THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY LLC

NATO SEASPARROW is a well-established air defense missile system with decades of operational history; the description contains zero mention of AI, ML, machine learning, computer vision, autonomous systems, or any algorithmic capability—this is weapons platform modernization or integration work, not AI-native development. JHU APL is a federally-funded research center (FFRDC), the institutional equivalent of a large prime, making this a legacy defense contractor award despite the university affiliation. The problem statement is purely administrative (system name only) with no articulated operational problem, end-user need, or success metric.