The modular EW payload for CCAs
With the best mix of capability, size & cost.
“The intent behind this is to provide for a deployed soldier an enhanced capability so that they can easily provide an RF [radio frequency] waveform and provide some of that reprogramming at the edge," Eric Bowes, the program officer of ARAT, told Breaking Defense.
The service announced the pilot in May after lessons learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine told the Army that the status of electronic warfare is rapidly changing.
Each technique available now or in the foreseeable future for what is known as alt-PNT comes with a need to make size, weight, power and cost trade-offs based on what type of platform is being used, according to experts.
"I think what people will find is that this type of advancement, going from ground-to-space, changes the whole space economy," Aalyria's CEO Chris Taylor said. "I think it's going to be monumental."
"We are a ground software service provider," ATLAS Space co-founder Mike Carey told Breaking Defense. "We've come up with a very modern, cloud-based, scalable secure platform by which any number of antennas can be brought in."
"We need to address space debris so that space is sustainable and remains a working environment," Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, assistant director for space policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), said today.
Detecting interference with Global Positioning System sat signals in conflict zones actually is "low hanging fruit," says Spire's Conor Brown. "We're picking them up accidentally with our weather satellites."
SDA intends to choose three contractors next year to design and build up to 144 new satellites.
Space based jammers? Kinetic kill vehicles? Ground based lasers? The Pentagon has a space weapon it's ready to show, but it's not clear exactly what it will be.
"We really focused on payloads that had tactical utility, because they were an underserved market," said Blackjack program manager Stephen Forbes.
“Fundamentally, we do it the same way as noise canceling headphones; we listen to what the radio transmits and inject it in reverse in the radio, so the radio thinks that it doesn’t hear itself, and it can hear everything else” Joel Brand of Kumu Networks says.