And here's the rest of the story. First up Military and Aerospace Magazine:
DARPA to brief industry on Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) program 25 Jan. in Arlington, Va.
And from Popular Science, where this might be going:
DARPA Wants "Upward Falling" Robots That Can Hide On The Seafloor For Years, Launch On Demand
The U.S. military spends a good deal of money and energy on delivery systems--capabilities that allow U.S. forces to move assets to where they are needed around the globe as quickly as possible. But for the Navy, whose area of operation is the entirety of the world’s oceans, DARPA is taking a different tack. Rather than trying to truck assets to where they need to be during a crisis, why not just plant them on the seafloor and activate them when you need them?
This is the driving idea behind DARPA’s Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) program, which seeks to create technologies that would allow the Navy to leave unmanned systems and other distributed technologies hidden in the ocean depths for years on end and deploy them remotely at the push of a button when the need arises. Think: unmanned aircraft that travel to the surface and launch into the sky to provide reconnaissance or to disrupt or spoof enemy defenses, or perhaps submersible or surface sub-hunters that launch from the seafloor during times of heightened alert in a particular maritime theater....MORE
