DARPA DICE Program: The $54B Doctrine Gap

DARPA's Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence (DICE) programme, with a Special Notice response deadline of 19 May 2026, is the most explicit public statement to date of how the Pentagon intends to solve the operator-bottleneck problem that has constrained drone warfare since the Predator era. A companion RFI on Materials for Physical Compute in Untethered Robotics (DARPA-SN-26-76) completes the technical envelope. The strategic risk is institutional rather than technological: less than 2% of the Pentagon's $54 billion FY27 autonomous warfare request is allocated to doctrine and training, according to a Hill commentary by retired Gen. David Petraeus and Isaac Flanagan. The architecture is being procured faster than the doctrine to govern it.