategy and future warfare, and defend against exploitation and use by adversaries and competitors.

The CDTFW addresses emerging operational issues in the development, deployment, and deterrence of the following critical technology areas to include:

Focus Areas

Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing. These technologies enable enhanced warfighter performance solutions, and on-demand production of critical supplies in austere environments, and countermeasures to adversaries’ biological and chemical weapons, thereby directly improving warfighter survivability and operational readiness. Biomanufacturing capabilities also reduce supply chain vulnerabilities by allowing forward-deployed forces to produce therapeutics, and biomaterials at the points of need to optimize warfighting and national security capabilities.

Directed Energy Technology. Directed energy weapons provide precise, very rapid engagement capabilities with broad range applicability and relatively low-cost use profiles that enable joint forces to counter drone swarms, missiles, hypersonic ordnance and other threats that could impede traditional defenses in contested environments.

Artificial Intelligence. AI accelerates information analyses and decision-making across all warfighting domains by integrating and processing extensive types and amount of data and providing actionable intelligence at machine speed; enabling iteratively autonomous systems to force multiply other intelligence and weapon systems to optimize warfighter capabilities in complex, fast-paced battlespaces.

Autonomous Technology. Autonomous systems extend operational reach, reduce risk to personnel, and enable missions in highly contested or denied environments across air, ground, maritime, and space domains. These technologies allow joint forces to achieve operational mass and persistence while keeping warfighters out of harm’s way during reconnaissance, logistics, and strike missions.

Quantum Technology. Quantum sensing, communications, and computing are affording unprecedented pace, volume and precision capabilities in ISR operations in ways that are resistant to detection, interception, and deterrence. Taken together , these technologies can provide decisive advantages in contested electromagnetic environments where traditional systems are easily degraded or denied.