Week in Review

AOC 2022 was tremendously successful week. More than 2,600 EMSO professionals participated in the event, which featured an excellent symposium program focused around the "EMSO Playbook" theme, and an outstanding exhibit hall showcasing advanced technologies and services across a wide range of EW and SIGINT applications.

The symposium program provided attendees with insights from 84 keynote speakers, presenters, panelists and moderators. Keynote session topics ranged from NATO transformation and DOD acquisition developments for EMSO to Information Operations and Artificial Intelligence. Spotlight Sessions covered cross-cutting topics on young engineers; EMSO strategy on Capitol Hill; EMSO governance; and EW and EMSO-related requirements, science and technology development, and acquisition. The Program Managers' Briefing Series included four sessions on Navy/USMC, Air Force, Army and directed energy programs, with 19 panelists and moderators providing critical insight into their priorities and plans. And the eight breakout sessions covered specific topics, such as JADC2, 5G/Next G, counter-C5ISRT, cognitive EW, supply chains, and coalition EMSO and integration.

In the exhibit hall, It is clear that the DOD's open systems standards and middle tier acquisition pathways have helped to grow the EW and SIGINT industrial base. On the show floor, 143 organizations offered advanced technologies and a range of services for EMSO applications. This figure was nearly one-third larger than last year's event, and many companies were relatively young and exhibiting on the AOC show floor for the first time.

Visit the Convention website or download the app to learn more.

In the latest episode of From the Crows’ Nest, host Ken Miller sits down at AOC 2022 with David Tremper, Director of Electronic Warfare in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. David is the US Department of Defense’s senior leader providing guidance and advocacy for US development and acquisition of EW capabilities and systems. Ken and Dave discuss a range of topics related to the concept of an EMSO Playbook, including Electromagnetic Protection, Open Architecture and Government Reference Framework and Counter C5ISR&T capabilities focusing on offensive EW. To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO and EW developments, visit our homepage.

Thursday Keynote

Thursday's keynote was given by Dr. Eric Haseltine, a neuroscientist, futurist and former 

CTO for national intelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as the former director of research at the National Security Agency. His talk focused on biomimicry and deception, comparing certain EW and cyber tactics to examples of deception found in nature.

Hazeltine introduced his talk by discussing cognitive biases in humans. He said, "…we tend to see what we expect to see and we don't see what we don't expect to see. We tend to see what we want to see and not what we don't want to see." He explained, "… if we want to see what the adversary is doing with denial and deception, we should not be looking out. We should be looking in, because we have blind spots. And the evil thing about those blind spots is that our brain blinds them to us."

Russians, he said, understand their adversary's blind spots very well, whereas the west tends not be less aware of them. He said, "…when you really think about cyber and you think about EW, one thing we often do not think about is that there's a human being connected to that piece of equipment. And where is the greatest vulnerability always, whether it's cyber or EW? It's the operator. And we lose sight of that because the technology is so sexy."

Haseltine noted Sun Tzu's principle that "all war is deception." He then began describing the role of deception in evolution. "In the past, let's say in the past 3 billion years, which is about when we think evolution started, we have this process of constant adaptation and change, which continues through to today. And I think we would be remiss if we didn't take a close look at what nature has already done." He explained to that audience that there are some lessons to be learned by "diving deep into what biology does, because for sure, there are some new answers in there for your future." He then provided examples from biology that show concepts such as "hide, confuse obscure law, discourage, disgust, exhaust, frustrate, lure, scare and sneer and hurt," as well as "compete." 

Using an example of each concept, he explained how the concept can be matched to specific EW and cyber tactics. For example, certain moth species can exhaust their prey (bats, in this case) by moving slower but turning faster and tighter and making the bat miss its target, until the prey gives up the chase. The cyber equivalent, said Haseltine, is creating an overwhelming amount of useless data that forces an adversary to use lots of resources to comb through it all. In EW, the equivalent is creating lots of meaningless transmissions to overwhelm an adversary's signal collection and processing resources.

Haseltine said all of these tactics pose a specific challenge. "So, what's the key challenge? You're doing all this deception. How do you avoid deceiving yourself? Well, first of all, I'm not going to B.S. you and say you're going to have a 100% perfect way of doing this. You are going to have some problems." He said that lawyers in any organization will try to minimize legal risk and argue against intentional acts of deception, such as putting false data in government files and information. "The culture is going to fight you," he said. "But that's an interesting thing. If the culture isn't fighting you, you're probably not doing something new and revolutionary. And again, I come back to cognitive biases. The adversary knows we're bureaucratic. They know we don't do certain things…. And, so they're not going to expect us to do certain things."

Toward the end of his speech, Haseltine talked about a part of the human immune system that has the ability to generate antibodies to infections the body has not seen before. "This is the most important lesson nature has. You don't change when it's obvious you have to change. Then you become a fossil – it's too late. You change before you have to change…. What would this mean in the cyber world or what would this mean in the EW world? It would mean coming up with counters to attacks we haven't seen yet, so that when you see something like it, you can quickly adapt and go after it. Billions of years of evolution say this is the way to not become a fossil."

Thursday Breakout Session — Joint Coalition EMSO Integration

In Thursday’s Joint Coalition EMSO Integration breakout session led by moderator Dr. Timothy Grayson, Special Assistant to the SecAF for Mission Centered Analysis and Operational Imperatives, the keyword was interoperability. EMSO should be a fully integrated and trained feature of the Joint Force and technical advances need to be made between allied partners. As panelist Ali Serdar Kilinc, Electronic Warfare Program Director, Aselsan, Turkey said in his opening remarks, “we need to change before we have to change.” Other panelists included Dr. Jimmy “Rev” Jones, USAF, PhD., NH-IV, SAF/AQLV, PEM SITCHES Warfighter Application Team Lead; and Bob "Otis" Winkler, Vice President, Corporate Development & National Security Programs, Kratos Defense. After a brief period where each panelist introduced themselves and their background, Dr. Grayson asked them questions. Here are some highlights from that Q&A.

From the perspective of a NATO ally, tell us about some of the specific coalition partner barriers

Ali: I don’t think as allies we have been successful on information sharing. … I don’t know how we will solve that, but I hope

Do you see opportunities in getting interoperability value with sharing parts of data?

Rev: There’s a reason, and it’s not a good or a bad reason, why it’s an all-or-nothing concept – sharing all of the data or none of the data. Virtually none of the classification guidance that exists out there gets down to the granular level of which piece of data can I share.

News Briefs 

New Office: “We are establishing a new office in OSD called the Acquisition, Integration Interoperability Office, and our first task is to take a look at how are we going to integrate — truly get JADC2 talking across the department.  – Chris O’Donnell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for platform and weapon portfolio management in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD A&S). The new office will be led by David Tremper, Director of EW at OUSD A&S.

Among the industry news at AOC 2022 last week, Pacific Defense (El Segundo, CA) announced that its Spectranetix subsidiary signed a contract with the Marine Corps Systems Command to provide the company's SX-3000 CMOSS Mounted Form Factor system for the MAGTF Electronic Warfare Ground Family of Systems (MEGFoS) static site system evaluation effort. According to the company, "The SX-3000 consists of a chassis, power supply, network switch, assured position, navigation and/or timing card, single board computer, and TSM mobile ad-hoc networking and communications card. The system is based on a 7-slot chassis that support up to two additional mission specific payload cards, such as SDR, DSP, and/or GPU processing card in a typical payload card configuration. Spectranetix or third-party software and firmware applications are installed on the payload processing cards to meet specific mission requirements."

Also announced during the show, RADX Technologies (Palo Alto, CA) introduced the Trifecta-GPU Family of COTS PXIe/CPCIe GPU Modules. According to the company, Trifecta-GPUs are the first COTS products that bring the extreme to compute acceleration and ease-of-programming of NVIDIA® RTX® A2000 Embedded GPUs to PXIe/CPCIe platforms for modular Test and Measurement and EW applications.

TEVET (Greenville, TN) announced that it is introducing the Liberty KA and Liberty KP software defined instruments real-time spectrum analyzers in partnership with Keysight Technologies. The Liberty KA and Liberty KP offers 1 GHz of bandwidth per channel on up to 16 independent or synchronous channels.

In other industry news, Northrop Grumman received a $21.6 million contract from DARPA to develop and demonstrate the next generation of scalable HEL sources under its Modular Efficient Laser Technology (MELT) program. Overall, the MELT program aims to exploit technologies such as novel semiconductor fabrication techniques, coherent beam combining, photonic integration, and three-dimensional integration and packaging.

Mercury Systems said that its new mPOD electromagnetic attack (EA) training system has successfully completed flight testing. Tactical Air Support installed the mPOD on its F-5 aircraft and demonstrated the system's ability to break, deny and delay radar locks from opposing fighters, as well as creating multiple false targets on their radars. "Our close working relationship with Mercury has resulted in a state of the art, internally configured EA capability fully integrated with our open architecture sensor suite," said RC Thompson, CEO of Tactical Air Support in a joint press release. "The result is threat realism with no performance penalty on our aircraft."

Program Executive Officer, Land Systems (PEO LS) Program Manager, Ground Based Air Defense (PM GBAD) at Marine Corps Base Quantico, VA, will hold an Industry Day to discuss PM GBAD’s upcoming requirement for the MADIS Effector. According to the announcement, this effort "will be accomplished through the integration of command and control software with emerging and existing components integrated onto the Marine Corps’ Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTV) Heavy Guns Carrier (HGC) Variant. These vehicles, complimentary in capability, are the Mk1, which includes a counter FW/RW aircraft and non-kinetic C-UAS capability, and the Mk2, which includes a detection, kinetic, and non-kinetic C-UAS capability. PM GBAD intends to acquire solutions from vendors that are capable of providing a Group 1 and 2, with potential for 3, C-UAS defeat capability via an effector. The effector would increase the range of C-UAS defeat capability to augment the current defeat mechanisms. The solution will be required to operate with the Mk2 JLTV given current requirement constraints. The effector will need to be a pre-existing field tested or demonstrated prototype, and must be able to utilize the existing RPS-62 radar for initial track guidance." The point of contact is Sarah Faulconer, e-mail sarah.faulconer@usmc.mil. 

Applied Signals Intelligence Inc. (Sterling, VA) received a $4 million contract from the Air Force Research Lab's Sensors Directorate, Multispectral Sensing and Detection Division, for research in support of its "Framework and Applications for Direction-finding at the Edge (FADE)" effort. According to the contract announcement, the company will supply its Crosswinds ultrawideband precision DF system housed in a Stongback pod configuration.

Teledyne Technologies (Thousand Oaks, CA) announced it has entered into an agreement to buy ETM-Electromatic, Inc. (Newark, NJ). ETM has decades of experience in developing and manufacturing high-power amplifiers for radar, EW and SATCOM applications. In a press release announcing the deal, Teledyne said, "ETM strengthens our capabilities in microwave combining technologies and high-power gallium nitride (GaN) based solid state power amplifiers."

AOC 2023 will take place Dec. 11-23 at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, National Harbor, MD. 

The October issue of JED includes these highlights:

Cover Story: The US Space Force and EMSO

News: US Army Awards EW and SIGNIT Development Contracts
US Navy Plans Frequency Extension For NGJ-MB Pod

Start reading the issue now, and read more each week at jedonline.com

The Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance (JED) is the official publication of the Association of Old Crows (AOC), an independent, nonprofit, international professional association promoting public understanding in the science and practice of EW, SIGINT and related disciplines. Become an AOC member to get access to the latest issue of JED.

Check out current issues from our media partners. You'll also be able to find news coverage from throughout the week on the AOC Convention's News page.

JED
Armada International
Defense News 
Microwave Journal
Military Embedded Systems 
Military Embedded Systems: SOSA Special Edition
Microwave Product Digest
Sea Power