Future weapon engagement

Land May 31, 2017

Companies are coming together at the EW Europe 2017 conference to discuss the changing nature of weapons and responses.

EWOS Technical Sales Manager for Cohort plc company MASS, Paul Bradbeer, is set to lead a discussion on the challenges faced through the development of hypersonic weapons and how to counter them.

Paul will say that EW must evolve to counter these challenges, which will leave humans too slow to manage effective platform defence.

He maintains that future weapons engagements will present scant warning cues to platforms, and will be delivered so fast that traditional man-in–the loop responses will be unable to cope with them.

Hypersonic missiles will place the advantage with the aggressor, and with current platforms reliant on legacy command and human controlled systems of decision-making and communication, the risk to these assets is increasing.

The key to countering these threats Paul believes is machines: “In future, we will need machines to interpret these indicators and assess the likely sequence of events. The response could involve machine-led re-configuration of combat systems and initiation of countermeasures,”

By using machine learning to automate EW responses will maximise defensive capability by exploiting every piece of information available to the platform: establishing and filling platform information gaps, using data to locate your position in someone else’s Kill Chain, and then taking effective action to disrupt the Kill Chain.

Another essential element of future EW Operational Support will be incorporating cyber techniques into our toolkit in the same way that we have with traditional Electronic Countermeasures.

“We recognise the need to expand the current narrow range of electronic countermeasure technologies and incorporate disciplines like cyber. At MASS, we have all the core skills in terms of traditional countermeasures expertise and we are working to develop our ability further to integrate cyber as part of Threat Vulnerability Analysis and Countermeasure Development,” says Bradbeer.

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Cohort EW EW Europe 2017 hypersonic missiles MASS