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Leonardo has already begun low-rate production of its BriteStorm stand-in jammer for collaborative combat aircraft.
Credit: Leonardo UK
With collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) increasingly being eyed for electronic warfare (EW) tasks, Leonardo has developed a lightweight, low-cost, stand-in jamming capability that could help protect force packages.
The company’s BriteStorm payload—being unveiled at the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) annual meeting, opening Oct. 14—builds upon Leonardo's experience with Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) technologies developed for the BriteCloud decoy.
Designed to equip attritable CCAs or autonomous collaborative platforms (ACP)—as they are known in the UK—BriteCloud is a 2.5-kg (5.5-lb.) miniature techniques generator that outputs its signals through a series of low-, mid- and high-band antennas, depending on the threat systems. This allows the CCA to take on tasks performed by standoff and escort jamming platforms such as the Boeing EA-18 Growler, which are in relatively short supply.
“Traditionally, force package jamming is done with standoff jamming or escort jamming, but these are expensive crewed assets,” says Michael Lea, vice president of sales for Leonardo UK’s EW business, speaking to Aviation Week ahead of the product’s launch.
“Now there is a drive for us to get that jamming further in toward those integrated air-defense systems … the benefit is, that if you put a stand-in jammer ahead of your friendly forces, you can do some clever techniques and modulations to do some very sophisticated jamming,” Lea adds.
The theory is that the closer the jammer gets to the threat systems, the less electrical power is needed to achieve the desired effect. Its low cost means that the system can equip multiple uncrewed systems, reducing the axis on which adversary air defenses can operate.
“Using our DRFM technology means that you can be very sophisticated in the techniques that you're able to program into BriteStorm … and we can cover a very wide frequency range, and potentially prioritize a number of different threat systems at the same time,” says Mark Randall, Leonardo UK’s campaign manager for EW.
BriteStorm’s launch emerges as air forces relearn EW skills in the face of a new era of near-peer warfare and complex and sophisticated ground-based air-defense systems.
Such capabilities had largely been neglected or even lost in the era of elective conflicts and counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
BriteStorm uses the uncrewed platform’s existing electrical power system. This can influence the level of the system’s performance, but if a platform has more electrical power, then it can output a higher effective radiated power. Conversely, smaller UAVs with a lower radar cross-section will be able to get closer to the threat system and cause more disruption, Randall says.
BriteStorm is a software-defined system, allowing customers to create mission data files based on sovereign threat libraries so that new countermeasure techniques can be added throughout the system’s life.
It does not detect and analyze what technique to use, but instead works through its library and recognizes threats as its finds them—and then responds with preprogrammed modulations and techniques and projects them back out.
The expectation is that air forces are unlikely to use their CCA/ACP regularly—and that they will likely only use them during wartime, so BriteStorm has been designed to be able to sit in storage and wait for use. If necessary, however, it can be subjected to regular flying hours and harsh environments.
BriteStorm’s launch at AUSA reflects the U.S. market’s importance to Leonardo, particularly after the success of the BriteCloud decoy there, and the ongoing development of various CCA programs.
Leonardo has already performed testing of the system in the UK with the Royal Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office, including flight tests in its Tecnam P2006T trials aircraft. The OEM also has sent three demonstration payloads to the U.S. for trials.
Fit checks have also been completed on several potential CCA/ACP platforms, and Leonardo has begun low-rate initial production as it works to finalize the first sales of the system to an undisclosed customer.
“We have got live inquiries from all the primes in the U.S.—from primes that you expect us to have discussions within the various CCA programs,” Lea says.
Leonardo says it also expecting to see further interest in BriteStorm from customers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.
Development of payloads for CCA is already beginning to gather pace. In the U.S., New York-based SRC, Inc. has developed an electronic support measures capability for CCAs.
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