Pentagon creates electronic warfare programs council to boost US tech edge

[F-22Raptor]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Pentagon will formally create an Electronic Warfare (EW) Programs Council today, with the hopes of boosting the U.S. military’s waning technological edge in this area, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work said on Tuesday.

Work, speaking at the Credit Suisse/McAleese 2016 Defense Programs Conference, said that the Pentagon’s Third Offset Strategy would center on winning a guided munitions salvo against an opponent, and EW capabilities would be pivotal to achieving this capability.

“The first aspect of the third offset strategy is to win a guided munitions salvo competition,” he said, noting that simply having a larger arsenal might do the trick.
“That’s the jab… The punch of the Third Offset Strategy is, how are we going to change what we are going to do once we get into a theater and solve that first competition? That is unknown, we are still trying to figure that out.”

Where adversaries have an advantage, Work acknowledged, is the emphasis placed on EW. Whereas the U.S. military tends to see it as a combat enabler, some foreign militaries and non-state actors view EW as an offensive and defensive tactic.

“It’s going to be at the forefront of any initial guided munitions salvo exchange. For relatively small investments, you can get an extremely high potential payoff, and our competitors are trying to win in the EW competition,” Work said.
“Now, we still have a lead, I think, that lead is diminishing rapidly. I worry about it. Today I’m signing a memo that establishes an Electronic Warfare Programs Council, which starts to take a look at all our investments across the department and make strategic recommendations to the secretary and I on how do we change that portfolio.”

Work said the idea for this council came out of the Defense Science Board. He liked the idea and will put Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld in charge of the effort.

Winnefeld said later at the conference that the emphasis on EW advancements would mesh nicely with the military’s focus on developing payloads rather than platforms to achieve new capabilities. In particular, he spoke about the ability to add pods onto remotely piloted aircraft, be it the current fleet of MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers or the future Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike vehicles.

“The sky is the limit, in my view, on what the imagination could bring to bear in terms of carrying payloads on those particular platforms,” he said.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) currently carry weapons and electro-optical and other sensors into the battle space, particular in permissive environments. Going forward, though, UAVs could bring additional communications for special operations forces, airborne self-protection to let the UAV go into a more contested environment, or even refueling pods to support other airborne platforms.

The key to fielding these capabilities quickly is creating the right business model with the right companies to help. “If I had a garage of highly innovative people and highly agile people,” he could funnel pod ideas to them from the warfighter and ask for a two- to three-month turnaround on the pods.

Also during the speech, Work discussed a Business Process and Systems Review, meant to free up money that could be devoted to technological innovation. He said the Defense Department currently has one million employees costing the department $134 billion a year managing six business operations: human resources management, acquisition and procurement management, logistics and service contracts management real estate property management, health care management and financial management.

Outside business experts were brought in to help with the review, Work said, and they suggested that commercial business might seek a 20 to 30 percent productivity improvement. Work said he would be happy with even 10 percent, which adds up to a lot of money.

“The leading focus of all of this is to free up money and resources so we can put back into modernization,” he said.

Key areas of investment include robotics and autonomy, biotechnology, miniaturization, big data and additive manufacturing, as well as seeking ways to use current defense systems in new ways.

The Navy in particular is in the midst of improving its EW capability both in the air and at sea. The service is working with industry to create a Next Generation Jammer to replace the decades old AN/ALQ-99 jammer on its current fleet of Boeing EA-18G Growlers by early next decade. In February, the Navy awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman for the AN/SLQ-32(V)Y Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) Block 3 System.

Additionally, the service stressed EW as part of its “all domain access” concept it outlined in last week’s release of the revision to the Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps’ cooperative tri-service strategy.

Pentagon Creates Electronic Warfare Programs Council to Boost U.S. Technological Edge - USNI News

 

[AMDR]

Good decision. The effects of EW cannot be understated. We cannot forget that during Operation Praying Mantis the SLQ-32 apparently jammed a number of Iranian missiles, potentially saving ships.

 

[F-22Raptor]

*Additional info


The Pentagon is creating a new high-level council to direct all Pentagon electronic warfare programs, Deputy Secretary Robert Work said this morning. The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will lead the group that will make permanent a top-level focus on a long-undervalued aspect of modern warfare.

After decades of US technological dominance, when we could bombard enemies with relative impunity, “now competitors have caught up in this regime and they’re going to fire mass guided missile salvoes at us,” Work said at the annual Newseum conference hosted by Credit Suisse and McAleese & Associates.

That’s a large part of the reason Work and the Pentagon launched its third Offset Strategy last year. The first offset strategy of the ’50s relied on our nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union; the second offset of the 1970s relied on smart weapons, stealth, and networks, which are the advantages we’ve relied on since. Now adversaries from China to Hezbollah are increasingly getting their hands on precision guided munitions, however, and we might be on the receiving end.

Work, understandably, would like the stop that. “So the first aspect of the third offset strategy is to win a guided munitions salvo competition,” he said — that is, to survive the enemy’s precision-guided barrage while crippling him with your own.

Being able to win the missile and electrons war is a matter not just of warfighting but of (non-nuclear) deterrence, Work emphasized: “If you cannot do that and you cannot convince your adversary that you will dominate in that confrontation, then they may feel emboldened to pull the trigger.”

Some 40 years ago, Work went on, the US developed a demonstration system called “Assault Breaker,” which paved the way for long-range smart-weapon strikes and put the fear of God — or rather US technology — into the Soviet general staff. Today, “we need a ‘Raid Breaker,'” he said. “We need a demonstration called Raid Breaker which can demonstrate to us that if someone throws a salvo of a hundred guided munitions [at us], we’ll be able to ride it out.”

It would take 100 incoming missiles to overwhelm existing missile defense systems, which rely on stopping enemy missiles with anti-missile missiles — expensive, specialized weapons available in sharply limited numbers. So for Raid Breaker, Work said, “it doesn’t have to be a kinetic solution. Hell, I don’t really want a kinetic solution [i.e. shooting a missile with a missile]. It’s got to be something else.”

When people talk about alternative means of missile defense, they tend to turn to lasers and electromagnetic rail guns. Both technologies now in advanced testing, both got plus-ups in the president’s 2016 budget request, and both got a nod in Work’s remarks this morning. But he spent far more time on a lower-profile alternative to physical destruction: electronic warfare.

“EW is often regarded as a combat enabler,” Work said: Electronic jamming and deception are traditionally see as adjuncts to physical weaponry rather as weapons in their own right. “Our adversaries don’t think so,” he said. “They believe it is an important part of their offensive and defensive arsenal, and it’s going to be at the forefront of any initial guided munitions salvo exchange.” If you can blind, deceive, or burn out the enemy’s sensors, it doesn’t matter how many missiles he launches or how smart they are. They will miss.

“For relatively small investments, you get an extremely high potential payoff,” Work said, “and our competitors are trying to win in the EW competition….Now, we still have a lead — I think — [but] that lead is diminishing rapidly.”

To preserve that lead, “today I’m signing a memo which establishes an electronic warfare programs council which starts to take a look at of all our investments across the department and make strategic recommendations to the Secretary and I on how we change that portfolio,” Work said. “That’s going to be co-chaired by Frank Kendall“– the undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics — “and Adm. [James Sandy] Winnefeld” — vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The recommendation to create the council came from a Defense Science Board study that Kendall commissioned in 2012. “It’s a way to bring the department together,” Kendall said this morning at the Newseum conference. “”We need to have some department-wide focus. We need to look for synergies” between services.

That doesn’t mean there should be a single service (say, the Navy) designated as the executive agent for the entire military, Kendall said: “I don’t think that’s the right approach. There is a possibility for joint programs, [but] each service is going to have to do some things that are unique and some things that are shared.”

Nor will the new council try to manage the services’ programs day-to-day. Instead, he said, the council will conduct “periodic reviews” that feed into the budget process, much like similar bodies he co-chairs on cyber and nuclear command-and-control.

“The department had been .. neglecting electronic warfare for some time,” Kendall said. “We hadn’t been really focused on that kind of threat.” As a result, area where both short-term and long-term trends are eroding US advantage.

Meanwhile, tightening budgets are slowing American modernization, even on the Pentagon’s highest priority EW program, the Next-Generation Jammer. “When we did next-gen jammer… we deferred some of the capabilities we had intended,” Kendall said. “I’d love to accelerate that [again].”

The Defense Science Board study also recommended investing at least an additional $2 billion a year in electronic warfare. However, Kendall told reporters on his way out of the Newseum that there wouldn’t be any significant new EW spending for a while. “We’ve got to make the case for it,” he said, adding that the new council might help.

Work took much of his speech denouncing the Budget Control Act spending caps, popularly (if inaccurately) known as sequestration.

“Right now the biggest obstacle in our way will be sequestration,” Work said. “Sequester is going to keep us from doing what we need to do to implement this third offset strategy in a timely manner.”

Raid Breaker: Work Elevates Electronic Warfare, Eye On Missile Defense « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary