Copyright Breaking Defense
Whether it’s waves of small, expendable drones or larger drones that can loiter on target and carry heavy armaments, the flexibility, maneuverability and speed of unmanned systems can overwhelm traditional defenses. Electronic warfare (EW) is another component of these new platforms, as jamming, spoofing and spectrum dominance are all top priorities on the battlefield. These platforms require solutions that can be quickly adapted and implemented to keep pace with the threats. Breaking Defense spoke with BAE Systems’ Ed Leonard and Dan Mooney, product line director and business development director for small form factor solutions, respectively, about how drones, precision weapons and their electronic warfare systems are changing and how those challenges are being met. Breaking Defense: How is the EW environment evolving, especially with respect to drones? Mooney: It’s about having the ability to have scalable and adaptable systems in that environment. The electromagnetic spectrum or EMSO (electromagnetic spectrum operations) is something that’s changing within a matter of minutes, days, weeks, not years. It takes time to adapt some legacy systems to address that. Our ability to scale and have an adaptable architecture leads to the ability to respond to threats in a timely manner. The threats are evolving rapidly. How do we keep pace with that? Not only do we want to have a match in terms of a peer-to-peer capability, we want to have greater power than our adversaries in that moment and in a timely manner. Responding as quickly as possible within that threat environment is the primary factor. There are both low-cost, affordable mass drones and larger Group 3 and above drones. What are the advanced high-end weapons that we’re talking about here in this discussion? I would define it the way that the Air Force defines it. They have a pyramid of systems that they call exquisite strike, sufficient strike, and then affordable mass-type weapons. We’re talking about the entirety of that spectrum of weapons categories. In the exquisite strike category, the burden of success is mainly all on the weapon itself. It is a single kill chain in of itself – single system, single kill. There will always be a need for those systems to address the entire threat domain of just about every target that there is out there. Sufficient strike is a balance between those two. Typically, you’ll see similar-type ranges, but the systems themselves aren’t necessarily exquisite, not to the point of being sole custodians of kill chain responsibilities. Affordable mass is just as in its name, which is about the ability to produce tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of those systems because mass in and of itself is an advantage. But mass paired with advanced effects, i.e., electronic warfare, is game changing. How does BAE address this pyramid of three categories? Leonard: We’re working to make to the lowest common building blocks of an EW system, like a power supply and a clock for example, that would be common from affordable mass to sufficient strike to exquisite strike. Then it becomes the simultaneity of the number of channels, the processing power you scale straight up through. Then you’re building many thousands of common components, common hardware building blocks to use a Lego analogy. Then we piece them together in different configurations for different applications. Mooney: Because we embrace the agile and digital design process, we will know our system to the core as it’s designed and as metal gets cut. Like Ed said, in terms of the common building blocks, that’ll simply be defined by mission needs in terms of what power amplification you need or what have you. The other key part of that Lego analogy, though simplistic, is I view a drone system or a weapon system or an unmanned aerial vehicle as the Lego box set itself. When you go to the Lego store, there’s always a cache of available piece parts stockpiled for when the need is there. We’re also looking into a stockpile to have our subsystems on hand for when they need to be integrated into the all-around solutions. What is the demand signal you’re hearing from the services? Leonard: For drones and weapon-type systems, they want information and survivability information. What’s around, where are they, what can I do about it? Depending on the platform, be it a UAV or a weapon, for whatever is the requirement set from the customer, we layer on the software algorithms as required. In a UAV type scenario, we would bring a transmit antenna and a power amplifier and could do offensive jamming and electronic attack. We could do self-protection jamming to protect the UAV. We’re looking into everything from Group 1 to Group 5. Group 1 and 2 are very challenging given their size and cost. But we’re looking to scale from everything. What drones are being targeted, what’s their cost? Then can we offer self-protection equipment and radar warning receiver type equipment. Mooney: I see the demand signal from all of the services. The beauty of it is the ingenuity that our services have been doing. It doesn’t really matter to us whether it’s air launched, ground launched, there’s utility for every service. We talk about leverage and reuse. A lot of the changes for us will simply be in the firmware or software. I view the software as being the game-changing capability. For us it’s a common system with a lot of leverage and reuse able to be adaptable to whatever system it is. What’s the importance of a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) or Weapon Open Systems Architecture (WOSA)? How are those shaping your development of these technologies? Mooney: It gives the Air Force, Navy, or Army the ability to access best of breed throughout the supply chain. It’s intended to break the traditional vertical vendor lock, have non-traditionals involved, have small businesses involved who may have fancy algorithms or some capability that really has game to bring to bear. With WOSA, there’ll be common messages passed between systems so everybody’s speaking the same language throughout the entire weapon or drone system itself. They’ve also implemented something called WOSA X, which is the hardware component to it. Back to that Lego analogy, they all have those same pips or studs on all Legos. You piece it together, it’s about common connectors, and then industry, again, best of breed, having their special sauce within their boxes, sensors, seekers, data links, what have you. How have you demonstrated these systems at military exercises, or through testing in EW environments? Leonard: If you’ve done your research on Army MOSA, everyone wants a VPX connector. Everyone wants a single-board computer. They want to upgrade their current system with more memory or faster compute by swapping in a new processor. They want to plug it in and have the software to download when the pilot or whomever walks out with the hard drive. In that context, we had a hard drive that went out to a jet with an open-system architecture, Big Iron software framework – that’s an industry initiative with the Air Force and other partners. Our Big Iron software framework was given the stamp of approval and then loaded onto a GFE (government furnished equipment) payload, and flew flight testing with a third-party algorithm running on it.
