Nicholas A O'Donoughue

In Mosaic warfare, individual warfighting platforms are assembled like ceramic tiles to make a larger "mosaic," or force package. Noting that the immune system has evolved over 500 million years to exhibit mosaiclike properties--meaning that these properties have conferred some evolutionary advantage--the authors suggest that Mosaic warfare might have advantages, such as resilience and adaptability, over other approaches to defeating a threat.

Mosaic warfare is named for the idea of creating a complex image from small pieces. This report studies Mosaic warfare and explores three dimensions of variability: (1) fractionation of capabilities from large multicapability platforms onto multiple smaller ones; (2) employment of heterogenous mixes of capabilities throughout a battlespace; and (3) rapid composition of a set of needed capabilities in a time and place to accomplish a mission.