Defense electronics manufacturer Hensoldt will provide the additional technology, worth more than €100 million (U.S. $108 million). The company will also integrate the TRML-4D radars into the IRIS-T SLM air defense systems destined for the two customers on behalf of Diehl Defence.

Estonia and Latvia agreed to purchase the German-made weapons in September in a deal worth more than €1 billion. For Latvia, the purchase of €600 million worth of air defense systems was the largest military purchase in the country’s 30 years of independence.

The TRML-4D radar enables the detection and tracking of aerial targets within a 250-kilometer (155-mile) radius and are able to simultaneously follow about 1,500 targets, Hensoldt said in a news release.

The European Sky Shield Initiative, launched by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022, seeks to strengthen the continent’s air defenses, with a particular aim of countering Russian and Iranian ballistic and cruise missiles.

The initiative now counts 21 participating countries, including neutral non-NATO members Austria and Switzerland. The aim is to maintain systems that can form a continuous barrier across the continent, from the Nordic region to Turkey.

The latest announcement brings the total number of radars Hensoldt is producing as part of the initiative alone to more than 80, the company said.

The German-made IRIS-T is the primary short- and medium-range system used under the scheme. Some participating countries have procured American-made long-range Patriot missiles and the Israeli-made Arrow 3 exo-atmospheric interceptor for longer ranges.

France, which is not part of the initiative, has criticized the approach for relying too heavily on non-European components. Italy and Spain are also not participants. However, the initiative has consistently expanded, notably when Poland dropped its ambiguous stance and announced in April it would join.

The initiative, largely a consequence of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has contributed to dramatically accelerating the pace at which European governments are spending funds on air defense. The Baltic states were among the first European nations to kick off the initiative, signing a joint declaration with 12 others in October 2022.

While anti-drone systems are lagging and “leave the sky open to things that are cobbled together but which are extremely fragile,” countermeasures are being developed, Schill told reporters during a tour of the French Army stand at the show June 19. Already today, 75% of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine are lost to electronic warfare, the general said.

”The life of impunity of small, very simple drones over the battlefield is a snapshot in time,” Schill said. “Right now it’s being exploited, that’s clear, and we have to protect ourselves. Today, the sword, in the sense of the aerial drone, is powerful, more powerful than the shield. The shield is going to grow.”

This year’s edition of Eurosatory featured dozens of anti-drone systems, including shotguns, cannons and missiles, while companies including Safran, Thales and Hensoldt presented soft-kill solutions to eliminate drones by electronic means. Schill said vehicles in France’s Scorpion collaborative combat program will all be anti-drone systems in two years time, linking their detection capability with turrets that can fire a missile or a 40mm airburst grenade.

First-person view drones currently carry out about 80% of the destruction on the front line in Ukraine, when eight months ago those systems weren’t present, according to Schill. The general said that situation won’t exist 10 years from now, and the question could be asked whether that might already end in one or two years. Schill cited the example of the Bayraktar drone, “the king of the war” at the start of the conflict in Ukraine but no longer being used because it’s too easy to scramble.

The general said he doesn’t consider that the war in Ukraine calls into question the French choice of a maneuvering army built around medium armor, with a focus on speed and mobility. The vehicles that the Army is introducing as part of the Scorpion program -- the Griffon, Serval and Jaguar – can be equipped with either active or passive protection, even if a strong emphasis of mine protection means they’re “quite massive.”

Griffons, Servals

The French Army is receiving around 120 Griffons and 120 Servals every year as part of Scorpion, as well as more than 20 Jaguars. The vehicles are equipped with “extremely powerful” information systems, and a vehicle such as the Griffon may contain more lines of code than a Rafale fighter jet, according to Schill.

Vehicles developed before the Scorpion program, such as the Leclerc main battle tank, are being reconfigured to become part of the collaborative combat system, which for example allows a target detected by one vehicle to be attacked by another. Scorpion was “extremely ambitious,” works, and has met expectations, according to Schill.

“Everything we had planned is perfectly in place, but it’s just a question of cost effectiveness on certain capabilities,” the general said.Something not considered five years ago is the rapid development of microprocessors, which means the gathered data can now be analyzed within the vehicle rather than externally. In combination with on-board artificial intelligence, that will allow for capabilities such as immediate threat detection, including of drones.

When looking to draw lessons from Ukraine, there needs to be a distinction between what is situational and related the type of terrain and battles being fought, and what is structural, the general said. The war in eastern Europe doesn’t mean the issues of the past 30 years around risk and crisis management will disappear. “We must remain a versatile army.”

The French choice has been to not separate the army into distinct parts suited for different theaters, for example an intervention army that is agile and mobile and a mechanized armor army prepared to fight a war like the one in Ukraine today, with “perhaps more rugged, lowered vehicles, but which, when they hit a mine will kill crews.”

Schill said he wants to preserve the “warrior aspect” of the French army, in which every soldier is aware they can be deployed in operation, rather than a soldier in a territorial defense army “who will never do anything.”

The pace of military drone development means that Army can’t commit to large buying programs, because an acquired capability can become obsolete in five months, according to the general. Schill said today’s drones fly better than those two or three years ago, with more computing power onboard that is capable of terrain-based navigation or switching frequencies to escape jamming.

Drones can’t be compared to 155mm shells, which can be stocked and will remain relevant in 10 years time, and the Army needs to find “the right system in this fast-moving world of new technology,” Schill said. The challenge is creating an industrial model that can produce in mass if necessary, and sufficiently standardized.

Future buying of electronic gear such as drones but also small radios and smart phones may be done in batches to allow for technology evolution, for example renewing equipment at the brigade level rather than multiple-year programs to equip the entire Army with a new piece of equipment, Schill said.

‘Just not possible’

The general also commented on the future French-German Main Ground Combat System, which will consist of several vehicles, some of them manned and others automated, combining anti-drone weapons, close-defense anti-aircraft capabilities, missiles and a canon. Putting all of that on a single tank would create a vehicle weighing 80 metric tons, which “is just not possible.”

Development of the system is going to 10 to 15 years because the land-based robotics are “not completely mature yet,” according to Schill.Schill said he doesn’t know whether the right main gun for the future tank system will be 120mm, 130mm or 140mm, saying that will depend on issues such as stealth and mobility requirements, as well as what the gun bore would add in terms of penetration. KNDS, which is involved in the MGCS program, presented a gun that can swap its barrel to fire either 120mm or 140mm shells.

The French Leclerc tank probably won’t get a second upgrade beyond the current XLR version being rolled out, according to the general. He said the French-German agreement is for the next-generation system in 2040, making the Leclerc question a secondary issue.

It’ll be in France’s interest to piggyback on any capability additions made by the United Arab Emirates, another Leclerc user, between now and 2040 as a way to finance intermediate innovations, Schill said. The introduction of the MGCS won’t immediately mean the end of the Leclerc, which the general expects to be in service in the French Army until 2045.

The Space Force said in February it was considering launching a constellation of small navigation satellites to augment the 31 GPS satellites now in orbit. The premise of the effort, dubbed Resilient GPS, would be to provide an additional layer of capability through a fleet of more affordable and smaller spacecraft.

But the House Appropriations defense subcommittee isn’t sold on the idea that flying more GPS satellites will inherently boost resiliency, and its proposed fiscal 2025 defense spending bill raises questions about the Space Force’s plan.

“While proliferation may provide some advantages, it is not clear how these additional satellites increase the resilience against the primary jamming threat to GPS, compared to alternative concepts for position, navigation, and timing systems being pursued elsewhere in the Department of Defense,” lawmakers said in a report accompanying the bill, released June 12.

The Pentagon has become increasingly concerned about GPS signals — used to guide weapons and help troops navigate difficult terrain — being jammed or spoofed by adversaries. Russia has taken advantage of this vulnerability in Ukraine, using electronic warfare to jam signals on a regular basis.

The Air Force announced in April it would use authority from Congress to shift unused funds from elsewhere in the Space Force’s budget to begin development on Resilient GPS. Those authorities, known as quick-start, were approved in the Fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act and allow the Defense Department to reprogram up to $100 million in funding to start high-priority programs before they are approved as part of a formal budget cycle.

According to the subcommittee, the department has since notified Congress it expects the Resilient GPS program to cost $1 billion over the next five years. To date, the Space Force has repurposed $40 million in fiscal 2023 funding for the effort and, since it didn’t include the program in its FY25 budget, has asked lawmakers to realign another $77 million toward Resilient GPS in that year’s appropriation.

In its proposed bill, the subcommittee denied the service’s request to realign FY25 funding, questioning whether the quick-start process was the best pathway for this effort. Lawmakers note that the service could have requested funding for Resilient GPS as part of its budget submission rather than rely on Congress to approve multiple funding shifts to support the effort.

Further, the subcommittee notes that the program seems to focus on the satellites without addressing how it would alter ground systems and user equipment to improve resilience. The Space Force has said the goal is for the spacecraft to be interoperable with existing user devices.

To shed more light on the viability of the service’s plan, the subcommittee directs the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office to assess whether the effort is the department’s best option for boosting the resiliency of its positioning, navigation and timing capabilities.

Kyiv’s main military intelligence service shared satellite photos it said showed the aftermath of the attack. If confirmed, it would mark Ukraine’s first known successful strike on a twin-engine Su-57 stealth jet, lauded as Moscow’s most advanced fighter plane.

In one photo, black soot marks and small craters can be seen dotting a concrete strip around the parked aircraft. According to the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, the strike took place on Saturday at the Akhtubinsk base in southern Russia, some 589 kilometers (366 miles) from the front line.

The Ukrainian agency said the plane, which is capable of carrying stealth missiles across hundreds of kilometers (miles), was among “a countable few” of its type in Moscow’s arsenal. According to reports by Russian agencies, Moscow’s air force obtained “more than 10″ new Su-57s last year, and has placed an order for a total of 76 to be delivered by 2028.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence, Andriy Yusov, hours later said on Ukrainian TV that the attack may have damaged two Su-57 jets parked at the base, and also wounded Russian personnel. He did not immediately give any evidence to support the claim.

Ilya Yevlash, a spokesman for Ukraine’s air force, told Ukrainian media in April that Moscow was trying to keep its Su-57 fleet “at a safe distance” from Ukrainian firepower.

The strike comes after the United States and Germany recently authorized Ukraine to hit some targets on Russian soil with the long-range weapons they are supplying to Kyiv. Ukraine has already used U.S. weapons to strike inside Russia under newly approved guidance from President Joe Biden that allows American arms to be used for the limited purpose of defending Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

But the airstrip’s distance from Ukraine, as well as unofficial comments from Russia, point to the likely use of Ukrainian-made drones. Since Moscow’s full-scale invasion more than two years ago, Kyiv has ramped up domestic drone production and used the munitions to strike deep inside Russia. In January, drones hit a gas terminal near St. Petersburg that lies over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of the border.

A popular pro-Kremlin Telegram channel, thought to be run by a retired Russian army pilot, claimed that three Ukrainian drones struck the Akhtubinsk airstrip on Saturday and that flying shrapnel damaged the jet.

“It is now being determined whether it can be restored or not. If not, it would be the first combat loss of a Su-57 in history,” the Fighterbomber channel reported.

A military correspondent for Russia’s state-run RIA news agency, Aleksandr Kharchenko, in a Telegram post Sunday denounced Moscow’s failure to build hangars to protect its aircraft. But the post stopped short of directly acknowledging the strike.

Russia’s so-called “military bloggers” like Fighterbomber are often seen as sources of information on military losses in the absence of an official Kremlin comment. Russia’s Defense Ministry or senior political figures did not comment Sunday.

The ministry on Saturday claimed its forces downed three Ukrainian drones in the Astrakhan region, home to the Akhtubinsk airstrip. Igor Babushkin, the governor of Astrakhan, that same day reported that Ukraine attempted to strike an unspecified facility there, but claimed the attack was unsuccessful.

Russia’s Su-57 fleet has been largely absent from the skies over Ukraine, and has instead been used to fire long-range missiles across the border. The U.K. Ministry of Defence said in an intelligence briefing last year that Russia is likely trying to avoid “reputational damage, reduced export prospects, and the compromise of sensitive technology” that would come from losing any Su-57 jets in enemy territory.

Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces kept up drone attacks on Russia’s southern border regions, according to local Russian officials.

Three drones hit Belgorod province late on Saturday, damaging a power line and blowing out windows but causing no casualties, said Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov. Another five drones and a Ukrainian-made missile were brought down over the region on Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

According to an update by Pepel (Ashes), a channel run by Belgorod journalists now based outside Russia, Ukrainian drones on Sunday afternoon struck an ammunition depot outside the town of Rakitnoye, some 35 kilometres (22 miles) from Ukraine. Footage circulating on social media showed thick plumes of smoke rising into the sky. In one video, a woman’s voice is heard, saying “I wonder if soldiers lived there?”

Gladkov, the governor, did not directly comment on those claims, but confirmed that a blaze had broken out in a “non-residential building” near Rakitnoye. He said no one was hurt.

Across Ukraine’s front-line provinces, Russian shelling killed at least three civilians and wounded at least nine others on Saturday and overnight, according to reports by regional officials.

A man died and two women suffered wounds in the village of Khotimlya, east of Kharkiv, Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said. Shelling also damaged the local school, a council building, a shop and private homes, Syniehubov said.

Heavy battles continued in the area as Ukrainian troops try to beat back Russia’s invading forces after a weekslong push by Moscow that sparked fears for Kharkiv, located just 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Russian border, and a wave of civilian evacuations.

Russia’s coordinated new offensive has centered on the Kharkiv region, but seems to include testing Ukrainian defenses in Donetsk farther south, while also launching incursions in the northern Sumy and Chernihiv regions.

The easing of restrictions on the use of Western weapons will help Ukraine protect Kharkiv by targeting Russian capabilities across the border, according to Ukrainian and Western officials. It is unclear what other impact it may have on the direction of the war, in what is proving to be a critical period.

The move drew a furious response from Moscow, and warnings it could embroil NATO in a war with Russia. But Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, described it as “common sense.”

“What was happening up around Kharkiv ... was a Russian offensive where they were moving from one side of the border directly to the other side of the border, and it simply didn’t make sense not to allow the Ukrainians to fire across that border, to hit Russian guns and emplacements that were firing at (them),” Sullivan said Sunday in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

John Sherman will leave the government gig to become dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Sherman, who served for three years as the intelligence community’s CIO before moving to the Pentagon post in 2021, “has been a steadfast advisor and an innovative leader who has helped the Department adopt and utilize modern information technology to keep our country safe,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in the announcement. “His technical expertise has proven invaluable in tackling a variety of digital challenges. His focus on mission readiness has ensured that each of the services is equipped with both the capabilities and the digital workforce necessary for modern warfighting.”

Under Sherman, the Defense Department refocused its approach to communications technology, spectrum management, cybersecurity, and positioning, navigation and timing policy. He told Congress last year that the U.S. must “regenerate” its electronic warfare capabilities after years of neglect to ensure dominance on the battlefield.

“As we get ready for China, we better be able to fight and dominate” the electromagnetic spectrum, he told the House Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation Subcommittee at a March 2023 hearing on defense in the digital era.

“As we’ve seen on the Ukrainian battlefield — all the dynamics with [electromagnetic spectrum operations], of how the Russians are trying to use it, and the Ukrainians are using it — we cannot be cut off on this, to be able to make sure we can conduct combat operations,” Sherman said.

Sherman was also a strong backer of cybersecurity practices known as zero trust, which he said could have prevented leaks including the 2022 disclosure of the classified reports by a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, if they had been fully instituted at the time.

“I am grateful for Mr. Sherman’s loyal service to the Department and to our Nation,” Austin said in the statement. “Our national security is stronger today because of his efforts.”

Sherman, who has also held senior positions in the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, will start in his new role Aug. 1, the university said in a statement.

He’s a distinguished military graduate of Texas A&M with a bachelor’s degree in history. While at the university, he was a Ross volunteer, which performs honor guard duties, and served as commander of the Corps of Cadets. He also earned a Master of Public Administration from the University of Houston.

After graduating from Texas A&M, Sherman was an air defense officer in the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Division.

“I think the biggest takeaway is that our near-peer adversaries, and then elements like Hamas, have formidable EW capabilities,” Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the Army’s program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said during Wednesday’s virtual event. “It’s really about making sure that our systems, our soldiers and our commanders have that kind of freedom of maneuver within the EMS.”

The electromagnetic spectrum, or EMS, consists of the energy waves produced from radios, cellphones, radars and the like. The EMS environment has become highly contested, presenting a difficult battle space in which actors are vying for dominance.

Maintaining situational awareness is necessary for military commanders to communicate and guide weapons to their targets. EMS is becoming increasingly used by U.S. adversaries such as Russia in its war against Ukraine, the militant group Hamas in Gaza and the Yemen-based Houthi rebel group in its attack on ships in the Red Sea.

It comes down to a select few advanced capabilities facing off against “non-exquisite capabilities in mass,” Barker said. “And sometimes, you know, that mass can be quite overwhelming.”

“We’re realizing we have to build essentially an EW arsenal across the landscape to be able to go at these different types of threats,” he added.

At the same conference, Col. Josh Koslov, the head of the Air Force’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, said interoperability among low-cost weapon systems will help hold the line in electronic warfare.

“They have to be able to talk to each other,” he said. “And so if we fight a near-peer tonight, we’re going to fight with the capabilities we have today. And so how do we make the systems that we have today more interoperable and able to share information, and then the systems that we’re bringing online?”

Koslov added that “super close” alignment between the warfighter and acquisition “is incredibly important as we move forward, and then making sure that we’re developing the requirements that drive interoperability from the beginning.” This means a reduced focus on major weapon systems, and more of a focus on the data that those weapon systems use, he noted.

He pointed to the use of low-cost tools that “create strategic and operational impacts” in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, adding that the U.S. needs to develop a system capable of countering that approach.

Signing the agreement on the U.S. side was Doug Beck, head of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helps the Defense Department adopt commercial-style technology.

In line with that mission, the new memorandum of understanding commits the two countries to cooperate on adopting tech that has both commercial and military uses. The main areas of focus for this work will be on maritime security and counter-drone systems, according to a Defense Department statement.

Part of the agreement will include “joint challenges” for counter-drone tech launched from ships, while another portion focuses on making systems resilient to jamming and other electronic warfare capabilities. The challenges are a way to kick-start the two countries’ work, Beck said in an interview.

The dates for each challenge aren’t set, but Beck said the goal is to start them both in about a month. The U.S. and Singapore will agree on the specific goals and criteria, and then allow companies from either country to apply. From there, the U.S. and Singapore will decide what kind of contracting tool they want to use to buy the offerings.

“That’ll yield winners that will then go into each of our systems,” he said.

These challenges resemble one held earlier this year by the U.S., the U.K. and Australia as part of AUKUS, a defense pact focused on nuclear-powered submarines and other advanced technology. The AUKUS competition allows defense companies from all three countries to compete around a problem focused on electronic warfare.

Alongside Beck, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue, a security summit that draws officials across the Indo-Pacific. The event is hosted by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank.

One of the U.S. government’s top messages at the conference — as it has been during President Joe Biden’s term — has been linking America’s defense industry with other countries.

In the last several years there have been multiple agreements to do so. General Electric agreed last year to manufacture fighter jet engines in India for the country’s Air Force. Japan and the U.S. agreed to work together on the development of glide-phase interceptors, which are meant to counter hypersonic missiles. And under AUKUS, American and Australian defense companies are working closely together.

Such co-development has become a higher priority amid the war in Ukraine, which has highlighted issues in America’s own ability to surge production of key weapons as well as innovate against the latest challenges, including electronic warfare.

Beck said the first time he spoke with partners in Singapore was last fall, shortly after he took his current job. He cited this agreement, seven months later, as evidence of how fast the partnership could move.

“We said let’s make something happen,” Beck said.

Brady Hauboldt, SNC’s vice president of business development, told Defense News on May 29 that the first of five Boeing 747-8 aircraft that will become the Survivable Airborne Operations Center, or SAOC, will arrive at its Dayton, Ohio, facility this summer.

Over the next dozen years, the SAOC will gradually replace the Air Force’s aging E-4B Nightwatch, also known as the National Airborne Operations Center aircraft. If a nuclear war or other catastrophe were to occur that destroyed the military’s command-and-control centers on the ground, the president would direct forces through an airborne E-4B or SAOC — thus the “doomsday” term.

The Air Force has four E-4Bs, which have been flying since the 1970s, and they are near the end of their service lives. The Air Force announced in April it awarded SNC a $13 billion contract to build SAOC and replace the E-4B by July 2036.

The deal is the largest single contract SNC has received in its more than six-decade history as a mission systems integration and aircraft modification company, Hauboldt said. The firm hopes its work on SAOC will open opportunities to larger contracts and major programs.

SNC decided to aim for larger growth in recent years, he said, with the company ramping up its spending on digital engineering tools as well as new infrastructure and facilities. That included standing up an Aviation Innovation and Technology Center in Dayton, which comes with large hangars where the 747s will receive modifications to become SAOCs.

The company’s first new hangar there opened a year and a half ago. The second is expected to be done this summer, and three more hangars and other support facilities are to follow.

Developmental engineering on SAOC will largely take place at SNC’s facility near Denver, Colorado. Other offices are being set up in locations such as Dallas, Texas. This will allow the firm to take advantage of hiring pools in multiple locations across the country as the company adds about 1,000 workers for the program, Hauboldt said.

“All of that investment in the digital tools, the employees and the facilities for SNC have put us in a position to take on this kind of a project, like SAOC,” he added.

Antennas, computers and radiation shielding

SNC plans to buy five Boeing 747-8 planes from Korean Air to convert into flying operations centers, with the last scheduled for delivery in September 2025, according to a May report by Reuters. Hauboldt told Defense News these five aircraft are all the company needs to finish the engineering and manufacturing development requirements of SAOC, but said SNC will buy more planes if the Air Force wants to further expand its fleet.

Hauboldt said SNC inspected the planes, the oldest of which was delivered in 2015, and found Korean Air has kept them in excellent condition.

SNC is using a fully digital process to design SAOC, he said, and the Air Force will own those digital models. Hauboldt said the models, along with the open-systems architecture, will make it easier for the Air Force to upgrade the planes.

The structural modifications to turn the 747s into airborne command centers will include installing communications antennas throughout the aircraft, a galley for long-haul flights, the mission systems where the crew will carry out their jobs, and the wiring and infrastructure to support those systems, Hauboldt said.

But one of the most critical upgrades will involve hardening the plane to withstand radiation and electromagnetic pulses it might encounter from a nuclear blast. Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works will conduct this work as a subcontractor on the program, Hauboldt said, as well as performing other work on SAOC.

Skunk Works brings “a lot of expertise in integrating advanced capabilities on airframes — in this case, the radiation hardening,” Hauboldt said. “They have an experience base that SNC has less experience on, so we added them to the team.”

The planes will keep their General Electric-made GEnx-2B engines, he noted, and Rolls-Royce will provide the aircraft’s auxiliary power systems. Collins Aerospace, which Hauboldt called a leader in the defense industry on nuclear command, control and communications systems, will also help build SAOC.

In addition to being a fresher airframe than the half-century-old E-4Bs, Hauboldt said, the new SAOC will benefit from having modern, user-friendly computers and other technologies, and the easy modification that comes from having an open-architecture structure.

The Air Force was focused on keeping down the life-cycle costs to operate and sustain SAOC, Hauboldt said — particularly after the high maintenance cost of the E-4B. So SNC tailored its proposal to address those concerns by using open-systems architecture and offering the Air Force a “robust” data rights package — something the service has found difficult to obtain from contractors on other aircraft, such as the Lockheed-made F-35 fighter.

Hauboldt acknowledged that could mean another company could win the contract to sustain the program. But he said SNC is confident that it can do the job well enough and efficiently enough to keep the job.

Obtaining data rights for SAOC is “going to pay great dividends for the U.S. Air Force and the [Department of Defense] for decades,” Hauboldt said. “We recognized early on that the Air Force valued data rights — in other words, the ability to cost-effectively sustain and modify the aircraft. We were willing, as a company, to listen and offer them what they asked for.”

The aid package will include the Saab-made airborne surveillance and control aircraft, known as ASC-890, which can track ships, drones, aircraft and missiles.

According to a statement published by the Swedish government, the aircraft will strengthen Ukraine’s “capability to identify and engage targets at long range.”

The weapons bundle will also contain a number of Swedish-made, advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles, or RB-99-AMRAAM, adapted for ground-to-air engagements.

The Scandinavian country will send its complete stock of armored tracked personnel carriers, the PBV 302, alongside spare parts, ammunition, and maintenance equipment to support the regeneration of new Ukrainian brigades.

The Swedish vehicles, produced by the company now known as BAE Systems Hägglunds, were retired from service in 2014.

Additionally, Kyiv will receive an undisclosed number of 155mm artillery shells from Swedish stockpiles, “to combat Russian units in the depths of the battlefield,” according to the statement.

While this donation will lead to a temporary decline in Sweden’s armament, government officials have already committed to procuring more munitions as replacements. Similarly, defense officials in Stockholm intend to buy more GlobalEye surveillance aircraft from Saab to make up for the donation of the older ASC-890 type.

These Swedish pledge follows military aid commitments from Spain and Belgium this week in the areas of combat aircraft, tanks and air defense.

The service’s Program Executive Office Land Systems is eyeing its newly reorganized portfolios — including ground-based air defense, expeditionary radars and light armored vehicles — to find efficiencies and build upon existing technology to rapidly field new systems and expand the portfolio.

Here are three notable areas the Corps is focused on:

Radars

One example involves the expeditionary radars program, which previously housed only the Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar. The office’s chief, Stephen Bowdren, told Defense News the G/ATOR is an active radar that has proved itself in the field and is now pivotal to future aspects of warfare like expeditionary advanced base operations.

But the Corps is still seeking a passive radar to complement G/ATOR and help Marines sense the battlefield without giving away their location.

Bowdren said his expeditionary radars program office is starting with an existing Army passive radar prototype to form the basis of a MuDRaCE — or Multi-Domain Radar for a Contested Environment — family of systems, as well as a Medium-Range Air Defense Radar, or MARAUDER, to field “as soon as possible.”

Bowdren noted he hopes this new passive radar will be ready for operations within two years given the service is approach the effort with an existing prototype.

Countering drones

Bowdren said his ground-based air defense portfolio is a prime example of “running fast with scissors.”

“Within the next year, we will have operationally assessed [the Medium-Range Intercept Capability]. We will have completed [initial operational test and evaluation] on, I think, both [the light and regular versions of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System. We are looking to field both of those systems probably within the next 12 to 18 months, easily,” he noted.

He said this portfolio has been able to move rapidly because the government serves as the systems integrator, pulling together existing sensors, computers, effectors and more to create kinetic and non-kinetic anti-drone technology.

Bowdren said the program office started with the assumption that its tech-integration effort would be a wild success: If the technology came together and was ready for fielding on a short timeline, what work did the program office need to do to ensure the training, the tactics development and the sustainment strategy were also ready to go on a short timeline?

It would have been a wasted effort if the tech integration failed and the program had to restart with a different radar or a different missile, for example. Indeed, there’s some risk in doing all this work in parallel, he said, but with that risk comes the reward of being able to field critical capabilities on a short timeline.

PEO Land Systems is considering further expanding that ground-based air defense portfolio, even as the original counter-drone systems continue through final test and evaluation. It could become a broader counter-intrusion portfolio, with Bowdren saying he sees benefits to incorporating an existing but separate Ground-Based Operational Surveillance System into the portfolio.

“Is that something that we add to our GBAD portfolio so that when you deploy a solution for counter-air to a base, it’s not a whole other separate suite of systems and boxes and screens, but it’s built in and plugged into the already existing security system?” he said.

He added that the Corps also must consider how to counter unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned surface vessels. “So is there really a counter-UxS portfolio we should be looking at?”

Recon vehicles

The light armored vehicle portfolio — specifically, the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle — is in limbo, as the Marine Corps reconsiders how it wants to meet its reconnaissance mission and with what combination of manned and unmanned vehicles on the ground, on the water and in the air.

Bowdren said the recon community is still experimenting to help define that future suite of programs and equipment. The Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle, or ARV, will be at the center of that suite of systems, but the new vehicles could be supplemented by Ultra Light Tactical Vehicles, manned and unmanned surface craft, unmanned aerial systems, and more.

Bowdren said that study would be completed “soon.”

Even as those discussions and the related question of funding continue, Bowdren said his office is preparing to move as fast as it’s allowed with the available resources.

The program office is working with industry to develop ARV-30 prototypes that use the same 30mm cannon as that on the Amphibious Combat Vehicle. This would be the second ARV variant, following the command, control, communications and computer/uncrewed aerial systems (C4/UAS) variant that the Corps has tested since prototypes were delivered in December 2022.

Bowdren said his office is “committed” to pushing forward on the ARV family of vehicles even though the start date for procurement remains in flux.

The Navy’s acoustic recognition and interpretation center CIRA in Toulon is working with French startup Preligens on AI-powered analysis of underwater acoustic signals, the center’s head, Vincent Magnan, said in a presentation here Thursday. France expects to test the technology onboard its submarines by the end of the year, with operational deployment scheduled for 2025.

As France equips more and more vessels with increasingly powerful passive acoustic sensors, the amount of data collected for analysis is growing exponentially. The Navy is counting on AI to help its acoustics analysts, nicknamed “golden ears,” cut through the noise, both at the Toulon center and on board its submarines.

More sensors and greater detection ranges will result in “a massive flow of data,” Magnan said. “To be able to analyze all this data, and especially to be able to isolate from it the useful and decisive information for the conduct of our combat operations, we need to resort to technological innovations, including artificial intelligence.”

In addition to submarines, frigates and aircraft fitted with passive sensors, the near future will bring drones and underwater gliders that capture acoustic data, according to Magnan. The amount of such data gathered by CIRA has increased to around 10 terabytes in 2024 from 1 terabyte in 2020, and is expected to approach 100 terabytes or more by 2030.

Interest in “passive acoustic warfare” is growing because it allows surface vessels and submarines to detect underwater sounds during operations at sea and derive tactical elements in “all discretion,” without an adversary knowing about it, Magnan said. A particular propulsion pattern might allow the Navy to define a target’s speed, which can then in turn determine a tactical maneuver.

The Toulon center is using AI to filter out those acoustic signals of interest, after which humans can carry out high-value added analysis. The goal will be broadly similar at sea, with AI allowing human operators to focus on the useful signals.

Are torpedo-killing torpedoes ready for prime time?

“So we use technology to discard or filter the standard part of the signal, the almost useless part, and we rely on humans to exploit the useful part,” Magnan said.

Sifting through 12 days of acoustic data recorded in the waters off Toulon takes two “golden ears” more than 40 working days, Magnan said. With the AI demonstrator from Preligens, extracting useful signals from those same recordings can be done in 4 to 5 hours, with an additional five to six days of human analysis. “So you can already see that the gain is enormous”

Whereas in the 1990s and 2000s CIRA analyzed acoustic recordings of around 5 minutes targeted at a particular threat, the center now deals with data stretching over forty-day periods that requires “a great deal of human capacity” to process, according to the head of the center.

In the early 2000s, a sonar operator could see around 20 kilometers and would monitor 10 simultaneous acoustic contacts, by 2020 that had increased to more than 200 kilometers and a hundred tracks, Magnan said. France’s third-generation ballistic missile submarines will have even greater sensor capabilities, creating a real need to ease the detection task, the commander said.

France currently operates four Le Triomphant-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines and is in the process of replacing its Rubis-class nuclear-powered attack submarines with six Suffren-class vessels.

The AI model has shown “very encouraging results,” able to distinguish hobbyist boats from commercial vessels, and identify propeller speed, propulsion systems and even the number of propeller blades, according to Magnan. A future step will be combining the AI models applied to acoustics with other sources of information, including satellite, radar, visual and electromagnetic.

The team working on acoustics detection has created a tool to automatically detect and identify various acoustic sources and sound emissions that will be demonstrated at the Viva Technology show in Paris next week, said Julian Le Deunf, an expert at the Armed Forces Ministry’s newly created agency for AI in defense.

“The promising results over these last few months also encourage us to test all these capabilities in real-life conditions, so to take the jump onboard the submarine and test these models directly at sea,” Le Deunf said. “The goal for the end of the year is really to succeed in plugging the model directly behind an audio stream, behind a sensor.”

The AI project has been running at CIRA since 2021, after Magnan met with Preligens executives in October of that year. French military intelligence was already using the company’s AI products to analyze satellite imagery, and Magnan said his discussions with Preligens led to the idea that the model could be replicated to make sense of underwater signals.

Eventually, the AI algorithms will be able to identify ambient noises such as a pump starting up or a wrench falling in a hold, according to Magnan.

“The idea in the long run is obviously to find models that are effective and efficient over the whole acoustic spectrum of the sources we encounter at sea,” he said.

The Navy awarded the company a $54 million contract in September to design and build the decoy, which the company says will be one of the most advanced radio frequency countermeasures in the world.

The system will consist of a towed unit connected by fiber-optic cable to electronic warfare equipment onboard the aircraft, BAE Systems said in a news release. The decoy is meant to lure missiles away from the aircraft and disrupt the enemy radars that target American jets.

The Navy in 2019 awarded both BAE Systems and Raytheon contracts to develop and demonstrate a decoy system. However, the service ultimately disqualified Raytheon from competing for the manufacturing contract, citing Raytheon’s hiring of a “retired Navy technical expert [that] gave rise to the appearance of impropriety,” according to documents from the United States Court of Federal Claims.

“Raytheon contends that the agency’s decision to exclude the firm from the competition because of an actual or apparent unfair competitive advantage resulting from the employment of a former government employee was unreasonable, and so delayed that it deprived Raytheon of any opportunity to mitigate the issue,” according to the Government Accountability Office decision.

GAO denied the protest in August, and the Navy awarded BAE Systems a contract in September. Raytheon moved its claim to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which in March ruled against Raytheon.

BAE Systems announced the contract May 15, with Don Davidson, director of the Advanced Compact Electronic Warfare Solutions product line at BAE Systems, saying the “Dual Band Decoy delivers broad capability that can be installed on a variety of aircraft and is upgradeable to address future threats.”

The new system will build on the AN/ALE-55 Fiber-Optic Towed Decoy, which was fielded around 2010. BAE Systems has since produced more than 3,000 ALE-55 decoys for customers around the world. The new decoy uses BAE’s custom integrated circuits that enable greater performance with reduced size, weight and power, the company stated.

The Navy has moved to make its Super Hornet fleet more survivable as enemy sensors and weapons grow more advanced. The Navy and Boeing developed a Block III design that features a reduced radar signature. Boeing is delivering new Block III jets and is also upgrading some Block II jets to the Block III configuration during their life-extension modernization periods.

BAE’s statement notes the decoy will be initially fielded on the Navy’s fleet of F/A-18E-F Super Hornets. The Navy has more than 500 of these planes in the inventory, but BAE Systems did not provide additional information on how many decoys this contract covers, nor did it provide information on the value of the contract or delivery timelines.

In the 21st century, the era of technology has ushered in a new way of fighting with drones and long-range missiles and hypersonics. In the near future, it may not be American soldiers leading from the front line but an array of autonomous and technologically advanced weapons defending us.

Furthermore, this new era of technology and warfare has decreased the cost associated with developing and deploying modernized airborne threats. Advanced radar capabilities are, therefore, needed to detect, identify, and engage both small and large, more lethal threats. Investing in these advanced radar capabilities is vital to our national security efforts – and the sooner the better.

As global warfare evolves to a more technologically advanced battlefield, the U.S. must design and deploy innovative solutions to bolster its defensive capabilities. The complexity and frequency of airborne threats underscore the necessity of innovative defense.

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the recent Iranian attack on Israel highlight the urgency. Investing in and developing advanced radars allows the U.S. to bolster its defense against airborne threats. Our ability to detect, identify and engage threats is paramount. As long as an airborne threat – from a hypersonic missile to a suspicious spy balloon – can be detected, it can be intercepted.

Increasing radar coverage along borders and across the homeland is critical. The radar space can be overcrowded, and equipment expensive. Creating more innovative and cost-effective radar solutions is the best way to detect, identify and track the multitude of airborne objects proliferating our skies like the 2023 Chinese balloon incident, which captured the attention of the nation.

What we are seeing on the front pages of the news is the new reality. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have been able to see new tactics, including drone swarms that overwhelm sensors and defenses to cause grave harm with smaller tactical devices. The ability to track these faster and more lethal airborne objects is incredibly challenging and takes sophisticated systems engineering.

Our adversaries can produce these more lethal projectiles more rapidly and cost-effectively and continue to bombard legacy defense systems and deplete our stockpiles of exquisite weapons and interceptors.

To counter this new threat reality, we must develop and deploy more advanced sensors in a rapid and more cost-effective manner. Developing and updating radars allows the U.S. military and our allies to better detect and, ultimately, defend against new threats.

Legacy radars of the kind many are familiar when driving by a local airport were designed over 50 years ago and are ill-equipped to detect threats. Today, we can update radars using a modernized design that utilizes hundreds of tiny antennas to deliver a more powerful picture of objects in the sky. These updated radars can detect multiple threats from multiple directions at one time by electronically scanning the entire sky.

The data detected from these radars would then be transferred and integrated into the systems that intercept these aerial threats. Deploying hundreds of state-of-the-art radars providing dense and low-altitude coverage with intercept-quality accuracies against new and emerging threats will enhance national security.

This approach could not come at a more opportune time. Our adversaries are watching the same news reports, increasing production and developing new tactics and ways to inflict more harm with faster, more lethal, more autonomous, more jamming-proof and harder-to-detect drones. The U.S. military is a highly capable force of protecting Americans from bad actors. It’ time we ensure our military and our allies have the tools to better defend and protect us.

The arena of warfare will continue to be more complex as technology continues to evolve and our national defense strategies and technology must be able to stay one step ahead. The U.S. has proven to be an incubator for cutting-edge research and development over our history. By embracing innovation and adaptability, the U.S. can mitigate the risk posed by airborne threats, guard our national security interests and promote peace in a hostile and complex global landscape.

Dmitry Turbiner is the Founder and CEO of General Radar whose mission is to build the World’s first 100% commercial AESA radar with flagship DoD performance. General Radar has secured over $35M in venture capital investment and is executing on several DoD and commercial contracts. Prior to General Radar, Dmitry was an RF and Antenna Engineer at NASA/JPL where he served as the Cognizant Engineer for the COSMIC-2/FORMOSAT-7 Mission’s Radio Occultation Antenna Array. Twelve of Dmitry’s phased array antennas are orbiting on a constellation of six heavy NASA satellites.

Washington and other governments have committed billions of dollars of security aid to Ukraine, including long-range missiles, armored vehicles and secure communication devices. The jamming and spoofing that blankets fighting in Eastern Europe offers a trial against Russian tools rarely seen in action.

Michael Monteleone, the director of the Army’s Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space Cross-Functional Team, on May 5 told reporters the conflict is a “huge learning experience for us.”

“The global community has shared a lot of our technology, our weapons systems, our command-and-control systems and others, with the Ukrainians,” he said on the sidelines of the GEOINT conference in Florida. “You’re seeing that being used in real time, and it is a source of feedback.”

Monteleone’s cross-functional team, expected to shift its focus to so-called all-domain sensing in the coming months, is tasked with improving soldier access to critical sources of situational awareness, including where they are, where they are headed and when they will arrive.

Digital harassment can render such information useless.

Ukraine comms struggles spur European hunger for L3Harris radios

“Even early in the war, we learned what happened when GPS just didn’t exist, and how the Ukrainian soldiers dealt with that, and how the Russian soldiers dealt with that,” Monteleone said.

The Defense Department’s spending is increasingly motivated by potential battles with Russia in Europe or China in the Indo-Pacific. Russian electronic warfare has hamstrung Excalibur precision artillery as well as an undisclosed ground-launched version of an air-to-ground armament, according to experts.

The lessons gleaned from Ukraine’s fight are making “everybody think about the problem space,” Monteleone said, “including where our investments truly need to be.”

The Army in recent years earmarked millions of dollars for sophisticated electronic warfare equipment as well as jam-resistant navigation gear.

The service inked a $318 million deal with BAE Systems for M-code GPS cards and tapped TRX Systems to produce second-generation Dismounted Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Systems, which soldiers can carry in the field. That deal was worth $402 million.

The defense tech company on May 6 made public its Pulsar products, which it said are capable of countering drones, geolocating forces and neutering improvised explosive devices. The equipment comes in variants for fixed use, mounting aboard ground vehicles, and integration on aircraft. A version that can be slung onto troops’ backs is also being eyed.

Electronic warfare represents a battle over the electromagnetic spectrum, which militaries rely on to communicate, discern friend from foe and guide munitions to targets. Pentagon investment in sophisticated EW atrophied in the years following the Cold War, but fighting in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East reignited interest.

“There’s a realization that the United States military is not where it needs to be, in terms of operating in this kind of high-EW threat environment, and then having the types of agile capabilities to defend our forces and fight back offensively,” Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told reporters at a briefing.

“We’re not going to go talk about ideas that we have, share glossy renderings of what they might look like in the world, and then go seek to build them and deliver them years later,” he added. “We tend to do the opposite.”

RTX, L3Harris to update electronic warfare kit on Navy’s Super Hornets

The Pulsar line has been in development since 2020 and was funded internally. It is software-defined, meaning updates can be dished out quickly and constraints imposed by hardware are lessened, and leans on advanced computing to retool for novel threats.

A war with Russia in Europe or China in the Indo-Pacific, for example, might introduce previously unseen technologies and electronic signatures. The time it takes to counter them could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

“Each system can process the data where it is, and then many systems that are networked together can learn from each other, just using small metadata,” said Sam El-Akkad, the general manager of radio frequency and EW systems at Anduril. “If one system sees something new, all the other systems are trained to see that new thing and recognize it in the future.”

While Anduril declined to specify where Pulsar has been used, deployment was described as happening across “multiple continents.”

The company in 2022 mentioned the EW equipment after winning a nearly $1 billion counter-unmanned aerial systems contract from U.S. Special Operations Command. A memo obtained by Defense News that same year described it helping to “mitigate incoming threats.”

“Pulsar is not just a figment of our imagination,” El-Akkad said. “At a high level, we’re in production of these systems, so we’re pumping them out and they are being used.”

The 388th Electronic Warfare Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, will begin operations Thursday, one week after the 563rd EWS launched across the country at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.

Together, they aim to bolster the military’s ability to disrupt the networked weapons, navigation tools and communications systems that form the backbone of modern warfare.

US Air Force activates units dedicated to electronic warfare

“Operational-level tools that we use as a force to plan, integrate, synchronize and collaborate [on] electronic warfare effects are basically nonexistent,” Col. Josh Koslov, head of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing at Eglin, told reporters Wednesday. “We’re building that capability.”

Electronic warfare allows troops to manipulate the spectrum of radio waves to block forces from talking, distract precision-guided munitions from their targets and install malicious software on enemy systems, among other offensive and defensive options.

The service is also mulling fresh tactics that would allow its combat missions to succeed even if airmen can’t communicate, if navigation systems go down, or if command centers are cut off from forces in the field.

Rather than supporting a particular asset, like the Compass Call electronic-attack fleet, the squadrons are the Air Force’s first units solely dedicated to software for electronic warfare at large. They’ll also help manage the “mountains of data” the Air Force amasses on its adversaries, to better understand the enemy and create new tools to counter them faster, Koslov said.

“Externally, it’s about providing tools by which to plan, synchronize, collaborate,” Koslov said. “Internally, it’s about speed.”

The 563rd EWS, which previously trained electronic warfare and combat system officers before it was deactivated in 2010, will focus on responding to operational units’ requests for new EW software, based on what they encounter in the field. Airmen will update the apps as needed to keep pace with evolving threats.

One program now in development will track the process of receiving commanders’ requests for new EW tools, building them and deploying them through the Air Force’s Pacific-focused 613th Air Operations Center in Hawaii, Koslov said.

Once that’s complete, the 563rd EWS will look at ways to speed up new software for the Air Force’s most advanced assets, like the F-35 Lightning II fighter, Koslov added.

At Eglin, the 388th EWS plans to study the digital capabilities of adversaries like China to determine where the Air Force could worm its way in to disable them. Those discussions will shape how the service codes and wields its own EW tools, and how airmen train to use them, an Air Force spokesperson said.

For instance, electronic warfare could lead air defenses to shoot away from an incoming U.S. aircraft, or stop a signal jammer from blocking an American attack.

“We’re going to ensure that we are using the best techniques, tactics and procedures in order to attack ‘red’ — our adversaries — to achieve blue objectives and support that joint force,” said Lt. Col. Tim West, the squadron’s incoming commander.

Multiple intelligence-focused teams will be nested within the 388th EWS, West said, including a group who will pore over Chinese, Russian and other electromagnetic offenses and defenses to determine what poses the greatest threat to U.S. and allied forces.

The two new squadrons are staffed by a combination of new trainees and those who have served in other EW units. Koslov expects the 563rd and 388th will grow to 150 to 200 airmen over the next few years.

Another existing squadron, the 39th EWS at Eglin, will pivot from developing electronic warfare tools to instead become stewards and curators of data collected on the capabilities of foreign forces.

The new units arrive in the midst of the Air Force’s yearslong push to revamp its electronic warfare enterprise with a more holistic view of those battlefield needs and a warfighting mindset. Koslov said the service has opened six new EW units in the past year and plans to launch at least four more.

Last October, the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing launched two other detachments at Robins AFB, Georgia, that will identify weak points in U.S. networks and move to protect them. Their parent organization, the 950th Spectrum Warfare Group, is designed to assess how effectively various aircraft can wage and endure electronic attacks, and improve jamming and spoofing at military exercises.

Koslov said he aims to bring at least 400 people to Robins as part of that effort.

Despite a staff shortage and other growing pains of revitalizing the Air Force’s once-robust EW enterprise, Koslov said airmen’s recent success in training exercises show they’re on the “glide path towards ultimate success.”

“We’re working towards getting better,” he said.

The service plans to retire roughly 70 aircraft — its entire ISR fleet — as it brings on the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, or HADES, that will be able to rapidly deploy and provide deep-sensing capabilities.

For the first time, the Army is using a large-cabin business jet — the Bombardier Global 6500 — to serve as the airframe for the spy plane. The service awarded Bombardier a contract in December for one aircraft, with an option to buy two more over a three-year period.

Competitors expect the Army to choose the team that will integrate sensors onto the business jet around late June or early July. An L3Harris Technologies, MAG Aerospace and Leidos team is competing against Sierra Nevada Corp. All four companies are involved in ISR fixed-wing prototype efforts with the Army.

What are the Army’s choices?

The Army has spent more than five years assessing ISR fixed-wing prototypes using high-speed jets to inform the HADES program. It began with the deployment of Artemis — or Airborne Reconnaissance and Target Exploitation Multi-mission System — which has flown in the European theater near the Ukrainian border.

The Army in 2019 awarded a contract to HII, and the company subsequently awarded a contract to Leidos to build Artemis using a Bombardier Challenger 650 jet.

Then the service deployed Ares — or Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System — to the Pacific region in April 2022. The Army awarded a contract to Alion Science and Technology, which is now owned by HII. Alion awarded a subcontract to L3Harris in November 2020 to build and fly the aircraft. Ares is based on a Bombardier Global Express 6500 jet.

Combined, Artemis and Ares have flown more than 1,000 sorties, according to Andrew Evans, who leads the Army’s ISR Task Force. They fly roughly 10-hour missions and average 20 sorties a month, he added.

The Army is also preparing to take on four more prototypes that will inform the requirements for the HADES program. The service chose a pair of companies to deliver two jets each with spy technologies to advance long-range targeting plans.

MAG Aerospace and L3Harris will outfit a Global 6500 with ISR sensors for the Army’s radar-focused Athena-R effort.

And Sierra Nevada is providing its RAPCON-X, based on a converted Bombardier business jet, for the service’s singals intelligence-focused Athena-S project.

The president of L3Harris’ ISR division, Jason Lambert, told Defense News at the AAAA conference that the team won its contract in March 2023, began integration in September 2023 when it received the aircraft and held its first flight in February. Since then the aircraft has flown 40 performance handling and quality flights, as well as collected more than 600 data points with a 100% success rate, Lambert said.

“The pilots came back and said it flies just like a Global 6500, despite the fact that we [have] these different outer-mold line changes on it,” he noted. This includes adding a 29-foot-long pod to the bottom of the plane.

The service will receive the two aircraft in the third quarter of 2024 — one in July and another in September, Lambert said. For L3Harris’ HADES submission, the aircraft will be 90% common with Athena-R, he added.

The company expects the service to award a contract for the second HADES prototype about six months after the first. The contract for the third — a production-representative prototype — will follow with a longer time gap in between so the Army can collect data from deployments involving the first HADES prototypes.

Why now?

The Army recognized it would need new piloted, fixed-wing ISR assets to carry out its missions in complex environments — “something that flies much farther, much faster and much higher,” Andrew Evans, the Army’s ISR Task Force director, said.

Using 70 “very capable” Beechcraft King Air and De Havilland Canada Dash-8 aircraft, the Army, “has done some enormous and powerful work in support of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan” Evans said during the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference this month. But the existing fleet won’t be able to fulfill long-range missions off the coast of China — which the U.S. government considers its top threat — “or really almost any other place in the world if you’re talking about extended geographic ranges with limited basing and access,” Evans added.

“So HADES provides our solution to that, but we have to do it affordably,” Evans noted.

Once the Army picks a team to integrate sensors onto the jet, the process will take 18 months before the aircraft can deploy for a user assessment, the Army estimated. That assessment moves the aircraft from a controlled test environment in the United States to operational environments “to really stress test your systems and figure out what’s working and what’s not,” Evans said.

The Army will deploy HADES for a limited period of time and then start building more aircraft as the early prototype remains deployed, he added.

The service plans to field 14 HADES aircraft by 2035, according to a slide Maj. Gen. Wally Rugen, the director of Army aviation, displayed during a speech at the AAAA conference.

While industry officials said they anticipate the Army will continue to award the same team subsequent contracts to build all of the HADES aircraft, Evans noted that “the guidance to our acquisition teammates was to ensure that we give ourselves as much flexibility as possible in the process.”

What has the service learned?

The Army’s strategy to overhaul its fixed-wing ISR fleet is a unique approach, Evans said, because the service asked industry to provide flight-ready prototypes, rather than select a team to build a system according to specifications. This was meant to help the Army quickly learn while it fills a capability gap.

Indeed, these prototypes are helping the service understand how sensors can keep up with a jet flying higher and at faster speeds, Dennis Teefy, the Army’s project manager for sensors and aerial intelligence within Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, said at the AAAA event.

The Army is currently working through how it refines processing, exploitation and dissemination of an enormous amount of data coming from the platform’s sensors, he added.

“How do we deal with all that volume of data? How do we transport that data across the comms network down to where it needs to go?” Teefy said, noting there are opportunities for industry to continue work on these areas and help the Army figure out how best to move data across the battlefield.

The prototypes already flying have also taught the Army a great deal about adapting sensor needs using a modular, open-system architecture, according to the service’s program manager for fixed-wing aircraft, Col. Joseph Minor.

“It’s different in every [environment] that we operate in, so to be able to change sensors quickly, to be able to adapt, especially on a globally deployable platform, much lower numbers is critical,” Minor said at the AAAA event. “When you are talking about a much smaller number of aircraft that are globally deployed, you’ve got to be able to make those changes on the fly.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. has used the QinetiQ explosive ordnance disposal robot for years and the U.S. Army is developing robotic combat vehicles as part of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program. Estonia, Germany, Israel, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey, and the UAE are all building UGVs too.

Like unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, UGV systems range broadly in size and mission from MacroUSA’s Bettle N-UGV weighing only 1 kg to the 30-ton RCV-Heavy with a 50mm AI-assisted cannon. The missions vary equally widely: UGVs can be used for reconnaissance, logistics, medical evacuation, explosive ordnance disposal, anti-tank warfare, anti-access / area-denial, and others.

The broad range of UGVs means a one-size-fits-all defense is unlikely to be successful, but a few clear options exist.

— Jamming: Like UAVs, UGVs typically rely on external signals to provide command and control for operations. Commercial UGVs may run on the same frequencies as commercial UAVs (e.g. 2.4 GHz), so the same electronic warfare assets used against commercial UAVs may work against commercial UGVs. But commercial and military UGVs are likely to favor lower frequency bands (below 1 GHz) which better penetrate obstacles.

This is because UGV operations are likely to encounter significantly more obstacles that inhibit signal propagation compared to a UAV flying in the empty air. During a 2020 wargame conducted by RAND, the requirement to maintain unobstructed, unjammable line-of-sight communication to remotely operated UGVs “imposed constraints on Blue forces, slowing the pace and complicating the management of Blue’s advance. Red’s effective use of jamming substantially limited Blue’s ability to use those vehicles.” (Emphasis added)

— Anti-Vehicle Weapons: UGVs often have limited to no armor, making them vulnerable to light anti-vehicle weapons and likely small arms. For example, Ukraine’s Ratel S consists of an anti-tank landmine strapped atop a small remotely controlled vehicle. Rules of engagement for UGVs can also be much more permissive because engaging UGVs poses minimal risk to human life.

The primary concern is detonating any onboard explosives that could harm nearby people. Defenders will also need to consider the relative costs of defensive munitions against the defeated system. Using a $78,000 Javelin missile against a modified commercial UGV might not be sustainable over time, but would make sense against a large, expensive system like Russia’s Uran-9.

— Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Strikes: Defenders could use bomb-dropping or kamikaze UAVs to destroy UGVs, as Ukraine has done on occasion. UAVs offer the advantage of being relatively cheap and could be useful to find UGVs too. As UGVs are typically smaller than equivalent manned vehicles, they are also often harder to detect.

However, a UAV could autonomously search an area, perhaps using sensors equipped with machine vision to detect and recognize UGV threats. When Russia sent a platoon of five or six UGVs equipped with 33-inch AGS-17 grenade launchers against Ukrainian positions in March 2024, Ukrainian UAVs destroyed at least two of them.

— Physical Barriers: UGVs are confined to the ground, so ground-based barriers restricting vehicle access are useful to defend against UGVs. Anti-tank concrete barriers (“dragon’s teeth”), bollards, fences, and anti-ram gates all could be useful. However, the type and spacing between barriers need to be aligned with the UGV threat, because small UGVs could slip between widely spaced barriers.

Of course, having options is not enough; defenders need to determine which works best, and which are most appropriate for their context. In the short-term, jamming seems a highly effective approach, because electronic warfare equipment used to defeat UAVs might be readily applied to UGVs. But as unmanned systems become more autonomous, jamming will be less effective and defenses will need to emphasize other approaches.

The limited armoring of UGVs suggest that practice and training with using light anti-vehicle weapons and small arms could be quite valuable. Physical barriers to defend fix sites seem sensible too, though may require some slight rearrangement to ensure they can protect against smaller vehicles. Defenders should also model, simulate, war game, and conduct live fire exercises to determine which approaches seem most effective, and what trade-offs exist.

Zachary Kallenborn is the lead researcher at Looking Glass USA, a UAS and counter-UAS consulting and investment firm. He is also affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Schar School of Policy and Government, the National Institute for Deterrence Studies, and the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. His extensive research, writing, and analysis on drone warfare, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and existential risk has received global news coverage and influenced a broad range of state, federal, and global security policies and strategies.

For 2022, analysts estimated global automotive lidar revenues at $332 million per year, a number only expected to grow as the technology becomes more widespread and sophisticated. However, the rapid growth of lidar in connected systems and the predominant position Chinese companies have in the marketplace, coupled with the precise data the technology collects, expose the threat posed by untrusted lidar systems. The systems could easily be exploited by malign actors to conduct any manner of malicious actions, including clandestinely mapping U.S. critical infrastructure or conducting cyberattacks that disrupt operations.

American and European companies previously comprised the majority of the global market, but Chinese technology firms like Hesai, RoboSense, Seyond, and Livox (a division of the Chinese drone maker DJI) have rapidly expanded into international markets, including the United States. Hesai has grabbed over 47% of the global market share, benefitting from Chinese domestic industrial policies, including state subsidies and procurement preference. An analysis of filings from publicly traded lidar companies shows that Hesai and RoboSense gained approximately 50% of the North American market share in just a few short years.

While the presence of Chinese companies in lidar competition can drive innovation and competitive pricing, we must be clear-eyed about the threats posed by companies affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party and its strategy of military-civil fusion. Under the military-civil fusion, the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, obfuscates the line between private companies and the government in order to direct technological research and development that would benefit the state both commercially and militarily.

Further, Chinese companies are subject to national security laws that require People’s Republic of China businesses to pass data to Chinese intelligence agencies when asked, even if their operations are overseas. These laws create the distinct possibility that Chinese technology can serve as an access point for CCP-directed intelligence collection and cybersecurity exploitation.

In a form sent to the SEC, Hesai directly admitted the “PRC government has significant authority in regulating our operations and may influence or intervene in our operations at any time.”

U.S. national security leaders have expressed serious concerns about the potential threat posed by Chinese malware installed in critical infrastructure, near military bases and even on American roads. Similar concerns about Chinese-connected systems and lidar have also been corroborated by our close allies. The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service published a report highlighting the threats of Chinese technologies, including lidar, to Estonian national security. Specifically, the report warns the agency is aware of an effort to develop Chinese-manufactured lidar intended to scan the environment and exfiltrate that data back to China.

In addition to the direct cybersecurity threat Chinese lidar systems pose to the United States, they also risk oversaturating the market. Overdependence on foreign technology allows an adversary to disrupt the United States’ economy and security with the implementation of an export control, and limits the development of viable alternatives.

In 2022, the PRC’s Ministry of Commerce added lidar to its proposed “Catalog of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export” because the country considers lidar a “strategic emerging industry.” In a crisis, the CCP could threaten to transition that list from proposed to enacted — and seriously disrupt the U.S. autonomous vehicle, agricultural and industrial sectors.

The U.S. government has begun to pay attention to these security concerns and take action. In November 2023, the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party encouraged the secretaries of commerce, defense, and the Treasury to investigate PRC lidar firms for ties to the People’s Liberation Army. Two months later, the Department of Defense concluded that Hesai held close ties to the Chinese military and consequently placed Hesai on its so-called 1260H list of Chinese military-linked companies. Hesai’s designation was notable not only because it is the first lidar manufacturer added to the list but also because it is the first publicly traded company on the U.S. stock exchange to be added.

Hesai has since objected to its designation by the DOD as a Chinese military-linked company, claiming it does “not sell our products to any military in any country, nor do we have ties of any kind to any military in any country.”

However, contrary to their claims, Hesai’s lidar systems have appeared on Chinese military vehicles, highlighting the dual-use nature of lidar technology and underscoring the true extent of Hesai’s role in the People’s Liberation Army’s defense industry. The DOD even defended Hesai’s addition to the 1260H list after Hesai threatened to sue.

Hesai’s designation on the Section 1260H list should be a wake-up call about the growing threat posed by untrusted sensing technology companies from countries of concern. Shortly after Hesai’s designation, numerous lobbying firms terminated business with Hesai after reports that congressional offices were considering banning firms that represent 1260H-listed companies.

On March 1, the Department of Commerce issued a proposed rule to identify information and communications technology and services used in autonomous vehicles deserving of regulation, specifically citing lidar. This is an important step toward scrutinizing the use of untrusted lidar in commercial applications. However, more must be done to safeguard U.S. data and prevent dependence on geopolitical adversaries for a critical, emerging technology.

First, Congress should continue its scrutiny of the threat posed by untrusted lidar companies. It is imperative that American lawmakers and the public be aware of how this technology is being employed across the nation’s cities, infrastructure and homes — and what vulnerabilities it creates for malign actors to exploit. Based on their findings, officials should consider placing additional restrictions or regulations on untrusted sensor technology companies.

Second, the Department of Commerce should use its authorities derived from the final rule on “Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain; Connected Software Applications” to inform an assessment of regulatory action needed to prevent Chinese lidar companies from posing a risk to U.S. cybersecurity interests.

At a minimum, the departments of the Treasury and Commerce should consider using their authorities to place companies found to have ties to the People’s Liberation Army on the sanctions list and entity list, respectively.

Third, the United States needs to invest in expanding its own trusted lidar-industrial base, drawing from domestic capacity and that of our allies and partners, to offer alternatives to subsidized Chinese lidar companies.

U.S. government investments in emerging sensing technologies, like lidar, through a CHIPS and Science Act-like program will likely be needed to strengthen the competitiveness of American industry.

If the U.S. government does not scrutinize lidar and other emerging technologies produced by companies from countries of concern, we run the risk of our automated future being dependent on untrusted systems that jeopardize our national security and undermine global competitiveness.

Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. He is also a senior adviser to the chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. He previously served as policy director of the Senate Armed Services Committee under Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and as director of operations (J3) at U.S. Pacific Command.

Zelensky said in a posting on X that Biden also assured him that a coming package of aid would also include long-range and artillery capabilities.

Ukraine is awaiting U.S. Senate approval after the House this weekend approved the $95 billion package that also includes aid for other allies. It comes after months of delay as some Republican lawmakers opposed further funding for Ukraine and threatened to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., if he allowed a vote to take place.

Kyiv badly needs new firepower as Moscow has stepped up its attacks against an outgunned Ukraine. The Senate is expected to vote on the package this week, and Biden has promised to quickly sign it into law.

Zelenskyy said he and Biden also discussed “Russia’s air terror using thousands of missiles, drones and bombs” including a strike on the Kharkiv TV tower just minutes before they spoke.

“Russia clearly signals its intention to make the city uninhabitable,” Zelenskky said

Russia has exploited air defense shortages in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, to pummel the region’s energy infrastructure and harm its 1.3 million residents. Some officials and analysts warn it could be a concerted effort by Moscow to shape conditions for a summer offensive to seize the city.

The White House in a statement confirmed that Biden told Zelenskyy “that his administration will quickly provide significant new security assistance packages to meet Ukraine’s urgent battlefield and air defense needs as soon as the Senate passes the national security supplemental and he signs it into law.”

“President Biden also underscored that the U.S. economic assistance will help maintain financial stability, build back critical infrastructure following Russian attacks, and support reform as Ukraine moves forward on the path of Euro-Atlantic integration,” according to the White House.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan delegation of U.S. Congress members on Monday met with Zelenskyy in Kyiv. The delegation included Reps. Tom Kean Jr., R-N.J., Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, Bill Keating, D-Mass., and Madeleine Deane, D-Pa.

Kean told reporters “we know that the needs of Ukraine are urgent” and U.S. aid is “crucial to stem the tide of Russia’s assaults.”

Kean said Biden should use the authority in the bill to quickly deliver to Ukraine the weapons that it has requested, including the longer-range Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS.

Zelenskyy said that he discussed with the U.S. lawmakers Ukraine’s need for artillery shells, long-range missiles, electronic warfare equipment, unmanned aerial vehicles, combat aviation and support in developing the Ukrainian defense industry.

They also discussed Ukraine’s bid to eventually join NATO, U.S. participation in an international conference in Switzerland in June aimed at charting a path toward peace in Ukraine, and other issues.

Pillar 2 of the agreement focuses on advanced tech the nations can develop and field together. There are eight working groups focused on cyber, quantum, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, hypersonics, undersea warfare, information sharing, and innovation, each with a list of ideas to quickly test and push to operators.

Leaders told Defense News how this process is playing out in the undersea warfare working group and how they aim to bring new capabilities to the three navies as soon as this year.

Dan Packer, the AUKUS director for the Commander of Naval Submarine Forces who also serves as the U.S. lead for the undersea warfare working group, said April 4 that the group has four lines of effort: a torpedo tube launch and recover capability for a small unmanned underwater vehicle; subsea and seabed warfare capabilities; artificial intelligence; and torpedoes and platform defense.

On the small UUV effort, the U.S. Navy on its own in 2023 conducted successful demonstrations: one called Yellow Moray on the West Coast using HII’s Remus UUV; and another called Rat Trap on the East Coast using an L3Harris-made UUV.

L3Harris’ Integrated Mission Systems president Jon Rambeau told Defense News in March that his team had started with experiments in an office using a hula hoop with flashlights attached, to understand how sensors perceive light and sound. They moved from the office to a lab and eventually into the ocean, with a rig tethered to a barge that allowed the company’s Iver autonomous underwater vehicle to, by trial and error, learn to find its way into a small box that was stationary and then, eventually, moving through the water.

Torpedo tube launch

Rambeau said the UUV hardware is inherently capable of going in and out of the torpedo tube, but there’s a software and machine learning challenge to help the UUV learn to navigate various water conditions and safely find its way back into the submarine’s torpedo tube.

Virginia-class attack submarines can silently shoot torpedoes from their launch tubes without giving away their location. If submarines can also fill their tubes with small UUVs, they’d gain the ability to stealthily expand their reach and surveil a larger area around the boat.

During a panel discussion at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference on April 8, U.K. Royal Navy Second Sea Lord Vice Adm. Martin Connell told Defense News that his country, too, would accelerate its work on developing this capability. He said the U.K. plans to test it on an Astute-class attack submarine this year, and then based on what worked for the U.K. and the U.S., they’d determine how to scale up the capability.

Packer said this effort will “make UUV operations ubiquitous on any submarine. Today, it takes a drydock shelter. It takes divers. It takes a whole host of Rube Goldberg kinds of things. Once I get torpedo tube launch and recovery, it’s just like launching a torpedo, but they welcome him back in.”

He added that the team agreed not to integrate this capability onto Australia’s Collins-class conventionally powered submarines now, but Australia will gain this capability when it buys the first American Virginia-class attack submarine in 2032.

On subsea and seabed warfare, Packer said all three countries have an obligation to defend their critical undersea infrastructure. He noted the U.K. and Australia had developed ships that could host unmanned systems that can scan the seabed and ensure undersea cables haven’t been tampered with, for example.

Connell said during the panel the British and Australian navies conducted an exercise together in Australia involving seabed warfare. This effort took just six months from concept to trial, he said, adding he hopes the team can continue to develop even greater expeditionary capability through this line of effort.

Packer said a next step would be collectively developing effectors for these seabed warfare unmanned underwater vehicles — “what are the hammers, the saws, the screwdrivers that I need to develop for these UUVs to get effects on the seabed floor, including sensors.”

The primary artificial intelligence effort today involves the three nation’s P-8 anti-submarine warfare airplanes, though it will eventually expand to the submarines themselves.

Packer said the nations created the first secure collaborative development environment, such that they can all contribute terabytes of data collected from P-8 sensors. The alliance, using vendors from all three countries’ industrial bases, is working now to create an artificial intelligence tool that can identify all the biological sources of sounds the P-8s pick up — everything from whales to shrimp — and eliminate those noises from the picture operators see. This will allow operators to focus on man-made sounds and better identify potential enemy submarines.

Packer said the Navy never had the processing power to do something like this before. Now that the secure cloud environment exists, the three countries are moving out as fast as they can to train their AI tools “to detect adversaries from that data … beyond the level of the human operator to do so.”

For now, the collaboration is focused on P-8s, since foreign military sales cases already exist with the U.K. and Australia to facilitate this collaboration.

Connell, without specifying the nature of the AI tool, said the U.K would put an application on its P-8s this year to enhance their onboard acoustic performance.

Packer noted the U.S. is independently using this capability on an attack submarine today using U.S.-only vendors and algorithms, but the AUKUS team plans to eventually share the full automatic target recognition tool with all three countries’ planes, submarines and surface combatants once the right authorities are in place.

And finally, Packer said the fourth line of effort is looking at the collective inventory of torpedoes and considering how to create more capability and capacity. Both the U.S. and U.K. stopped building torpedoes decades ago, and the U.S. around 2016 began trying to restart its industrial base manufacturing capability.

“The issue is that none of us have sufficient ordnance-, torpedo-building capability,” Packer said, but the group is looking at options to modernize British torpedoes and share in-development American long-range torpedoes with the allies ­— potentially through an arrangement that involves a multinational industrial base.

Vice Adm. Rob Gaucher, the commander of U.S. Naval Submarine Forces, said during the panel discussion that these AUKUS undersea warfare lines of effort closely match his modernization priorities for his own submarine fleet.

Pursuing these aims as part of a coalition, he said, strengthens all three navies.

“The more we do it, and the faster we do it, and the more we get it in the hands of the operators, the better. And then having three sets of operators to do it makes it even better,” Gaucher said.

As an adjutant general, LP 480 presents a multitude of concerns. It would set a precedent for moving state forces to a federal chain of command without the governor’s consent and would reduce a state’s capability to respond to state emergencies without any input from the state. It would also create unnecessary costs for American taxpayers.

Congress approves Space Force part-timers, but still no Space Guard

And LP 480 would degrade America’s space capabilities.

Last year, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, the chief of Space Operations, told Congress that the Air National Guard’s roughly 1,000 space professionals make more than 30% of American space capability and a whopping 60% of the nation’s electromagnetic warfare capability.

LP 480 would move about 1,000 positions (known in the military as billets) from the Air National Guard to the Space Force. However, because the service members that occupy those positions signed contracts with the National Guard, they cannot be forced to transfer to the Space Force and must do so voluntarily.

The Air National Guard recently conducted a poll surrounding this proposed transfer and found that about 86 percent of space professionals would not transfer out of the National Guard. Instead, they would rather be re-missioned into other Air National Guard jobs.

It takes more than nine years to train a space operator from the street to the highest levels of competency in space operations. Air National Guard space operators make up more than 30% of American space capability. The effect that losing up to 86% of these personnel would be catastrophic. America does not need us to self-create a catastrophic gap in space capability right now — or ever.

Taxpayers would need to pay for recruiting, training, and building facilities for this new Space Force “Reserve.” Some estimate a cost of at least $500 million. Costs to establish a Space National Guard would be absorbed in the annual budget. We already have the personnel, training, and facilities within the National Guard. Why is the Space Force so ready to spend a significant amount of money to have at least a nine-year operational gap in capability knowing the National Guard has provided extraordinary capability to the U.S. Space mission for the last 28 years?

China is rapidly progressing in the space domain, and they continue to expand their capabilities. The U.S. is already at risk of losing our advantage. LP 480 would put us at risk of falling behind entirely.

Removing space missions from the National Guard would create up to a 10-year gap in space capability. All the while, our senior military leaders continue to tell Congress that a large-scale conflict with China in the next 5 to 10 years is more and more likely. So, it begs the question:

Is now the time to cut American capability in space?

Maj. Gen. Rich Neely is the adjutant general and commander of the Illinois National Guard. He is a Master Cyberspace officer who has served nearly 34 years as an Air Force officer. Prior to being appointed as the Illinois adjutant general, he served in the Pentagon from 2016 to 2018 as the Air National Guard’s deputy director for cyberspace and space Operations and the Air National Guard’s chief information officer. During this time, he witnessed the significant increase in the Air National Guard’s space portfolio as the Air Force requested more space missions be assigned to the Air National Guard.

In a statement to Defense News on Thursday, Air Force spokesperson Maj. Alli Stormer said eight Boeing-made F-15E jets are undergoing modifications with the Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System, or EPAWSS. The work is taking place at the company’s facility in San Antonio, Texas, the service said.

EPAWSS will come standard on F-15EX Eagle II fighters, also made by Boeing, and will be added to some F-15Es. BAE Systems, which makes EPAWSS, said the technology will allow those F-15s to monitor, jam and deceive threats in highly contested environments as well as provide radar warning, geolocation, situational awareness and self-defense capabilities with an array of sensors, electronic countermeasures and algorithms.

The delivery of the first F-15Es with upgraded electronic warfare capabilities would mark a major step forward in the Air Force’s effort to modernize these fourth-generation aircraft and prepare them for a possible war against an advanced adversary, such as China.

Boeing started installing the EPAWSS on operational F-15Es in San Antonio in July 2022, the Air Force said in a previous statement that year. Boeing also awarded BAE a contract in September 2022 to produce the second EPAWSS lot for new F-15EXs and as many as 43 F-15Es there were already operational. The Air Force now has roughly 218 F-15E jets.

BAE said earlier this month that EPAWSS had recently finished its initial operational test and evaluation phase.

In Thursday’s email, the Air Force said the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center and the Pentagon’s Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation will deliver their final reports on that phase of EPAWSS by the end of June.

The Air Force also said EPAWSS’ engineering and manufacturing development phase is nearly finished, and the service expects to have final production-representative hardware modules delivered this fiscal year. The Air Force expects to award a contract for full-rate production on EPAWSS by the end of 2024.

BAE declined to comment and referred queries to the Air Force.

The March 28 test was the first time this pairing — central to Japan’s Aegis System Equipped Vessel program dedicated to providing missile defense platforms — successfully detected and tracked an object in space, then passed along the data to the combat system for further processing.

The test took place at Lockheed Martin’s Production Test Center in Moorestown, New Jersey. The Missile Defense Agency led the test, with U.S. Navy Aegis program representatives and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel on hand.

A Lockheed Martin representative told Defense News this week that this was the first of a series of land-based tests the SPY-7 would go through before installation on the first Aegis System Equipped Vessel. This test involved one radar face; the next will involve all four radar faces, as Lockheed Martin ensures full system integration before shipping the hardware to Japan for installation on the first ship.

Japan expects to commission one Aegis System Equipped Vessel in March 2028 and another in March 2029. The ships will bring an integrated air and missile defense capability that will provide regional missile defense to the island nation.

The Lockheed-made SPY-7 radar is based on the same technology as the ground-based Long Range Discrimination Radar fielded at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska. That MDA-developed radar, which hit initial fielding in 2021, continues to go through testing. Its eventual delivery to the U.S. Space Force is delayed amid testing challenges.

Because the radar for the Japanese ships — smaller than the ground-based Long Range Discrimination Radar, but larger than the other shipboard radars — shares the same hardware and software backbone as the others in the program, much of the integration work was already done, the company said.

The ongoing round of live testing is meant to ensure the current iteration of hardware and software are fully integrated with the combat system, as a means of reducing risk before installing them on the ship.

Versions of the SPY-7 radar will also be fielded on the Spanish Navy’s F-110 frigate and the Canadian Surface Combatant.

But for one U.S. Navy commander, there’s another more-promising application.

“For unmanned systems, I think electronic warfare- and cyber-related mission areas are the ‘killer app,’ if you will,” Rear Adm. Doug Small said April 10 at the Sea-Air-Space defense conference here. “That is the growth imperative.”

Small is the leader of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, what he calls the service’s “Geek Squad.” He’s also the head of Project Overmatch, which seeks to digitally link sailors, Marines and their vessels over vast distances. Little has been shared about the project since its inception in 2020, with officials attributing the secrecy to Russian and Chinese monitoring.

Outfitting unmanned vehicles or vessels with jammers, spoofers and other gear capable of wreaking electronic havoc is “absolutely critical,” according to Small. EW represents a battle over the electromagnetic spectrum, which militaries for decades have relied upon to communicate, identify friend from foe, and guide weapons to their targets.

“These smaller vehicles, commercial vehicles, have the capability to provide effects,” he said. “And if we architect it correctly, and make sure that, again, we can bring those AI-enabled autonomous behaviors to those vehicles, there are any number of missions that we can accomplish.”

The Navy is investing in unmanned systems — on the water, as well as above and below it — to augment existing and near-future firepower. A service strategy known as the Navigation Plan at one point included an outline of a fleet comprising roughly 373 manned ships and 150 uncrewed vessels.

Defense News previously reported the Navy was realizing its manned-unmanned teams in three phases: experimentation from fiscal 2024 to 2028; deployment in fiscal 2029 through 2033; and full-fledged operations in the years thereafter.

“One of the key things is establishing and expanding this naval operational architecture throughout the Navy, to include unmanned systems. Part of our role is extending that connectivity to these unmanned systems,” Small said. “Our North Star is a hybrid fleet.”

Former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday last year said unmanned vessels with the ability to confuse adversary electronics, spy on distant activities and coordinate the flow of fighting would play an increasingly important role in the service’s mission.

Work to realize such a concept, he said at the time, is underway.

Information warfare becoming a critical submarine capability: Aeschbach

“Think about medium unmanned vessels that have [command-and-control] capabilities, that have [EW] capabilities, that can, perhaps, even have cyber capabilities,” Gilday said. “That kind of work is happening now.”

The defense industry is taking the hint, too. Northrop Grumman plans to participate in two events this year to demonstrate autonomy and EW kits it is developing for unmanned surface vessels under its Project Scion initiative.

The project leans on tech in other domains, such as aerial drones, ground robotics and smart buoys, to quickly produce equipment that can turn platforms into “true combat-and-surveillance systems for our customers,” a Northrop business development manager told C4ISRNET in February.