Fiscal priorities identified in plan to upgrade thousands of combat aircraft.
US Air Force electronic-warfare (EW) planners are crafting the business case to justify a far-reaching investment in airborne self-protection systems, with the goal of upgrading thousands of bombers, fighters and airlifters to a common suite of more powerful and reliable digital modules for radar warning receivers (RWR), jammers and techniques generators.
With the integration cost alone likely to be enormous, the EW community is carefully laying the groundwork to document the need and the technological readiness of the four industrial suppliers – BAE Systems, ITT, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon – for the ambitious investment strategy.
Two major factors are driving the effort. First, the obsolescence of major parts for existing EW systems, such as Northrop’s ALQ-155 low-band jammer for the Boeing B-52, will become a critical issue after 2008. “Some of the parts are no longer built and we can’t even find suppliers who can fix them,” says Ron Wilkie, Northrop’s director of B-52 EW programmes.
The second motivator is the growing maturity of common digital and modular EW packages being designed, and in some cases fielded, by all four major EW contractors in the USA.
This is pushing the air force to introduce an EW upgrade investment roadmap next year as the major commands arrange their spending priorities for the five-year budget plan to start in fiscal year 2008.
“The FY08 [plan] is the earliest they can change the budget forecasts given our recommendations,” says Phil Nielsen, senior director, technology centre, at MacAuley Brown, a defence engineering services company that is drafting the roadmap. “As it stands now we’re getting good comments back from the major commands.”
A positive reception early on is encouraging as the USAF EW community fights to overcome recent setbacks caused by the multi-billion dollar failure of the Rockwell B-1 defensive system upgrade programme, which was cancelled following technology failures in 2003 with no return on the investment.
But USAF and industry officials promise the mistakes that doomed the B-1 programme are now being avoided. A key principle is to start by validating the design of a new system before committing large funds to the project. As such, a proposed RWR upgrade for the Air National Guard’s Boeing F-15 fleet has begun with an invitation for contractors to demonstrate their designs in USAF laboratory tests over the next 18 months.
“The impression I got is everything is relatively near-term ready,” says Garry Allison of MacAuley Brown, which has gleaned data from a recent USAF market survey. “The technology [the contractors] are proposing is either in production or advanced development.”
The EW plans and programmes office at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio has completed three studies in the past year to provide the foundation for the investment roadmap. Their recommendations are expected to make a case for replacing the outdated B-52 EW system with a modular digital suite. Variants of this package are then hoped to be extended to the B-1B and F-15C/E fleets. Airlifters such as the Boeing C-17 and Lockheed Martin C-130 are also being considered for inclusion in the roadmap at a later stage of the investment strategy.
STEPHEN TRIMBLE / WASHINGTON DC
Source: Flight International
