Air Force Looks to Kaiju for Advanced Anti-Aircraft Countermeasures

In January, the Air Force will launch Project Kaiju, a giant new effort to secure the future of US air dominance with plans for nine subprojects and tasks, all named after famous strange beasts.

As the Air Force fights opponents from close peers who receive more advanced detection and anti-aircraft technology, the service wants to use cognitive electronic warfare, artificial intelligence and work through integrated system integration “to generate and / or maintaining a competitive advantage due to the huge amount of data, the speed of activity and the complexity of the threat opportunities “, according to contract action notice published Thursday to SAM.gov.

The announcement, announcing an upcoming $ 150 million broad agency deal that is expected to expire in January, said the U.S. military has held air control for many years.

However, “opponents have filled the gap,” the documents said. “American aircraft are increasingly required to operate in a hostile environment, heavily protected by integrated air defense systems,” or IADS.

These capabilities are only becoming more advanced, with Air Force officials expecting adversaries to begin implementing “multispectral technology” designed to shoot down American planes and drones.

“That is, American aircraft will be expected to oppose IADS, equipped with missiles controlled by sensors that operate with different levels of coordination between [electro-optic/infrared] and [radio frequency] modes for process detection, navigation and / or tracking ‘, the notice states.

The Air Force’s countermeasures for many of these protection methods are “designed for a single-spectrum threat” and are not calibrated to deal with them all at once.

This is also a growing problem for high-quality airborne assets, or HVAAs, that tend to fly high enough to stay off the battlefield while supporting ground troops.

“As adversaries understand the importance of the HVAA to the mission’s success, as well as their vulnerabilities, the HVAA could become a likely target for emerging further extended threats,” the statement said.

To move forward and move forward, the Air Force seeks to develop a set of advanced applications and algorithms and then link them together in a monstrous interconnected system.

“The cognitive e-war ecosystem encompasses all AI / MLs used by systems and processes to allow for different levels of autonomy in different EW missions, with [Air Force Research Lab] support for military and community operations operations, including-rapid-reprogramming on the ground until the closure of self-defense in the fight, “the statement said. “In the lab or squadron, AI / ML can help with data analysis or mission data generation to increase the amount of data processed and the credibility of the data to be used operationally. This will allow further updates of the mission data when generating reports for further analysis. “

The contract action notice includes a brief description of the main tasks, each of which involves a different giant monster.

Officials saved the King of Monsters for the King of Tasks: Program Management.

Under Godzilla task, the contractors will manage the full scope of the project, including the schedule, costs and “risk for the entire contract and for each individual research project and development activity”.

Although program management is always an important task, it is even more critical for Project Kaiju, as the central mission of the contract will be to integrate all the various tools that are being developed.

“No research and development under this program will be carried out in isolation, but rather with a full examination of how new technologies can move towards full integration with large, complex systems ready to move to support. fighters “, the document states.

The other eight projects, called Kaiju, will focus on specific technologies and battlefield results:

GAMERA

Big data on cognitive e-war research: Conduct a study that examines which key tools developed by the community should be integrated into a common and modular framework for generating big data.

KING HYDOR

Software defined radio survey: The SDR code library requires a thorough study of the hardware of the target system in order to understand its operation in order to create the best possible emulation of the SDR of the target system. Purchase of target systems, development of data connections to the interface with SPT and other equipment for control and management systems, disassembly – to include destructive tests – of target systems, laboratory, field and flight tests and purchase of a candidate for hardware / software for SDRs.

SWORD BORN

Defeat from a multispectral threat: Enhance existing multispectral environments to add advanced capabilities — including model accuracy — and cover electronic support and electronic attack.

KUMONGA

RAPTURE Laboratory: Design, manufacture, test and document special purpose hardware to meet R&D requirements for size, weight and power (SWAP) limits. Perform lab and field tests on custom hardware – includes soldering surface mount PCBs, modifying PCBs, assembling custom cables, computer designing custom boxes, and assembling the final product.

MATRA

Electronic attack demonstration: Build a reconfigurable EA processing framework to assess the capabilities of EA – transmitter tracking, equipment selection, equipment generation.

KING KONG

Development of real-time algorithms: Use the description of the government-equipped hardware architecture to determine the viability of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for real-time applications.

Baragon

Electronic Warfare Radio Frequency Demonstrator (REWD) for reprogramming Next Sortie mission data: Development, development and evaluation of advanced algorithmic concepts for EW for detection, sorting, identification, differentiation and tracking of complex emitters in complex environments. These include usage algorithms developed in the Agency’s Adaptive Radar Counteraction to Advanced Research Projects, the AFRL Critical Experiment for Electronic Support, and the Naval Research Service’s Electronic Attack Reactive Measures. This effort will also include the integration of multi-source processing circuits, software control and tuning of closed-loop components, component performance comparison, analysis and visualization of products to support man / machine equipment and trust.

COLOS

Extended threat defeat: Develop new and cognitive e-warfare capabilities to generate multi-layered EA techniques leading to long-range killing networks. Use distributed detection, machine learning and AI and align with the concepts of an advanced autonomous vehicle battle management system to enable joint management and management of all domains, leading to coordinated joint fires and convergence of EW effects .

The BBC expects to award two prizes: a $ 135 million “core contract” covering all nine research areas and a smaller $ 15 million “niche contract” that will focus on the Mothra, King Kong, Baragon and Colossus projects. .

The final contract will last five years until fiscal 2026.

The contracting staff will hold an industrial day on a specific date, probably at the end of October.

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