Unmanned Sea Surface Vehicle Electronic Warfare
Abstract
The use of tactical unmanned vehicles provides a means to accomplish a wide variety of combat missions without risk to operators' lives and without loss of expensive platforms. In addition, these vehicles offer an opportunity to rapidly field advanced warfighting capabilities at relatively low cost simply by developing payload systems that seamlessly integrate with the vehicle's onboard control network. With the emergence of open control system standards, such as the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS), the ability to build so-called plug-and-play payloads is approaching reality. To exploit the opportunity of fielding advanced capabilities using unmanned platforms, the Tactical Electronic Warfare Division at NRL is developing an advanced electronic attack (EA) payload for surface ship defense that is suitable for unmanned vehicles like those planned for use with the Littoral Combat Ship. This development, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, is designed to provide capabilities to counter late-generation sea surface surveillance and targeting radars found in maritime patrol aircraft and multirole fighters, and to provide the capability to attack anti-ship missiles during their initial target survey scans. Used singly, the unmanned vehicles provide a long-duration self-protection countermeasure system. Used in multi-vehicle constellations, the unmanned vehicles with EA payloads can be used to provide an area defense capability over large sectors.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2007
- Accession Number
- ADA518455
Entities
People
- D. Tremper
- J. Heyer
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory