Quote Originally Posted by Penta View Post
It's always struck me....Why do we never have simple "Technology Maturation" projects?
You do, it just becomes less robust as the sticker price goes up. It's one thing to bang away at code through a test suite, dump manure into rifle or crash test a Hummer, it's another to fire live shots at an airborne F-22 or blow up a Stryker. At some point your testing focus becomes chiefly unitary over cheaply produced components rather holistic over the final system.

"Because that's DARPA's job", I'm going to hear, I suppose.

I always thought DARPA's job was the really far out research - then, once you have something that may actually have applications, it transitions to the services.
As far as I know, DARPA's job isn't even proof of concept, but more along the lines of basic research done in universities in the new drug discovery chain.