Mosaic Warfare: How the U.S. Military Wants to Fight Future Wars With AI, Drones and Kill Webs

Imagine a battlefield where destroying the enemy's most advanced radar does not blind the opposing force.

Another sensor immediately replaces it.

A drone detects a target but carries no weapon.

Its coordinates move through another aircraft, a satellite or a ground network.

An artillery battery hundreds of kilometers away becomes the shooter.

If that battery is unavailable, a ship-launched missile might take its place.

If communications are jammed, another network finds a path.

If several drones are destroyed, others reorganize around the loss.

No individual machine has to perform the entire mission.

No single platform has to be indispensable.

Instead, dozens, hundreds or potentially thousands of different military systems behave like interchangeable pieces that can be assembled and reassembled depending on what is available at that exact moment.

That is the basic idea behind Mosaic Warfare.

Developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the concept attempts to replace rigid collections of highly specialized weapons with something more adaptable: a distributed force of sensors, weapons, communications systems, human operators and autonomous machines that can form new combinations during combat.

DARPA describes the metaphor literally.

Traditional weapons resemble pieces of a puzzle.

Each has been engineered for one specific location.

Remove the wrong piece and the picture develops a hole.

A mosaic is different.

Its pieces are simpler.

Many can substitute for one another.

They can be rearranged into entirely different patterns.

DARPA's former Strategic Technology Office leadership argued that a future commander could similarly select from available manned and unmanned systems and rapidly assemble them into a mission-specific force.

The ultimate objective is not merely to own more drones.

It is to create more possible military decisions than an adversary can efficiently understand, predict or stop.

That distinction is what makes Mosaic Warfare potentially much more consequential than another drone program.

It is an attempt to change the architecture of warfare itself.

Mosaic Warfare Is a Concept, Not a Secret New Army Doctrine

The phrase is sometimes described online as the Pentagon's new “Mosaic Doctrine.”

That description is imprecise.

Mosaic Warfare originated primarily as a DARPA warfighting and force-development concept, not as a single formally codified U.S. Army doctrine replacing established doctrine.

RAND describes DARPA's vision as both a warfighting concept and a way to accelerate capability development and fielding. The envisioned force is more heterogeneous and distributed, with individual components capable of being dynamically combined on tactical timelines rather than permanently integrated years in advance.

The U.S. Army has nevertheless incorporated Mosaic Warfare ideas into concept and modernization literature. An Army Futures Command document, for example, described Mosaic Warfare as moving away from tightly centralized command-and-control architectures toward dynamic all-domain “kill webs” that could compose new effects at mission speed.

Army professional literature was still discussing the concept in 2025 as a way to combine robust traditional platforms with many smaller autonomous or expendable partners.

So the best way to think about it is:

Mosaic Warfare is an influential U.S. defense concept whose principles increasingly overlap with real Pentagon programs, rather than one universal doctrine every U.S. military unit has suddenly adopted.

DARPA Publicly Introduced the Modern Mosaic Vision in 2017

DARPA's Strategic Technology Office publicly laid out the modern concept in August 2017.

The problem it identified was straightforward.

For decades, one of America's main military advantages came from building extremely sophisticated individual systems.

Stealth aircraft.

Advanced satellites.

Precision-guided weapons.

Complex surveillance platforms.

Those systems were enormously capable.

They were also expensive.

They could take decades to develop.

And rival militaries were gradually gaining access to increasingly capable precision weapons, sensors and commercial technologies of their own.

DARPA argued that simply making the next fighter, submarine or radar incrementally better might no longer provide the same asymmetric advantage.

Instead, the U.S. could generate advantage through complexity itself.

Many lower-cost components could cooperate dynamically, forcing an adversary to confront an enormous number of potential combinations.

Tom Burns, then director of DARPA's Strategic Technology Office, and deputy director Dan Patt became closely associated with the concept and the Mosaic Warfare name.

Their metaphor was elegant because it highlighted a weakness in traditional military engineering.

Modern Weapons Often Behave Like Puzzle Pieces

Consider a traditional integrated weapons system.

An aircraft may carry its own radar.

Its own electronic-warfare equipment.

Its own communications systems.

Its own weapons.

Its own targeting software.

All these components may have been designed specifically to work together.

That creates extraordinary capability when everything is functioning.

But it can also create rigidity.

Replace one component and integration may require years of engineering.

Try connecting equipment built by another military service and the data formats may be incompatible.

Introduce an allied country's sensor and security classifications may prevent information exchange.

DARPA compared such tightly integrated systems with puzzle pieces: highly specialized parts engineered to fit in predetermined places.

Mosaic Warfare wants the military equivalent of standardized tiles.

A sensor should ideally be useful even if the weapon it was originally designed to support is unavailable.

A shooter should ideally receive targeting information from multiple different sensors.

A communications link should be replaceable.

A drone destroyed during battle should not cause the entire operational design to collapse.

The system should be designed around functions, not merely platforms.

The Fundamental Cycle Is Sense, Decide, Act

Nearly every military engagement contains three basic functions.

Someone or something must sense the environment.

Someone must decide what should happen.

Something must act.

Traditional platforms frequently package those functions together.

Mosaic Warfare tries to separate them.

Imagine a small reconnaissance drone detects an armored vehicle.

The drone is the sensor.

It sends information to a command element.

The command element confirms the target and chooses a response.

The weapon might come from artillery, another drone, an aircraft, a missile battery or some other available system.

If one shooter cannot engage, another may be selected.

DARPA argues that separating these functions exposes huge numbers of possible combinations.

Everything capable of sensing potentially connects with multiple decision nodes.

Those nodes potentially connect with multiple effectors.

The result is not one predictable chain.

It is a web.

From the Kill Chain to the Kill Web

The traditional military expression kill chain generally describes a sequence moving from target detection through identification, decision, engagement and assessment.

The problem with a chain is obvious.

Break one critical link and the sequence fails.

Suppose a reconnaissance aircraft is the only sensor capable of supporting a particular missile battery.

Destroy or jam the aircraft.

The weapon becomes far less useful.

Mosaic Warfare instead emphasizes kill webs or, in DARPA's broader terminology, effects webs.

In a web, multiple paths can lead from a sensor to a desired effect.

DARPA's Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs program was designed to help commanders rapidly identify combinations of sensors, effectors and support elements across air, land, maritime, space and cyber domains. Instead of relying on predefined monolithic chains, the system sought to offer commanders several dynamically generated options.

The military advantage is resilience.

Destroy one route.

Another route may remain.

A Simple Example Shows Why This Matters

Imagine six systems operating in the same area.

A satellite.

Two reconnaissance drones.

A fighter aircraft.

A ground artillery battery.

A naval missile launcher.

Under a rigid architecture, perhaps the satellite is configured primarily for one command network, each drone supports a particular ground formation and the fighter uses its own targeting architecture.

There are powerful systems present.

But the number of usable combinations may be limited.

In a Mosaic architecture, the objective is for the components to cooperate much more flexibly.

The satellite might detect.

A drone might verify.

A ground command node might decide.

The ship might strike.

Minutes later, the process could reverse.

The fighter detects.

An AI-enabled planning system compares available weapons.

Artillery engages.

Another drone performs battle-damage assessment.

The power is not necessarily a revolutionary new weapon.

It is the number of combinations.

DARPA Calls This “Cost-Effective Complexity”

The objective is partly psychological and organizational.

An adversary planning against a conventional force can study its known structure.

This fighter normally supports this mission.

This radar normally controls these interceptors.

This headquarters normally communicates through these nodes.

Mosaic Warfare attempts to make those relationships less predictable.

DARPA described its objective as turning complexity into an asymmetric weapon. Lower-cost systems could combine in a large number of ways, producing effects tailored to a changing situation.

This produces what military planners often call dilemmas.

If the enemy destroys one sensor, what happens?

If the answer is “the American system fails,” attacking the sensor is an obvious choice.

If destroying it merely causes five other sensors to reorganize, the problem becomes harder.

The enemy has to decide what matters.

And the answer may continuously change.

Attritable Does Not Mean Disposable Junk

One word appears repeatedly in discussions of Mosaic Warfare:

Attritable.

It sounds like a euphemism for expendable.

There is some truth to that.

An attritable system is generally inexpensive enough that commanders are willing to expose it to greater risk than an exceptionally expensive crewed aircraft or ship.

But the purpose is not to manufacture useless equipment designed to be destroyed.

It is to change the economics of loss.

Losing a multimillion-dollar unmanned aircraft is serious.

Losing a small drone costing a fraction of that amount may be tolerable if hundreds are available and the mission succeeds.

DARPA explicitly identified attritability as a central component of Mosaic Warfare. If there are large numbers of comparatively expendable systems, forces may operate in areas that would be prohibitively dangerous for a handful of irreplaceable platforms.

The collective system remains valuable even when individual pieces are lost.

This Is the Opposite of Putting Every Egg in One Basket

Modern military platforms can be extraordinary concentrations of capability.

A sophisticated warship may combine sensors, command systems, missiles, electronic warfare, communications and hundreds or thousands of personnel.

A modern fighter may cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars once development and support are considered.

A large surveillance aircraft can be both indispensable and easy for an opponent to identify as a priority target.

Mosaic thinking asks whether some capabilities can be distributed across many platforms instead.

Instead of one enormous radar, perhaps many smaller sensors contribute partial observations.

Instead of one command aircraft controlling everything, decision-making may be distributed.

Instead of expecting one aircraft to penetrate defenses, detect the target and deliver the weapon, separate machines might perform each task.

The entire force becomes harder to eliminate with a few successful attacks.

“Mass Fires Without Massing Forces”

One of DARPA's most important descriptions of the concept is the ability to concentrate effects without physically concentrating every unit.

Historically, armies often needed to mass forces to achieve overwhelming combat power.

But massing soldiers, vehicles and aircraft also makes them easier to detect and attack.

Mosaic Warfare attempts to distribute the force geographically while still bringing many effects against the same target.

DARPA described this as distributing sense-decide-act functions across many platforms while massing firepower rather than physically massing the force.

Modern long-range weapons and digital networks make this possible in ways earlier armies could barely imagine.

The shooter does not necessarily have to see the target.

The sensor does not necessarily have to carry a weapon.

The commander does not necessarily have to sit near either.

This Is Why Communications Become the Hidden Center of Mosaic Warfare

Mosaic Warfare sounds like a drone concept.

In reality, networking may be its hardest problem.

Connecting heterogeneous military equipment is notoriously difficult.

Different systems were developed:

By different companies.

For different services.

At different times.

With different data formats.

Using different security standards.

Some systems are decades old.

Others were designed last year.

Some belong to allies.

Some operate at different classification levels.

DARPA's STITCHES program was created to help connect otherwise incompatible systems through software without requiring major modifications to the original hardware. In demonstrations, DARPA presented it as one of the technologies needed to build cross-domain kill webs in real time.

That integration problem is still far from solved across the broader Department of Defense.

The Pentagon Is Still Struggling to Make All Its Systems Talk

The Government Accountability Office provided a sobering assessment in 2025.

The Pentagon's broader Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, effort seeks to connect selected capabilities across land, air, sea, space and cyberspace.

But GAO found that military organizations were still developing many systems largely in isolation and that the Department lacked a sufficiently comprehensive framework to coordinate investments and measure progress.

Among the barriers were incompatible systems, proprietary interfaces, inconsistent data standards, classification rules and organizational differences.

This matters enormously for Mosaic Warfare.

A mosaic whose tiles cannot communicate is merely a pile of equipment.

Mosaic Warfare and CJADC2 Are Closely Related—but Not the Same Thing

These terms are easy to confuse.

Mosaic Warfare is a broader concept for dynamically composing distributed military capabilities into flexible effects.

CJADC2 is a Department of Defense effort focused heavily on command, control, data integration and decision-making across military services and coalition partners.

In 2022, the Defense Department described JADC2 as enabling forces to sense, make sense and act rapidly using resilient networks, automation, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and machine learning.

By 2025, GAO described the evolved CJADC2 concept as connecting selected U.S. and partner assets across space, air, land, sea and cyberspace so decision-makers can share and use data more rapidly.

CJADC2 can therefore provide part of the digital nervous system a Mosaic force would need.

Mosaic Warfare is the larger operational idea of what commanders might do once those flexible connections exist.

The Pentagon Originally Talked About “Every Sensor to Every Shooter”

An early shorthand for joint all-domain command and control was connecting every sensor to every shooter.

That phrase is powerful.

It is also too simplistic.

Not every sensor should transmit to every weapon.

That could create enormous bandwidth demands, security risks and information overload.

The more sophisticated objective is to connect the right sensor to the right decision-maker and the right effector at the right time.

DARPA's ACK program explored exactly this problem.

It treated military capabilities almost like participants in a marketplace, allowing commanders to compare which available assets could best produce a desired effect without necessarily exposing every sensitive detail of how the capability worked.

The future network therefore should not be indiscriminate.

It should be intelligent.

AI Becomes Important Because Humans Cannot Evaluate Every Combination

Once hundreds of assets can potentially cooperate, another problem emerges.

Too many options.

Imagine 50 sensors.

20 decision nodes.

40 weapons.

Multiple communications networks.

Different fuel states.

Different ammunition levels.

Different ranges.

Different probabilities of detection.

Different jamming conditions.

Different authorities.

The number of potential combinations explodes.

A human commander cannot manually calculate every possibility in seconds.

This is where artificial intelligence, optimization algorithms and automated battle-management tools become valuable.

The machine can search through combinations.

The human can establish objectives, constraints and authorities.

This idea became central to later studies of Mosaic Warfare.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments described the approach as decision-centric warfare, using AI and autonomous systems to generate operational dilemmas rather than relying entirely on destroying enemy formations through attrition.

AI Does Not Necessarily Mean a Machine Decides Who Dies

This distinction is important.

Automation can perform many functions without independently authorizing lethal force.

An AI-enabled system might:

Fuse sensor data.

Estimate routes.

Recommend weapons.

Predict enemy movement.

Manage networks.

Assign reconnaissance tasks.

Reconfigure drones after losses.

Prioritize information.

A human commander can still retain authority over important use-of-force decisions.

DARPA's Air Combat Evolution program, for example, explored how human pilots could trust and command autonomous systems, shifting the pilot toward a mission-command role overseeing multiple unmanned platforms rather than manually controlling every movement.

The exact human-machine relationship will vary by mission, technology and policy.

Mosaic Warfare is fundamentally about composition and adaptability; it does not by itself prescribe unrestricted autonomous lethal decision-making.

Swarms Are One Possible Mosaic Tile—Not the Whole Concept

Drone swarms are frequently treated as synonymous with Mosaic Warfare.

They are not.

A swarm normally involves many autonomous or semi-autonomous systems cooperating with one another.

A Mosaic force can contain a swarm.

But it can also include traditional equipment.

A mosaic could theoretically combine an F-35, a satellite, a submarine, artillery, cyber capabilities, ground robots, inexpensive drones and human special-operations teams.

The defining feature is not that every platform is unmanned.

It is that heterogeneous capabilities can be rapidly composed into a mission network.

DARPA has repeatedly described Mosaic Warfare as combining both manned and unmanned systems rather than replacing humans and conventional platforms entirely.

Expensive Weapons Still Have a Role

Another misconception is that Mosaic Warfare means abandoning aircraft carriers, stealth aircraft, submarines and other sophisticated systems in favor of cheap drones.

DARPA's own concept is more nuanced.

High-end platforms remain valuable.

But instead of forcing a few expensive systems to perform every task, a military can surround them with numerous specialized lower-cost components.

A stealth fighter might become a particularly powerful tile rather than the entire mosaic.

A submarine might provide one effect.

A drone swarm another.

A satellite another.

An electronic-warfare system another.

The idea is not:

Cheap replaces expensive.

It is:

Expensive and cheap become more powerful when they can be recombined.

The Pentagon’s Replicator Initiative Looks Very Mosaic-Like

DARPA's original terminology is not always used in current Pentagon programs.

But several later initiatives strongly reflect its logic.

One of the clearest examples is Replicator.

The Defense Department launched the initiative with an initial goal of fielding multiple thousands of autonomous systems across multiple military domains, emphasizing affordable, attritable capabilities that commanders could employ with greater tolerance for loss.

Former Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks summarized the idea memorably as:

“small, smart, cheap, and many.”

That is not identical to Mosaic Warfare.

But the family resemblance is unmistakable.

Lots of comparatively inexpensive autonomous systems.

Multiple domains.

Distributed operations.

Resilience through numbers.

Software-enabled coordination.

Rapid fielding.

These are core Mosaic ideas.

Replicator Also Shows That the Threat Is Evolving in Both Directions

The first Replicator effort emphasized attritable autonomous systems.

By the FY2026 defense budget, Replicator 2 was focused on countering small unmanned systems and protecting critical assets.

The Defense Department requested major funding for counter-unmanned capabilities and identified mass drone proliferation as a fundamental change in modern conflict.

This reveals an important reality about future warfare.

If one side can deploy huge numbers of inexpensive autonomous systems, the opponent can too.

The mosaic has to survive an enemy mosaic.

That means sensing and attacking are only half the problem.

Defending against mass becomes equally important.

Ukraine Demonstrated Why “Cheap and Many” Matters

The Russia-Ukraine war did not begin as a DARPA Mosaic Warfare experiment.

But it has provided real-world evidence for several assumptions underlying the concept.

Small drones became routine battlefield sensors.

FPV drones became weapons.

Commercial satellite services supported communications and intelligence.

Electronic warfare constantly disrupted links.

Units changed frequencies and software.

Both sides continuously modified equipment.

Expensive vehicles could be threatened by weapons costing a tiny fraction of their value.

U.S. defense officials explicitly cited lessons from Ukraine when discussing the renewed importance of what they called precise mass—large numbers of relatively inexpensive systems combining scale with precision.

The key lesson is not simply that drones are deadly.

It is that adaptation speed has become a weapon.

Electronic Warfare Is the Nightmare Scenario for a Networked Mosaic

A force depending on connectivity has an obvious vulnerability.

What happens when the network disappears?

Modern opponents can:

Jam GPS.

Jam radio frequencies.

Spoof navigation.

Detect transmissions.

Attack satellites.

Launch cyber operations.

Destroy relay nodes.

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated intense competition between drone communications and electronic warfare. Frequencies are changed, jammed and changed again. Both sides continually adapt their counter-drone systems.

A Mosaic force therefore cannot assume perfect connectivity.

DARPA's vision explicitly asks how many diverse pieces can cooperate without perfect communications and without planning everything in advance.

That is much harder than drawing lines between icons on a PowerPoint slide.

The Network Must Be Able to Degrade Gracefully

A conventional network sometimes works beautifully until one central node fails.

Then everything becomes dramatically worse.

Mosaic Warfare requires the opposite behavior.

Lose satellite communications?

Use another path.

Lose high-bandwidth links?

Transmit only essential targeting information.

Lose central command connectivity?

Local nodes should continue operating under previous instructions.

Lose several drones?

Remaining vehicles should redistribute tasks.

DARPA's Mission-Integrated Network Control program is one example of trying to build networks that dynamically route critical information through whatever communications, computing or storage resources remain available in contested environments.

The phrase graceful degradation captures the objective.

Damage should reduce capability.

It should not cause collapse.

GPS Cannot Be Assumed Either

Many precision military systems depend heavily on the Global Positioning System.

A peer adversary will attempt to jam or spoof it.

DARPA's 2026 Robust Optical Clock Network work illustrates the broader effort to preserve precise timing even when GPS becomes unavailable. The program seeks tactical optical clocks capable of maintaining highly accurate synchronization for extended periods in GPS-denied environments.

This may sound unrelated to Mosaic Warfare.

It is not.

Distributed systems cannot coordinate effectively if they lose reliable timing and positioning.

The boring infrastructure underneath the concept—clocks, datalinks, protocols, identity management and network routing—may matter as much as spectacular drones.

Underwater Mosaic Warfare Is Even Harder

Radio communication works poorly underwater.

Submarines and underwater drones therefore operate under severe communications constraints.

DARPA's completed TIMEly program specifically investigated heterogeneous underwater networking intended to support Mosaic Warfare-style composition of effect chains from available assets across domains.

This demonstrates how ambitious the concept really is.

The objective is not merely to network aircraft flying over one battlefield.

It is to make systems operating in radically different physical environments cooperate:

Space.

Atmosphere.

Land.

Ocean surface.

Undersea.

Cyber networks.

Electromagnetic spectrum.

That is an enormous systems-engineering problem.

Even Radio Hardware Could Become a Mosaic

DARPA has also explored the concept at the subsystem level.

Its CONCERTO program describes a software-defined radio-frequency architecture intended to combine functions such as radar, electronic warfare and communications more flexibly.

DARPA explicitly calls the concept an ultimate software-defined RF “tile” for Mosaic Warfare.

That reveals another layer of the idea.

A mosaic does not have to consist only of entire vehicles.

A radar function can be a tile.

A communications service can be a tile.

A software application can be a tile.

A satellite sensor can be a tile.

The architecture potentially stretches from individual electronics all the way to theater-wide military formations.

Acquisition May Be Harder to Change Than Technology

Suppose engineers solve all the networking problems.

A different obstacle remains.

The Pentagon traditionally purchases weapons as programs.

A service identifies requirements.

A contractor develops a platform.

Funding is allocated.

Testing occurs.

The platform enters service.

That process can take many years.

Mosaic Warfare assumes faster technological refresh.

New tiles should be introduced without redesigning the entire force.

RAND's study of Mosaic acquisition found that the concept presents serious governance challenges because existing acquisition responsibilities are distributed across services and organizations that do not necessarily optimize for rapidly composing capabilities across institutional boundaries.

In other words, the military bureaucracy itself was built for puzzle pieces.

Mosaic Warfare wants tiles.

Open Architectures Become Strategically Important

Proprietary technology can make a company successful.

It can make Mosaic Warfare difficult.

If every radar, drone and command application speaks a proprietary digital language, connecting them becomes expensive.

GAO's 2025 CJADC2 review specifically identified proprietary interfaces and insufficient interoperability as obstacles to integrating military command systems.

This is why the future competition may involve software standards as much as missiles.

A slightly less capable drone that can communicate with 40 other systems may sometimes be more valuable than a technically superior drone that can communicate with only one.

The value of the tile depends partly on how many mosaics it can join.

The Strongest Mosaic May Not Have the Best Individual Pieces

This is one of the concept's most counterintuitive implications.

Imagine Country A owns the world's best individual fighter.

Country B owns a slightly less capable fighter.

But Country B's fighter can instantly cooperate with hundreds of drones, satellites, ships and ground sensors.

Which military has the greater combat capability?

Traditional weapons comparisons frequently count individual platforms.

How many fighters?

How many tanks?

How many destroyers?

Mosaic thinking says the relationships between those objects may be equally important.

Military power becomes partly a property of the network, not just the machine.

Decision Speed May Become More Important Than Weapon Speed

A hypersonic missile traveling several times the speed of sound is useless if the targeting process takes too long.

A slower weapon can win if its force detects, identifies and authorizes the engagement much faster.

This is why DARPA and later U.S. concepts emphasize the entire sense-decide-act cycle.

CSBA's Mosaic Warfare study focused heavily on decision-centric operations: presenting an adversary with many simultaneous dilemmas faster than its command system can resolve them.

The goal is sometimes described as decision superiority.

Your force does not need perfect information.

It needs to make better decisions quickly enough that the enemy is always reacting to yesterday's problem.

Mosaic Warfare Tries to Weaponize Optionality

Optionality sounds like management jargon.

On a battlefield, it can determine survival.

One sensor.

One shooter.

One network.

One route.

That produces very few options.

Five sensors.

Six weapons.

Four networks.

Multiple autonomous relay systems.

Now the commander can select among many alternatives.

If the enemy jams one path, the force moves to another.

If ammunition runs low in one location, another effector is chosen.

If a platform is destroyed, the mission can be recomposed.

DARPA's programs repeatedly emphasize this combination of optionality, diversity and rapid adaptability.

Optionality is the real product.

The hardware exists to create it.

But More Options Can Also Paralyze Commanders

There is a paradox.

Give a commander two choices and selecting one may be easy.

Give the commander 20,000 possible sensor-weapon combinations and decision-making becomes impossible without assistance.

Automation must therefore filter choices.

But filtering creates another problem.

Who decides what the algorithm considers important?

How does a commander know why one weapon was recommended instead of another?

How reliable is the data?

What happens if enemy deception poisons the algorithm's assumptions?

AI can reduce complexity for humans.

It can also hide complexity behind an interface.

That makes trust, testing and explainability critical.

DARPA's contemporary AI work continues to emphasize the need for national-security AI that is reliable, predictable, understandable to operators and secure in contested environments.

Cybersecurity Becomes Battlefield Survivability

A tank's armor protects it physically.

A Mosaic force also needs digital armor.

If software dynamically connects sensors and weapons, cyber compromise can potentially distort the information linking them.

An attacker might not need to destroy a drone if it can manipulate what the drone reports.

It may not need to destroy a network if it can make commanders distrust the network.

Potential threats include corrupted data, false tracks, compromised software updates, stolen credentials and adversarial manipulation of AI systems.

This makes zero-trust architecture, authentication, encryption and software assurance operational requirements rather than ordinary IT concerns.

The more composable the force becomes, the more carefully it must verify the pieces entering the mosaic.

Classification Could Defeat the Concept Without a Single Enemy Shot

One of the strangest barriers to Mosaic Warfare is administrative.

The perfect allied sensor may detect a target.

But perhaps the network containing that information is classified at a level the allied shooter cannot access.

Technically, the connection exists.

Politically or bureaucratically, it cannot be used.

GAO identified overly restrictive classification and difficulties sharing information with allies as significant obstacles to CJADC2.

Future warfare may therefore depend partly on solving questions that appear mundane:

Which country is allowed to see which data?

Which algorithm can cross which network?

How quickly can information be downgraded?

Who owns the sensor output?

Mosaic Warfare is as much an institutional challenge as a technological one.

What Would Mosaic Warfare Look Like in a Major War?

A genuinely mature Mosaic force might contain one coherent network composed from many different kinds of components:

• satellites and airborne sensors providing surveillance;
• inexpensive reconnaissance and strike drones distributed across a large area;
• crewed aircraft coordinating autonomous teammates;
• ships and submarines providing long-range weapons;
• ground artillery and missile batteries acting as additional effectors;
• cyber and electronic-warfare systems disrupting opposing networks;
• AI-assisted command systems continually recomposing mission options;
• resilient communications moving critical data through surviving paths;
• human commanders setting objectives, authorities and risk limits.

No single element defines the mosaic.

The interaction does.

China Is an Important Strategic Context

Mosaic Warfare emerged partly from concern that U.S. forces could no longer assume uncontested technological superiority against sophisticated state adversaries.

Modern Chinese military capabilities include large missile inventories, advanced air defenses, increasingly capable aircraft, naval forces, space capabilities and extensive sensing networks.

The Pentagon's Replicator initiative was explicitly framed in part as a response to China's advantage in military mass, with U.S. officials arguing that distributed autonomous systems could create scale without reproducing the People's Liberation Army platform for platform.

The idea is not necessarily to own more of every conventional weapon.

It is to create a force whose combinations are harder to suppress.

An Enemy Would Try to Attack the Mosaic’s Connections

Every concept generates a counter-concept.

If the American advantage comes from networking many distributed components, a rational opponent will attack:

Communications.

Satellites.

Data centers.

Cloud services.

GPS.

Electromagnetic links.

Command nodes.

Software supply chains.

Undersea cables.

The objective may be to separate the tiles.

Once disconnected, sophisticated individual systems may become much less useful.

This means future conflict could involve an intense battle over connectivity before traditional weapons even begin firing at major platforms.

The network itself becomes terrain.

Cheap Drones Do Not Automatically Beat Expensive Militaries

Ukraine has also provided a warning against simplistic conclusions.

Videos showing inexpensive drones destroying or damaging expensive equipment are powerful.

They do not prove that tanks, aircraft or artillery are obsolete.

Drones depend on reconnaissance.

Operators.

Communications.

Electronic protection.

Manufacturing.

Software.

Logistics.

Explosives.

Air defense.

The opponent adapts.

The same dynamic applies to Mosaic Warfare.

A collection of cheap platforms without robust command, supply and communications is not a revolutionary force.

It is merely a lot of cheap platforms.

Integration is what creates the mosaic.

Logistics Must Become Mosaic-Like Too

Distributed warfare creates another challenge.

A centralized formation can concentrate fuel, maintenance and ammunition.

Hundreds of small distributed units require supplies across a much larger area.

Drones need batteries.

Vehicles need fuel.

Missiles need replacement.

Sensors need spare parts.

Networks need power.

If logistics remain centralized and fragile, an enemy can simply attack the supply system.

The future distributed force therefore requires distributed logistics.

Autonomous resupply vehicles, additive manufacturing, smaller supply caches and predictive maintenance may become as important as autonomous weapons.

The combat mosaic cannot survive without a logistics mosaic behind it.

Mosaic Warfare Changes What “Mass” Means

For centuries, military mass usually meant concentrating soldiers and equipment.

The precision-guided weapons revolution changed that relationship.

Massed forces became easier to detect and attack.

Mosaic Warfare attempts another transformation.

Mass can be:

Massed sensors.

Massed drones.

Massed potential attack routes.

Massed information.

Massed decision options.

Massed effects.

The force itself may remain geographically dispersed.

Former Pentagon leaders have referred to a related idea as precise mass: combining the scale of numerous lower-cost systems with increasingly accurate sensing and weapons.

Mass never disappeared.

Its form changed.

Is Mosaic Warfare Actually Revolutionary?

Possibly.

But many of its individual ideas are not new.

Combined arms is ancient.

Armies have long tried to coordinate different weapons.

AirLand Battle integrated air and ground forces.

Network-centric warfare emphasized information sharing.

The Second Offset linked sensors and precision weapons.

Commanders have always wanted flexibility.

DARPA itself explicitly connects Mosaic Warfare with this history, including AirLand Battle and earlier systems-of-systems concepts.

What is new is the technological possibility of making composition far more dynamic.

Instead of carefully engineering one fixed integration over years, software could potentially create new combinations during a mission.

That is the revolutionary claim.

Whether the Pentagon can accomplish it at scale remains uncertain.

The Difference Between a System of Systems and a Mosaic

Military engineers have used the phrase system of systems for decades.

Why invent another term?

Because traditional systems of systems can still be rigid.

System A was engineered to exchange specific information with System B.

System B supports System C.

Change one component and integration work begins again.

DARPA criticized those architectures as brittle.

The Mosaic vision tries to make the combinations much more fluid.

New components should be added more like applications joining a digital ecosystem than custom machinery being welded permanently into one vehicle.

This is why software interfaces, modularity and machine-readable descriptions of capabilities matter so much.

Could Allies Become Tiles in the Mosaic?

In principle, yes.

And this may become one of its most important advantages.

The United States rarely expects to fight major wars entirely alone.

Different allies possess different capabilities.

One nation may contribute maritime surveillance.

Another air defense.

Another fighters.

Another cyber expertise.

Another long-range fires.

If interoperable networks can connect these capabilities, coalition forces become a much larger mosaic.

But the political and technical challenges multiply.

Different countries use different equipment.

Different classification rules.

Different rules of engagement.

Different security standards.

GAO's concerns about CJADC2 interoperability with international partners therefore strike directly at one of the most ambitious possibilities of the Mosaic concept.

The Biggest Weakness May Be That the Mosaic Is Harder for Us Too

A complex force confuses the enemy.

It can also confuse its owner.

Who commands an autonomous system temporarily supporting another service?

Who is responsible if two systems receive conflicting objectives?

Who decides which mission gets a scarce satellite?

How does logistics track hundreds of rapidly reassigned platforms?

What happens when AI recommendations conflict with a commander's intuition?

How are friendly forces prevented from interfering with one another?

How does airspace remain safe when drones, aircraft, artillery rounds and missiles share it?

DARPA's ASTARTE program was created partly because future battlefields may become extraordinarily congested, requiring improved airspace awareness and deconfliction to support Mosaic-style operations.

Complexity can be a weapon only if your side manages it better.

The Entire Theory Depends on a Dangerous Assumption

The central bet of Mosaic Warfare is not really about drones.

It is this:

The United States can manage complexity better than its adversaries.

If true, generating thousands of possible combinations creates an advantage.

If false, complexity becomes self-inflicted friction.

Networks fail.

Operators become overwhelmed.

Software breaks.

Autonomous systems behave unpredictably.

Different services refuse to share information.

Commanders revert to familiar platforms.

The mosaic fractures.

This is why demonstration and operational experimentation matter more than the elegance of the concept.

Frequently Asked Questions About Mosaic Warfare

What is Mosaic Warfare?

Mosaic Warfare is a DARPA-developed concept in which diverse military capabilities are dynamically combined like tiles in a mosaic.

Sensors, weapons, human operators, communications systems and autonomous platforms can be recomposed depending on the mission and what remains available.

Who invented Mosaic Warfare?

The modern DARPA concept is closely associated with former Strategic Technology Office director Tom Burns and his deputy Dan Patt.

DARPA says the phrase emerged from that office's effort to rethink future warfare around composable systems.

When did DARPA introduce Mosaic Warfare?

DARPA publicly outlined the Strategic Technology Office's Mosaic Warfare approach in 2017, with additional detailed explanations appearing during DARPA's 60th-anniversary publications in 2018.

Is Mosaic Warfare an official U.S. Army doctrine?

Not as a standalone doctrine in the way the term is sometimes used online.

It originated as a DARPA warfighting and force-development concept, although Army concept literature and professional military writing have incorporated its ideas.

Why is it called Mosaic Warfare?

DARPA compares military systems with tiles in a mosaic.

Unlike rigid puzzle pieces, tiles can be combined in many different arrangements to create different pictures—or, militarily, different mission packages.

What is the difference between a kill chain and a kill web?

A kill chain generally describes a relatively linear sequence from sensing a target to deciding and engaging it.

A kill web creates multiple alternative connections among sensors, command nodes and weapons, allowing the force to reroute around losses or disruption.

What does “effects web” mean?

DARPA sometimes uses “effects web” because not every desired military effect involves physically destroying a target.

Electronic warfare, cyber operations, deception and information effects can also contribute to a mission.

Does Mosaic Warfare depend on drones?

Drones are important potential tiles, but Mosaic Warfare is broader.

It can integrate crewed aircraft, ships, submarines, ground forces, satellites, cyber systems, sensors and unmanned platforms.

Does Mosaic Warfare mean replacing soldiers with robots?

No.

The concept includes human-machine teaming and can shift humans toward command and mission-management roles while autonomous systems perform selected tasks.

It does not inherently require removing humans from lethal decision-making.

What does attritable mean?

An attritable platform is affordable and available in sufficient numbers that commanders can accept a greater risk of losing it compared with an extremely expensive or scarce system.

Why use many cheap drones instead of one advanced aircraft?

Numbers can provide geographic coverage, redundancy and resilience.

Destroying several inexpensive systems may not eliminate the mission if others can substitute for them.

But high-end crewed platforms still remain valuable within the Mosaic concept.

What is CJADC2?

Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control is the Pentagon's effort to improve data sharing and command and control across land, air, maritime, space and cyber forces, including cooperation with allies.

Is CJADC2 the same as Mosaic Warfare?

No.

CJADC2 is heavily focused on the networking, data and command architecture needed to connect forces.

Mosaic Warfare is a broader operational concept about dynamically composing those forces into different combinations.

They strongly overlap.

What role does artificial intelligence play?

AI could process sensor information, identify available capabilities, optimize networks and recommend combinations of sensors and effectors much faster than humans could manually evaluate thousands of possibilities.

What is DARPA’s ACK program?

Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs was a DARPA effort to help commanders rapidly identify combinations of sensors, effectors and support capabilities across military domains.

What was STITCHES?

STITCHES was a DARPA software toolchain intended to rapidly connect heterogeneous military systems without requiring extensive hardware changes or a universal common interface.

What is Replicator?

Replicator is a Pentagon initiative created to accelerate the fielding of large numbers of autonomous and attritable military systems.

Its first iteration emphasized thousands of systems across multiple domains.

Is Replicator part of Mosaic Warfare?

It is not simply another name for Mosaic Warfare.

But its emphasis on numerous affordable autonomous systems, distributed operations and rapid acquisition closely reflects Mosaic principles.

What is Replicator 2?

The FY2026 Pentagon budget describes Replicator 2 as focused on improving protection against small unmanned systems and addressing challenges including production capacity, integration and open-system architecture.

Has Ukraine demonstrated Mosaic Warfare?

Ukraine has not simply implemented DARPA's formal Mosaic Warfare concept.

But the war has demonstrated several related principles: mass use of inexpensive drones, distributed sensing, rapid technological adaptation, commercial technology, electronic warfare and the renewed importance of precise mass.

What is precise mass?

Precise mass refers to combining relatively large numbers of lower-cost systems with precision sensing and attack capabilities.

Pentagon officials have identified Ukraine as accelerating this trend.

Can Mosaic Warfare function if communications are jammed?

A mature Mosaic architecture is specifically supposed to remain useful in contested communications environments.

In practice, achieving that resilience is one of its hardest technical problems.

Why is GPS denial important?

Many military platforms depend on GPS for positioning and precise timing.

A sophisticated enemy is expected to jam or spoof those signals.

DARPA continues developing alternatives, including optical-clock technologies capable of maintaining precise timing without continuous GPS.

What is the biggest technological challenge?

Interoperability may be the biggest.

The Pentagon operates an enormous number of systems using different networks, data formats, contractors, security classifications and technical standards.

GAO continues to identify this as a major obstacle to CJADC2.

What is the biggest organizational challenge?

Military services traditionally develop and buy capabilities to meet their own requirements.

Mosaic Warfare requires capabilities to cooperate dynamically across service boundaries, creating difficult questions involving acquisition, ownership, funding and command authority.

Could Mosaic Warfare overwhelm commanders?

Yes.

The number of possible combinations can itself become unmanageable.

AI and automated decision aids are therefore important, but those systems introduce new issues involving trust, reliability, cyberattack and human oversight.

Can enemy cyberattacks break a Mosaic force?

Potentially.

A heavily networked force depends on reliable data.

Cybersecurity, authentication, resilient communications and the ability to continue operating locally during network disruption are therefore critical.

Does the concept make aircraft carriers or fighter jets obsolete?

No.

Mosaic Warfare generally envisions high-end platforms operating alongside numerous cheaper and more specialized systems.

The goal is to reduce dependence on any single platform, not eliminate sophisticated weapons entirely.

Could NATO or other allies participate in a Mosaic force?

Technically yes, and coalition integration could dramatically expand available combinations.

But classification rules, incompatible systems and national policies remain significant obstacles.

Is Mosaic Warfare already fully operational?

No.

Individual technologies and related concepts are already being fielded, demonstrated or used operationally.

But the complete vision of a seamlessly composable, all-domain Mosaic force remains aspirational.

Why does the Pentagon care so much about it?

Because future opponents may be capable of destroying or disabling some of America's most expensive platforms and networks.

A distributed, recomposable force promises to continue fighting after individual components are lost.

The Future Battlefield May Be Defined Less by the Best Weapon Than by the Best Combination

For most of the modern military era, technological superiority was easy to picture.

The faster aircraft.

The more powerful radar.

The quieter submarine.

The more accurate missile.

The better tank.

Those comparisons still matter.

Mosaic Warfare proposes another metric.

How many different ways can your force solve the same problem?

If one aircraft is the only system capable of detecting a target, it is extraordinarily valuable.

It is also an obvious target.

If 30 different systems can contribute enough information to identify that same target, destroying one has much less effect.

If one headquarters must approve every action, disrupting it can paralyze the force.

If command functions can migrate among surviving nodes, decapitation becomes harder.

If one datalink carries every critical message, jamming it creates disaster.

If the network can automatically discover five alternate routes, jamming becomes a temporary inconvenience.

This is the logic of the mosaic.

The individual tile matters.

The connections between tiles matter more.

And the ability to rearrange those connections under fire may matter most of all.

That is why the concept is not really about drones.

It is about resilience through recombination.

Ukraine has already demonstrated what happens when inexpensive technology, rapid adaptation, commercial systems and precision weapons collide on a modern battlefield.

The Pentagon's Replicator programs reflect the renewed importance of autonomous mass.

CJADC2 reflects the effort to build a joint digital nervous system.

DARPA's autonomous aircraft, resilient networking, cross-domain kill-web and communications programs tackle different pieces of the same underlying challenge.

Yet the hardest part remains unresolved.

A beautiful mosaic requires tiles that actually fit together.

As of 2025, GAO was still warning that the Pentagon's command-and-control modernization suffered from fragmented investments, incompatible systems, classification barriers and insufficient coordination.

So the decisive battle over Mosaic Warfare may occur before any shooting starts.

Inside software standards.

Acquisition rules.

Communications protocols.

AI reliability.

Coalition agreements.

Industrial production.

Training.

And organizational culture.

If those problems can be solved, the result could be a military force radically harder to predict and disable.

An enemy might destroy ten drones and discover twenty alternatives.

Jam one network and watch another appear.

Eliminate one sensor only to expose itself to three others.

Attack one formation and find that the important combat power was never concentrated there in the first place.

But if those integration problems cannot be solved, the revolutionary vision becomes a collection of expensive systems that still cannot reliably talk to one another.

That is the wager behind Mosaic Warfare.

Not that America can build the single greatest weapon.

But that it can build a force in which no single weapon needs to be the greatest—or indispensable—because the whole network can continuously become something different.

The future battlefield may therefore belong not to the military with the strongest individual pieces.

It may belong to the military that can rearrange the board faster than its opponent can understand the picture.