The US Air Force’s unmanned air vehicle battlelab is preparing to set up formal links with the Australian Department of Defence’s UAV-based distributed data fusion concept technology demonstration programme as part of a new electronic warfare project dubbed Phoenix.
The US project involves linking of multiple UAVs equipped with a variety of sensor and electronic attack payloads into a network to detect, localise and identify potential air defence systems prior to their engagement.
According to the commander of the UAV Battlelab, Lt Col Larry Felder, the objective is to “document the integrated air defence in such a fashion that that information is shared among multiple UAVs and then passed on to a HARM [anti-radiation] shooter”.
Current suppression and destruction of enemy air defence operations require strike platforms to “go into harm’s way in order to gather the data, and once he has that data gathered they can then make the strikes”. The Phoenix project would allow the strike platform to go into a hostile environment “fully supported with the situation awareness of exactly what can happen”.
The Australian activity, designated Joint Project 2101, is being carried out by the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Autonomous Systems and BAE Systems Australia. Launch funding from the Australian DoD was provided in 2003.
Felder says “we are looking at an Australian technology and working with an Australian organisation to bring that to bear. They have the capability to work in some very significant information-denied environments in a distributed network that I think will benefit the war fighter in that specific initiative, and in some other areas as well.”
Felder adds that the battlelab’s hunter-killer UAV development programme launched last year is to focus on expendable UAVs. The programme is aimed at providing co-ordinated multiple UAV support for urban area operations. The UAVs would operate as “trucks…to provide weapons on demand”.
Source: Flight International
