Distributed Electronic Warfare

Current platform-centric electronic warfare systems are limited in their ability to generate essential EW effects required to counter emerging threat system developments and employ advanced EW concepts. Proprietary and closed system designs limit rapid technology insertion and hamper the ability to match or outpace emerging threat developments.

The Office of Naval Research’s vision for distributed electronic warfare is based on a network-enabled, coordinated and spatially distributed EW system-of-systems to counter emerging asymmetric threat capabilities. This system would provide time-
critical situational awareness of adversary dispositions and activity, denial of the enemy’s awareness of friendly force dispositions and activity, and camouflage and deception to dilute enemy engagement capacity.

Distributed EW will provide the following objective capabilities:

• Wide area, real-time location determination of adversary emitters
• Automated recognition of threat emitter operating modes
• Adaptive electronic attack response to threat emitters
• Wide area camouflaging to deny target detection or cause misclassification of targets and deception through synchronized decoy control
• Denial or corruption of enemy sensing capabilities by synthetic generation of high density clutter environments
• Seamless operability and graceful degradation of network-enabled functions in dense electromagnetic environments
• Simplified scalability and ability to upgrade through modular and open systems architecture design.