As adversaries become better at keeping up with the pace of innovation from America’s defense industrial base, a new strategy is needed to ensure the US military can maintain its information dominance across domains.
BAE Systems’ FAST Labs, the R&D wing of Electronic Systems, is addressing that need by focusing on developing and implementing new solutions. Combined with BAE Systems’ extensive production capabilities, the R&D organization can develop ideas and test them in the field quickly, enabling rapid adaptation to meet constantly changing demands.
Breaking Defense spoke with Tim Grayson, vice president and general manager, and Leonard Lublin, deputy vice president and general manager for BAE Systems’ FAST Labs, to learn more about how R&D is being turned into reality.
Breaking Defense: What’s happening in the world right now in communications and electronic warfare that necessitates the need for something like BAE Systems’ FAST Labs?
Lublin: There is a perpetual cat and mouse game of move, counter move, and that cat and mouse game continues to accelerate at a crisp pace. The rate at which we need to develop new technologies and approaches to counteract things our adversaries are working on is only increasing. That is a big part of our mission, and we see that across the electronic warfare spectrum.
We see it in communications and in precision navigation and timing, all these exquisite technologies that we as a country developed. Our peer adversaries have been watching us and developing ways to deny our abilities to operate like we have done so dominantly in the past. The need for us to now come up with even greater, more impactful approaches has never been more pressing.
Grayson: We want to accelerate how we assemble system-of-systems capabilities and architectures. In my former government life at DARPA, we talked about something called ‘mosaic warfare,’ where you could accelerate the pace at which you compose systems of systems. Instead of having to wait until you build the next big monolithic platform, I can take different things and pull them together to get a new capability out much faster.
The pace is accelerating so rapidly that the challenge is predicting where it’s going to accelerate next. How do you tackle that?
Grayson: In my prior US Air Force role, we talked about operational imperatives; the whole view behind operational imperatives was not to just focus on a technology but focus on what the mission problem is. How do you paint an architecture, how do you paint a picture of a mission thread, and then decompose that and say, ‘if I want to go do this big operational strategy or this operational mission view of the world, what technology do I need to use to enable it?’
One of the things we are working on right now within FAST Labs is getting our scientists thinking this way. We still want to be pushing what’s the next great technology, but also how do we focus that great technology on the mission problem and use that to motivate where we will make the most impact using either our own investments or government R&D funding.
How do you take R&D and then turn it into reality? What are you focusing on right now, and how are you tackling those main challenges that you have?
Lublin: One of the great things about being a lab for R&D within the bigger BAE Systems is that we actually have quite a substantial installed base of capabilities. We have factories that can manufacture, we have teams that know how to build hardened military products. To take advantage of all of that, we build strong connective tissues between our scientists and our businesses that are actually engaged in the manufacturing, production, design, and sustainment of the equipment that gets into weapon systems.
In particular, we’ve had good success looking at where we have an installed base, such as in signal processing, and bring new capabilities that take advantage of the electrons and photons that our systems are already out there collecting, and provide new capabilities that we can install as firmware software loads in that installed base.
That’s how we can do aggressive things, be bold and try things that people think are crazy that won’t work, actually prove that they can work, and then see that show up on the actual platforms in a short timeframe. We do that on a regular basis across a broad set of technologies.
We’re looking at not just what are the next new products, but how do we make the existing products better and keep them ahead of our adversaries with what they can execute and produce.
What does the future of software look like where everything is smart and connected?
Lublin: There were a lot of federated systems in previous generations. You’d have a specific radar, electronic warfare and communication systems. All those were independent with a ton of software in them. Now things are more software defined, where you have a transducer that is sampling and able to respond at different pieces of the electromagnetic spectrum. You make that transducer just a digitizer and then behind it you have multiple skills and different types of software running.
One example is the work we’re doing in radio frequency machine learning. This is where we are developing unique models for artificial intelligence, whether it’s large language models or deep neural networks and all the learning that goes with them. We’re applying that to the radio frequency signal domain. You’ve seen tremendous progress in using artificial intelligence in commercial industries largely for things like text, video, sound and voice. There is a lot of progress being made there and we see unique applications for the military in the radio frequency part of the information spectrum.
One of the big challenges of software is making sure that it’s accessible in contested and denied environments. How are you tackling that challenge?
Grayson: We know how to make radio boxes, also known as communication boxes, inherently more resilient through electronics and some of the waveforms and signal processing they would be using. Much of that in the software-defined world can be augmented further by capturing that in software. If one box does get jammed, can we move it somewhere else? Can we bring in some of that A.I.-enabled radio frequency and make it so it’s harder to jam a box? It’s that combination of hardware and software that allows us to make capability that’s inherently more resilient, and that’s going to give connectivity back to those edge warfighters and weapon systems.
Let’s talk about microelectronics. How is that evolving as new threats arise?
Grayson: There are two main points. One of them is that there is so much advancement in commercial microelectronics that we’re being circumspect about where we invest and where we pursue research funding for things that are going to be differentiators, versus whether we can ride the commercial wave and use commercial parts. We’ve got the expertise to be able to do that, perform make-or-buy decisions, and also have the electronic architectures that could take advantage of the best of both worlds.
We’ll go find those particular applications or special discrete components like a unique filter or amplifier or processor. We’re looking at things that straddle the analog and digital world that are an accelerator or a co-processor that are more effective and efficient than a commercially available general-purpose-type of device.
Lublin: There’s another dimension, too, where we need custom electronics. There’s a perspective that high performance microelectronics are available commercially driven by the telecom industry, things like satellite communications and smartphones. Our adversaries have access to all that technology.
If we’re using and building military systems with the same commercial parts they are, it’s going to be more challenging to have overmatch against them because we’re effectively fighting with the same kit, so to speak. So, we need to develop unique discriminating microelectronics we can bring to bear in order to go beyond what’s commercially available.