Tactical Missile Innovation Challenge

Tactical Missile Innovation Challenge is sponsored by Department of Defense - Navy. Overview Modern tactical missile systems are a force multiplier on the battlefield, but they have become increasingly difficult and expensive to develop, produce, and sustain at scale.

Traditional product development practices, which optimize a single design to tightly specified requirements to assure performance and reliability, have produced world-class systems. However, in some contexts, these practices can reduce design flexibility, increase unit and lifecycle costs, and constrain scaling in production and sustainment.

This Challenge seeks alternative missile product development approaches that, at the design stage, use modern tools and linked models to explore coupled trade spaces across performance, cost, schedule, and production, producing concepts that are affordable, adaptable, and producible at scale. This Challenge invites participants to rethink the development of tactical missile systems from a clean sheet.

Using modern design tools, modeling and simulation, and structured exploration of design and production trade spaces, participants should submit a methodology and development approach intended to underpin a new all-up-round (AUR) missile concept that is: Affordable: significantly lower development, production, and sustainment costs than current systems.

Adaptable and scalable: designed for growth in production capacity and mission capability. Operationally relevant: aligned with near-term force needs, including countering small to medium unmanned aerial threats. Rather than requiring a complete missile design, each submission should present a clear, structured design methodology and execution plan.

Proposals should explain how the method will reduce technical and programmatic risk, manage cost drivers, and provide a credible path to production and fielding by traversing the coupled trade space. Teams are encouraged to describe the enabling capability stack that executes the method, such as model-based design environments, linked mission and subsystem