2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (2025)
Chapter: Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies
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Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
B
The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory’s 11 Competencies and Core Competencies
The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory (ARL) provided a list of 11 competencies and core competencies, reprinted in Table B-1.
TABLE B-1 Foundational Research Competencies and Core Competencies
| Competency | Core Competency | Core Competency Description |
|---|---|---|
| Biological and Biotechnology Sciences (BBS) biological-related disciplines, including synthetic biology, biological materials, biological/abiological interfaces and biological effect |
Bio Synthesis for Precision Materials | Research related to producing hierarchical and hybrid materials using synthetic biology and biotechnology for acceleration of the discovery-to-product timeline. |
| Biology in Military Environments | Research related to understanding and controlling living materials in military environments with an emphasis on the speed of functional effects. Pursue fundamental understanding toward the ability to control at physical/biological interfaces. | |
| Synthetic Biology Tools | Research related to the understanding and discovery of genetic design and synthesis toward building an agile and target–agnostic genetic circuit development pipeline. Establish synthetic biology foundational capabilities to facilitate rapid genetic tool development for diverse applications, including novel functional materials and biohybrid devices. | |
| Electromagnetic Spectrum Sciences (EMSS) novel approaches to sensing and operating across the entire electromagnetic environment; counter-sensing across the EM spectrum; protection from EM effects; emerging concepts for radio frequency (RF), radars, and electronic warfare (EW) |
EW | Research related to new methods and concepts for electronic attack, electronic protection, and EW support through integration of concepts, underpinning hardware, and algorithm development. |
| RF Technology | Research related to the development, modeling, and characterization of RF sensor components, sensor concepts, antenna design, and RF phenomenology. | |
| Energy Sciences (ES) science of mechanical and electrical power generation, storage, conditioning, and distribution; energy conversion; and emerging concepts for lasers, directed energy (DE), and DE |
Battery Science | Research related to electrochemical energy storage technologies; design, development, characterization, and analysis of battery materials and interfaces; and hybrid power systems technology. |
| DE | Research related to materials, optics understanding, and atmospheric transmission effects for the delivery of and protection from highly focused energy. |
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
| Competency | Core Competency | Core Competency Description |
|---|---|---|
| protection and propagation | Expeditionary Power | Research related to emerging and disruptive technologies in energy materials, compact power subsystems, alternative energy sources, energy scavenging, and long-lived power ideas. |
| Power Integration and Architecture | Research related to power control, generation, distribution, conditioning, conversion, and thermal management. | |
| Humans in Complex Systems (HCxS) multi-disciplinary non-medical approaches to understand and modify the potential of humans situated in and interacting within complex social, technological, and socio-technical systems |
Bidirectional Human-System Communication | Research underpinning effective and efficient real time multimodal communication between Soldiers and systems. |
| Estimating and Predicting Humans in Complex Systems | Research to develop novel approaches to sense, interpret, and predict human state changes across time scales to enable effective and efficient technology adaptation and inference of operational environment context. | |
| Human–Guided System Adaptation | Research underpinning novel approaches for Soldiers to effectively and efficiently guide the adaptation of intelligent technologies to create new or upgraded human–system capabilities. | |
| Human–System Team Interactions | Research underpinning an understanding of dynamic team interactions and leveraging emergent team properties to enhance human–system team performance. | |
| Hybrid Human–Technology Intelligence | Antidisciplinary research aimed at uncovering foundational hybrid approaches to enhance human–system teams in Multi-Domain Operations. | |
| Neuroscience and Neurotechnologies | Research to harness the power of the human nervous system to enable neuroscientific principles to maximize soldier performance and drive the understanding and development of novel computational approaches necessary for creating future intelligent systems. | |
| Mechanical Sciences (MS) science of novel mechanics, mechanisms, and control to enable manned/unmanned ground and air vehicle concepts |
Platform Design and Control | Basic and applied research to establish interdisciplinary scientific foundations to enable maneuverable, adaptive, tactical platforms through advances in theoretical mechanics, machine-enabled and conceptual design, and non-classical mechanical systems and actuators. |
| Vehicle Propulsion Sciences | Fundamental research to understand and exploit energy conversion and power transfer mechanisms to enable extended reach, endurance, and readiness of Army platforms. | |
| Military Information Sciences (MIS) underpinning sciences, physical autonomy, and enablers required to provide timely, mission-aware information to humans and systems at speed and scale for all-domain and coalition operations |
Artificial Reasoning for Intent and Discourse | Theories, methods, algorithms, and experimental approaches to enable computer systems, autonomous physical systems, and humans to reason about available data and interactions between those entities; to understand the intent and meaning of the communicated information; and to conduct discourse over time where communications depend on the history of previous interactions and situational conditions. |
| C-4 for Multi-Domain Operations | Theories, methods, algorithms, and experimental approaches to enable distributed teams of humans and intelligent agents (software and robotics) to integrate a broad range of dynamic, complex, and disparate information arriving from the multidomain battlespace; comprehend situational implications; generate and recommend effective decisions; and monitor/assess decisional effects. |
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
| Competency | Core Competency | Core Competency Description |
|---|---|---|
| Complex Behaviors for Ground Autonomy | Theories, methods, algorithms, and experimental approaches to enable ground autonomous systems to coordinate, collaborate, and execute goal-driven and tactically appropriate behaviors and activities that comprise multiple actions in complex ground environments. | |
| Comprehensive Spatiotemporal Scene Understanding | Theories, methods, algorithms, sensors, and experimental approaches to enable intelligent systems to understand the content, meaning, and implications of complex situations and events unfolding in physical environments over space and time; and identify and label mission-relevant elements of the observed scene and actions performed within the scene. | |
| Data Science Enablers | Theories, methods, processes, algorithms, frameworks, and experimental approaches to identify, characterize, extract, and integrate entities, patterns, relations, insights, and ultimately knowledge from collections of diverse types of structured and unstructured data. | |
| Heterogeneous Characterization and Sensing of Atmospheric State and Constituents | Methods, algorithms, and empirical approaches that couple diverse sensing modalities with new theories of near-surface atmospheric processes and predictive models to understand the physical environment and enable Warfighters and intelligent systems to tactically exploit environmental impacts. | |
| Low Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) Machine Learning (ML) and Graph Neural networks (GNNs) | Theories, methods, processes, algorithms, and experimental approaches to create ML models that acquire ability to perform complex tasks by self-modifying from experience without being explicitly programmed. Of particular emphasis are low SWaP enabled methods and algorithms suitable for tactical edge operations, and that often use graphs and networks that function by passing messages between the nodes and storing information within links and nodes. | |
| Robotics and Physical Autonomy | Fundamental research toward embodied systems capable of executing tasks in complex environments through the use of artificial intelligence and ML. | |
| Network, Cyber, and Computational Sciences (NC&CS) sciences to enable and ensure distributed, resilient, secure networking & resource adaptive decentralized computing for decision dominance |
Cyber-Defense and Cybersecurity | Research related to the development of theories, models, optimized algorithms, and experimentation for the prevention, detection, mitigation, monitoring, and prediction of adversarial activities and their impacts within cyber space (networks, analytics, and artificial intelligence / machine learning). Scope includes tactical information networks, enterprise-level networks, non-traditional networks such as communication buses found on vehicle platforms as well as protecting the AI/ML and analytic algorithms operating on these networks. |
| Interactions of Earth Terrain with EM Communications | Theories, experimental studies, and models to characterize the combined effects of the EM propagation channel, multipath, diffraction, ground impedance, terrain, vegetation, infrastructure, and meteorological influences on the source signature. Full-wave and other modeling tools to characterize effects at local and urban scale, resulting in high-fidelity models informing networking protocols. | |
| Resilient & Adaptive Comms Networks | Research related to the development of theories, methods, algorithms, and experimental approaches to enable survivable, resilient & adaptive communications networks in complex and contested environments. Scope includes novel communication modalities, multi-layer adaptive protocols for robust information |
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
| Competency | Core Competency | Core Competency Description |
|---|---|---|
| delivery (including storage, computing, and communications), emerging quantum networks, and interpretable and adversarial ML to enable autonomous control of heterogeneous network structures and dynamics for resilience to adversarial attacks. | ||
| Computational Methods for Modeling and Learning | Research related to the development of theories, models, analyses, and development of advanced and unconventional computing architectures and algorithms optimized to run in a broad range of resource environments. Scope includes systems and application-specific computing architectures, including lightweight, non-von-Neumann, and other emerging architectures; distributed/decentralized energy-efficient computing and scalable computing. Research related to the development of mathematical algorithms, deterministic and stochastic models, multi-scale methods, and uncertainty quantification to simulate complex, physical systems to understand variability, & predict system evolution with quantified confidence. | |
| Photonics, Electronics, and Quantum Sciences (PE&QS) materials (and related manufacturing methods) and devices intended for achieving photonic, electronic, and quantum-based effects |
Advanced Electronics | Research related to electronic, photonic, and electro-optical materials, devices, circuits, and subsystems whose functionality is derived from electron transport, rectification, amplification, storage, and interaction with solid-state, gases, vacuum, and energy including underpinning theory, design, modeling, fabrication, characterization, and analysis. |
| Integrated Photonics | Research related to materials development, device design, and processes necessary to achieve extremely complex optical processing in highly integrated and compact low-power form factors, capable of high- bandwidth signal processing of optical and traditional electronic functions modulated to optical frequencies. | |
| Quantum Components and Technologies | Research related to exploiting nonintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics in atoms, materials, and nanophotonics for advancements in sensors (e.g., magnetic, gravimetric, and RF), precision timekeeping, communications, and information processing. | |
| Sensing | Research related to sensor physics, non-traditional sensing, processes, and analysis of sensor design, multimodal sensing integration, sensor/environment modeling and experimentation, sensor networks, and insertion of sensors onto platforms. | |
| Sciences of Extreme Materials (SEM) materials and related manufacturing methods focusing on mechanical response and performance extremes, including active, adaptive, and flexible/soft materials; novel manufacturing science for energetic materials |
Advanced Manufacturing Sciences | Fundamental understanding and process development of modular, on-demand and by design, material- and shape-agonistic manufacturing. Manufacturing from the “bottom up,” where a structure can be built into its designed shape to create capabilities for unique military needs. |
| Functional Materials | Discovery of multifunctional materials with tailored properties or properties that change in a controlled fashion by external stimuli (temperature, electric/magnetic field, etc.). | |
| High Strain Rate Materials Response | Characterizing the strain-rate sensitive deformation and failure of materials under ballistic and blast loading. | |
| Materials and Data Science | Discovery and application of materials via the merging of materials science, computational science, and information science within an integrated design framework. Exploitation of these specific opportunities to accelerate materials design and deployment. | |
| Mechanics of Materials | Fundamental understanding of solid objects subjected to stress and strain used to predict the response of structures to various |
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
| Competency | Core Competency | Core Competency Description |
|---|---|---|
| types of loading, and analyze the vulnerability of these structures to various failure modes. | ||
| Novel Synthetic Molecular Systems | Design and discovery of stable structure and synthetic routes of designer molecules to be employed for the novel and efficient production of military-relevant chemicals, fuels, and materials. | |
| Structural and Ballistic Materials Synthesis, Processing, and Characterization | Exploration and evaluation of fundamental properties for design and creation of defense-critical materials to mitigate ballistic (high-temperature, high-rate, impact, and blast) loading. | |
| Terminal Effects (TE) sciences and applied research of weapon–target interactions |
Armor Mechanisms and Countermeasure | Discovery and advancement of techniques to minimize or eliminate lethal effects at minimum space, weight, and power. |
| Mechanisms for Human Injury and Protection | Quantitative understanding of the mechanics and physics that affect human structure and function; fundamental understanding of human injury to high-intensity loading (ballistic and blast). The exploitation of this understanding to protect or degrade Soldier function. | |
| Mechanisms for Lethal Target Interactions | Discovery and advancement of weapon/target interactions to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of munitions to provide lethal overmatch across all calibers and platforms. | |
| Terminal Effects Mechanics, Modeling, and Simulation | Quantitative understanding of structural and material response due to ballistic, blast, and highly energetic events. High-fidelity experimentation closely coupled to development and validation of theory, algorithms, and computational techniques that enable the reduction of the problem space related to technology concepts for protection and lethality. | |
| Weapons Sciences (WS) internal, transitional, and external ballistics; launch, flight, control, and navigation of guided weapons and aerial systems; development of novel weapon concepts |
Aerodynamics and Control | Understanding the dynamic interaction of solid bodies with air. Optimization of interactions to control motion of projectiles and aerial systems. |
| Discovery, Synthesis, and Formulation of Energetic Materials | Research to propose, create, and validate ingredients that can undergo rapid release of energy on demand. Formulation of novel energetic materials to optimize performance, manufacturing processes, and stability for explosive and propellant applications. | |
| Guidance and Navigation of Weapon Systems | Guidance, Navigation, and Control algorithms, electronics, and design of gun-launched and/or missile guidance systems, to include the evaluation of new sensing modalities (inertial, magnetic, GNSS, vision, etc.) to improve the performance of navigation and terminal homing accuracy for weapons systems in challenged or degraded spaces. | |
| Gun and Rocket Propulsion | Exploration of the art-of-the-possible to substantially increase range and velocity while radically reducing the weight and form factor of future weapon systems (all calibers) and armaments for next-generation manned or unmanned (small-to-large air and ground) platforms. | |
| Modeling, Simulation, and Experimental Characterization of Energetics | Delivery of exploitable knowledge through the creation and application of physics-based theoretical models to design advanced energetic materials for increased lethality and extended range munitions and to predict their performance in system concepts. |
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
Suggested Citation:
"Appendix B: The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory's 11 Competencies and Core Competencies." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. 2024 Assessment of the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/28878.
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