ROME N.Y. – U.S. Air Force cyber warfare experts are asking industry for new ways to identify enemy cyber attacks by providing rapid cyber warfare intelligence, targeting, and new capabilities.
Officials of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate in Rome, N.Y., issued an advanced research announcement (ARA) last week for the Research Engineering Development and Analysis for Cyber Targeting (REDACT) program.
REDACT seeks to develop adversary system-of-systems analysis to support Air Force and U.S. Cyber Command cyber security and cyber warfare efforts.
Research will evaluate requirements, develop proofs of concept, deploy enabling technologies to operationally realistic environments for further evaluation. The goal is to create new tactics, techniques and procedures against evolving enemy cyber threats.
Three components
The project has three components: target engineering and analysis; agile cyber mission adaptation; and rapid non-kinetic cyber capability development.
Target engineering and analysis seeks to provide rapid cyber warfare intelligence, targeting, and capabilities to help understand adversaries and their complex systems. This will involve multi-modal data fusion; predictive modeling of adversary intent and system evolution; and generating critical analyses.
The objective enable real-time insights, automated identification of critical vulnerabilities, and understand emerging threats -- even from disparate and unconventional data sources.
Agile cyber mission adaptation seeks to develop agile frameworks and automated tools to create tactics, techniques, and procedures against evolving enemy cyber warfare systems.
Cyber vulnerabilities
Rapid non-kinetic cyber capability development seeks identify enemy cyber system vulnerabilities quickly so as to deploy cyber defenses that do not involve physically destroying targets with bullets, bombs, or other traditional munitions. Of interest are automated vulnerability discovery, critical node identification, and applying agile software engineering to develop resilient and evasive cyber warfare effects.
The Air Force wants to spend as much as $999.9 million on the REDACT program through the year 2030, and several contractors will be involved.
Companies interested should email white papers by 26 Jan. 2026 for 2026 contracts; by 1 Nov. 2026 for 2027 contracts; by 1 Nov. 2027 for 2028 contracts; by 1 Nov. 2028 for 2029 contracts; and by 1 Nov. 2029 for 2030 contracts to the Air Force's Aaron Gudrian at [email protected]. Those submitting promising white papers may be invited to submit full proposals.
Email questions or concerns to Aaron Gudrian at [email protected], and business questions to Amber Buckley at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/9ba18c015b1943e4a1c177887feda755/view.
