IWRP engages industry and academia to develop and mature technologies in the field of Information Warfare that enhance Navy and Marine Corps mission effectiveness, focusing on underlying technologies that advance information warfare capabilities through a consortium that can support research, development and prototyping.
Specific technology focus areas include:
i. Cyber Warfare: Defensive and offensive technologies used to operate, configure, control, secure, maintain, and restore the infrastructures and resident data, including Internet Protocol (IP) networks, radio frequency (RF) networks, computer systems, embedded processors and controllers, process, and physical systems
ii. Data Science/Analytics Technologies: Technologies and technical processes enabling and enhancing the reliability, assurance, integration, interoperability, delivery, value of data and information assets. Data may be derived from diverse verticals (Combat, Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR), Electromagnetic Maneuver Warfare (EMW), Cyber, etc.) includes specialized technology capabilities that capture, ingest, persist, analyze, and visualize data and help our customers perceive, visualize, and make decisions about their environment
iii. Assured Communications: Technologies providing robust, protected, resilient, and reliable information infrastructure undergirding the Navy’s overall information environment and allowing uninterrupted worldwide communication between deployed units and forces ashore. Technologies will include application in multiple transmission spectrums, including RF, millimeter wave, optical; networking technologies such as application awareness, resilient routing, and attack tolerance
iv. Cloud Computing: On-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service, software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Private Cloud, Community Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud
v. Enterprise Resource Tools: Collection of computer programs with common business applications, tools for modeling, and development tools for building organization unique applications focused on solving enterprise-wide problems to improve the enterprise’s productivity and efficiency
vi. Collaboration and Social Networking: Collaboration/Social interaction for sharing design patterns and best practices into our engineering culture, allowing social interaction to be aggregated, assessed, and pushed back into the supporting systems as structured data that can be used to support better decision-making.
vii. Autonomy: Techniques applicable to systems, incorporating assistants and decision support systems implemented through artificial intelligence and machine learning enabling them to adapt their actions to changes in their mission and operating environment without the intervention of a human operator
viii. Internet of Things (IoT) Embedded Systems: Various connected sensors that can be accessed or controlled remotely across an existing network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy, and economic benefit in addition to reduced human intervention; encompasses computer systems that performing a particular function within a larger system without direct human interactions
ix. Mobility: Includes the wireless technology and infrastructure to connect and authenticate to the enterprise while enforcing enterprise specific security policies on mobile devices to access to enterprise data
x. Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE): Technologies used to support the development, management, and application of virtual constructs of varying fidelity across the spectrum of systems engineering activities; including operational capability functions, system requirements, design, analysis, verification, validation, operations, and maintenance activities
xi. On-Demand Manufacturing: Additive and/or Traditional manufacturing methods such as Stereo Lithography (SLA), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), Direct Metal Printing (DMP), Color Jet Printing (CJP), Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), and 3D Additive Manufacturing (AM)
xii. Assured Command and Control (AC2): Capability to exercise authority and direction when access to and use of critical information, systems and services are denied, degraded or exploited. AC2 is enabled by essential network and data link services across secured segments of the electromagnetic spectrum to transport, share, store, protect and disseminate critical mission/combat information.
xiii. Integrated Fires (IF): Capability to fully employ integrated information in warfare by expanding the use of advanced electronic warfare and offensive cyber effects to complement existing and planned air, surface and subsurface kinetic weapons.
xiv. Battlespace Awareness (BA): Advanced means to rapidly sense, collect, process, analyze and evaluate information content to exploit the warfighting operating environment. BA uses AC2 and IF elements to provide the characteristics and conditions to understand the operating environment. BA is aided by passive discrimination, identification and tracking of objects, persistent sensing and real-time/multi-spectral awareness, and cyber situational awareness within the operating environment.