The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is now soliciting abstracts from potential offerors for a program that aims to improve stock military and commercial drones by advancing the development of an autonomy capability without being tied to specific drone hardware.

The Rapid Experimental Missionized Autonomy program intends to build a subsystem to facilitate autonomous operations of various drones, according to a presolicitation notice published Monday.

The subsystem will be composed of a drone autonomy adapter, or DA2, and mission-specific autonomy software, or MAS, and could be delivered through rapid development spirals.

DA2 will work to detect the drone type on its own and serve as the interface to the physical drone, while MAS will use the DA2 interface to upgrade the unmanned system from remotely piloted operation to autonomous mission execution.

DARPA expects the program to result in the award of an other transaction agreement for prototype projects.

The agency will accept questions regarding the funding opportunity through Sept. 19 and abstracts until Oct. 3.

Offerors selected for oral presentations will be notified by Oct. 10 and are expected to present their proposals by the end of October.

Michael Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit, and Lorin Selby, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, said the U.S. should implement a hedge strategy to advance the development and procurement of small, unmanned and smarter weapons systems, enhance the capability of the Joint Force in the next four years and deter China’s potential military action in the Indo-Pacific region.

“The hedge strategy should leverage emerging technologies with an emphasis on adopting these technologies at scale within the next three years,” Brown, who is now a partner at Shield Capital, and Selby, former chief of naval research, wrote in a commentary published Thursday in War on the Rocks, a Texas National Security Review publication.

In this piece, they discussed the four elements of the strategy, including the integration of a multiplicity of small and low-cost, smarter, unmanned systems and adoption of commercial platforms with a sense of urgency.

Selby and Brown offered five recommendations for the hedge strategy’s implementation and the first calls for Congress to create an undersecretary of defense for innovation and commercial technology who will serve as the chief innovation officer at the Department of Defense.

“Second, the department should name organizational homes for these commercial technologies to focus building centers of expertise for assessing these technologies, assign an ongoing budget, better signal demand to private industry, and avoid duplication across the department,” the former DOD officials wrote.

They also called on DOD to “embody a commercially oriented acquisition process that maximizes competition and operates at commercial speed and with commercial terms” and keep pace with commercial product cycles by ensuring a sustained budget for commercial platforms in a “capability of record.”

Engineers at the Naval Sea Systems Command have equipped the U.S. Navy’s fleet of Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers with a suite of energy monitoring capabilities.

The Global Energy Information System was installed onboard the DDG 51 Arleigh Burke destroyers to collect, consolidate and present actionable energy information to ship operators, the Navy said Friday.

GENISYS includes a Shipboard Energy Assessment System and digital logbooks to establish a link between fuel use and mission and environmental data to help operators afloat and ashore monitor and manage the fleet’s energy consumption.

SEAS connects sensors and energy-related data sources to produce a real-time operational data model for enabling logistics, mission planning and operational awareness.

The eLogBook provides a smart logging capability to digitize shipboard operational data logs.

The tools will undergo testing and crew training onboard the DDG 51 class destroyers before achieving operational capability later in 2023.