Air Force asks industry to improve targeting by speeding-up decision making and battle damage assessment

ROME, N.Y. – U.S. Air Force researchers are approaching industry for enabling technologies aimed at improving targeting the enemy by speeding decision-making and battle damage assessment.

Officials of the Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate in Rome, N.Y., have issued a broad agency announcement (FA8750-25-S-7002) for the four-year Targeting Operations and Analytics Development project.

Dynamic targeting engagement

Proposed technologies to improve decision-making and targeting should address dynamic targeting engagement at scale; mission communications; combat assessment; indications and warning analytics; and test and evaluation.

Dynamic targeting engagement at scale seeks to match the speed and scale of a potential peer conflict by tracking and targeting hundreds of dynamic objects. Technologies of interest include human on the loop (HOTL) and human in the loop (HITL) targeting and weapons selection in a small-size networked configuration.

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Mission communications involves a low-bandwidth, low-permissivity environment that avoid, mitigate, and counter adversarial electromagnetic interference.

Combat assessment seeks to inform re-strike and re-planning that involves multi-source fusion capable of reasoning over noisy, low-quality data while operating within a small networked architecture.

All available data

Indications and warning analytics will address analytics using all available data sources to understand adversary readiness, intent, and overall posture. Technologies of interest are automated pattern recognition, graph-based analytics, and anomaly detection from machine-readable data.

Test and evaluations involves validating performance to ensure that developed technologies are effective, suitable, survivable, and deployable.

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Air Force researchers say they expect to spend nearly half a billion dollars over the next four years in 3-year contracts each worth from $1 million to $25 million, with the potential of awards as high as $99.9 million.

Companies interested should respond for 2026 projects by 1 Nov. 2025; 2027 projects by 1 Nov. 2026; 2028 projects by 1 Nov. 2027; and 2029 awards by 1 Nov. 2028. Companies submitting promising white papers may be invited to submit full proposals.

Where to send white papers

Companies should email questions, concerns, and white papers to Ariana Emad, the Targeting Operations and Analytics Development program manager, at [email protected].

Email contracting questions to the Air Force's Amber Buckley at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/opp/b7ad150efe1c4c8aaf574a7f6ca12276/view.