C4ISRNet - Media for the Intelligence-Age Military | C4ISRNET

US Air Force conducts final test of Lockheed’s hypersonic missile

migration — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:34:44 +0000

This story was updated March 20, 2024, with a statement from Lockheed Martin.

The U.S. Air Force on Sunday carried out what is expected to be the final test of the hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon.

The service did not say whether the test was successful.

In a statement to Defense News, an Air Force spokesperson said a B-52H Stratofortress carried out the test of the fully operational ARRW prototype, referred to as an all-up round test, after taking off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The test was carried out at the Reagan Test Site, an Army facility in the Marshall Islands.

The Air Force declined to identify the test’s objectives, but said it “gained valuable insights into the capabilities” of the Lockheed Martin-made hypersonic weapon.

“This test acquired valuable, unique data and was intended to further a range of hypersonic programs,” the spokesperson said. “We also validated and improved our test and evaluation capabilities for continued development of advanced hypersonic systems.”

In a follow-up statement, Lockheed Martin said it is ready to deliver ARRW technology or other hypersonic capabilities to the Air Force.

“Following the recent end-to-end flight test, Lockheed Martin has completed the test program with full confidence in ARRW’s revolutionary capabilities, and we stand ready to deliver this fully-qualified, hypersonic solution to the U.S. Air Force,” the company said. “Building on ARRW’s industry-leading technology and testing success, Lockheed Martin can quickly deliver additional hypersonic-strike assets that can be rapidly deployed to the U.S. military.”

ARRW is one of the Air Force’s two main programs to develop an air-launched hypersonic weapon that could fly faster than Mach 5 and be highly maneuverable. China and Russia have invested heavily in their own hypersonic weapons, and the Pentagon is under pressure from Congress to show more progress toward fielding the United States’ own capabilities.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall last year told lawmakers the ARRW program had “struggled” in testing, shortly after a March 2023 test failed.

Air Force officials said earlier this month that ARRW’s upcoming test would be its last, and the service plans to wrap up its rapid prototyping program this year. The service requested no funding to procure ARRW, nor conduct any research and development, in 2025.

Kendall has sounded a more optimistic tone about the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program, and the fiscal 2025 budget request proposes $517 million to keep developing that program. The HACM weapon, developed by Northrop Grumman and RTX subsidiary Raytheon, is an air-breathing missile that the Air Force said would be smaller than ARRW and able to fly along “vastly different trajectories” than the boost-glide ARRW.

The Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics told reporters earlier this month that the service will study the results of the final ARRW test to help it decide what hypersonic capabilities it will need.

Software sustainment: A new mission at Tobyhanna Army Depot

migration — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 16:38:05 +0000

Tobyhanna Army Depot, the Department of Defense’s leading provider in C4ISR systems, is undertaking a new mission: software sustainment.

One of the problems befalling the Army’s software sustainment community is maintaining information assurance vulnerability alert (IAVA) compliance. This involves disseminating a message through the force to identify a vulnerability in a piece of software, which in turn directs certain activities to be taken to mitigate the risks the vulnerability might pose.

Compliance with this effort, which also includes strict timelines as it relates to identifying the criticality of the vulnerability risks, was overwhelming software engineers in the Software Engineering Center located at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Skilled engineers were burdened with simple patching functions as opposed to conducting other critical tasks.

Tobyhanna, in partnership with the Software Engineering Center, is now pursuing an organic capability to tackle this IAVA compliance issue associated with software sustainment across the various mission systems. By using an organic workforce on software sustainment — a government workforce as opposed to contractor support — it provides a lot more flexibility, officials at Tobyhanna told C4ISRNET.

“What we’re trying to achieve through this flexibility is instead of having a security analyst dedicated to supporting system A and another for system B and the same thing with testers, [we are] pooling resources,” said Daniel Soderberg, chief software systemic division and director of production engineering at Tobyhanna. “I might have a pool of testers and one tester can support two, three, four, five systems. Now you can reduce overall support cost for these systems in the future.”

Tobyhanna is taking the IAVA messages provided to them from Cyber Command to develop a corrective process, taking action for the current supporter software baseline, packaging it up and sending it back to the Software Engineering Center to disseminate to the larger force.

What this component of Tobyhanna’s new software support undertaking does is twofold: It releases the burden on engineers so they can focus on other aspects of software support. They are also accelerating the effort, which typically was released on a quarterly basis. These vulnerability alerts come out as often as every month to every week, and if it takes a quarter to develop the update. Meanwhile, those assets are vulnerable in the field, which is a big risk. Tobyhanna is shortening that time to one month.

Another big effort Tobyhanna is undertaking involves automated testing of software fixes. They have automated systems capable of conducting tests of software systems in less than an hour, meaning these can be released in the same day to the Software Engineering Center. The center will then replicate that how it sees fit and release it to the field. This capability is huge, officials said, especially in terms of shrinking the time it takes to get these updates to the field.

While from a technical standpoint, patches can be implemented in a matter of hours to fix critical vulnerabilities, the difficulty in disseminating software vulnerability patches in mission systems or other systems used by war fighters is that some systems are not interconnected, some systems are tactical and injecting software patches into a larger system might adversely affect the larger system.

Tobyhanna Army Depot, the Pentagon’s leading provider of C4ISR, is embarking on a new mission set — software sustainment for the Army. (Daniel Woolfolk/Staff)

Software patches must somehow be delivered to the system, either through a connected system or a USB drive. For some tactical systems — which might be in extremely austere environments that are hard to get to — delivering a software patch to them is a challenge. Additionally, for larger mission systems, the patch that fixes a small, isolated portion must be tested to ensure it does not break the larger system or connected systems. By virtue of the disparate nature of some of these networked systems, Soderberg said a zero-day vulnerability exploited tomorrow won’t hit all the systems in the force.

These collective efforts at Tobyhanna will also contribute to reducing support costs. “As we get more dependent on software in our systems, the costs are growing exponentially and we have to find ways to do things efficiently to reduce those costs,” Soderberg said. “If you just look at the software cost — so you’ve had this growth in software, now there is a growth in software costs that accompany this. The cost to provide that software support is growing at a rate we can’t support.” This can be in the way of manpower, software licensing costs or labor costs, among others, he said.

In addition to work being done at the depot in northern Pennsylvania, it’s beneficial to provide field software engineers in person at posts stretching from Korea to Germany as well as Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, Tobyhanna’s commander, Col. Gregory Peterson, told C4ISRNET.

“As a part of that, too, we have a worldwide footprint that provides software support to the field stretching all the way from Korea across the Pacific … over into Europe, and we have folks deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait to help provide that support as well,” he said. “So that is an area example that the technology is changing with cyber concerns about cyber and patching and making sure software is current and able to not be modified and messed with. That is an opportunity for the depot that we are beginning to provide that support-to-support readiness.”

Marine Corps radars serviced at Tobyhanna Army Depot

migration — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 16:23:39 +0000

Despite being an Army facility, Tobyhanna Army Depot provides service across the joint force. An example of joint systems worked on at Tobyhanna are the TPS-63 medium-range radar and the TPS-59 long-range radar.

Officials told C4ISRNET during a walk through of the facility that these systems leave Tobyhanna in better condition than when they came into be serviced. The entire life cycle of repair — which includes testing of the hardware before it’s sent back into the field — of systems is done here at Tobyhanna, officials said. The work done at Tobyhanna, in fact, extends the life cycle of systems past their original timeline.

Check out our behind-the-scenes look at the depot.

Radio work at Tobyhanna Army Depot

migration — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 16:11:24 +0000

Tobyhanna Army Depot provides C4ISR support in the way of refurbishment, sustainment and logistics to the joint force. Some of the systems included in this effort are radios.

In a unique opportunity, C4ISRNET was invited to Tobyhanna to view these systems and the workforce that supports them.

Some of these systems include the SINCGARS radios — the primary ground force radios, Harris PRC-117 satellite radios for ground vehicles, the Enhanced Position Location Reporting System and the vehicular intercom system.

In the last two years, Tobyhanna worked on 20,000 of these systems, as they are in every tactical vehicle in the field. Tobyhanna will be supporting these until 2020.

Tobyhanna also works on legacy, analog systems such as the GRC-171, an airborne system used by the Air Force. According to personnel at the depot, this technology still used by the military is from 1965, which is what makes Tobyhanna’s work on analog and legacy systems so unique. Many of these systems are difficult to repair or even acquire parts for, but Tobyhanna can perform the work.

When systems are received at the depot for repair or sustainment after being in the field, they are completely overhauled inside and out with the latest software updates as required, then sent back to the field, officials said.

Tobyhanna Army Depot provides sustainment and repair of handheld, vehicle-mounted and airborne radios. (Daniel Woolfolk/Staff)

A behind-the-scenes look at Tobyhanna Army Depot

migration — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 16:06:34 +0000

Tobyhanna Army Depot, located near the Poconos Mountains in northern Pennsylvania, serves as the Defense Department’s leading provider of C4ISR systems. C4ISRNET had a unique opportunity to tour the campus, which spreads across 1,336 acres and is the largest industrial employer in the area, and view the systems for which Tobyhanna conducts support — not just for the Army, but also joint force and coalition partners.

“We are the Department of Defense’s premier C4ISR support provider. Providing overhaul, providing light fabrication, providing logistics support for everything from handheld radios all the way up to sophisticated joint threat emitters and radars, and we are branching into software support for the Army,” the depot’s commander, Col. Gregory Peterson, said in an interview.

The depot provides support for anything that runs this gamut, he said. “We’re more than just an Army provider, about half of our workload is other services. We provide that same level of support for the Army, but [also] for the Air Force, Marine Corps [and] a small portion of the Navy.”

Support to both joint force and coalition partners is critical as branches of the U.S. armed forces will never deploy alone. “The ability of everybody working on the same type of radios, using these same type of radios, as an example, is absolutely key and critical so everybody can talk together, everybody can see the same things together, everybody functions off the same common operating picture,” Peterson said, regarding how Tobyhanna contributes to joint readiness. “By doing that and not having disparate sets of equipment … helps with that interoperability.”

Peterson added that there is a great rapport with the other services. “We get together and do line-by-line reviews of the equipment that’s being worked on, the status, when it’s going to be ready,” he said.

Tobyhanna Army Depot is the Pentagon’s leading provider of C4ISR. C4ISRNET was invited for a unique tour to view the support Tobyhanna provides to the Army, joint force and coalition partners. (Daniel Woolfolk/Staff)

As the military is making strategic and operational planning adjustments focused on more dynamic environments — such as a focus on multi-domain operations — Peterson said Tobyhanna’s role in this new world is to stay ahead of technology. “You’ve got to understand the environment and what the technological changes are that are coming down the pipe,” he said. “So you’ve got to see the big, broad spectrum of this is what technology’s doing, then you’ve got to look at what are the services doing specifically with that technology, or not, and how are the services trying to harness that technology to their advantage.”

The next step, Peterson said, is to look internally and determine whether or not Tobyhanna is postured to support these new programs with new technology from a workforce, training, facility, tools, equipment supply chain and logistics standpoint.

Tobyhanna Army Depot conducts complete overhaul of critical Air Force simulator

migration — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 15:54:18 +0000

The Air Force’s Joint Threat Emitter is considered a critical training element for pilot readiness. This system provides a realistic combat training environment for air crews by emitting a variety of signals to pilots flying overhead that simulate a number of domestic and foreign threats such as heat seeking missiles or radar.

At Tobyhanna Army Depot, personnel conducted a complete overhaul of the system, stripping it to the bare frame for repairs. This includes top to bottom work on the wiring, the computers and the electronics. This process, officials said, is targeted at a year and a half.

The Air Force’s Joint Threat Emitter is considered a critical training element for pilot readiness. At Tobyhanna Army Depot, personnel conduct a complete overhaul of the system, stripping it to the bare frame for repairs. (Daniel Woolfolk/Staff)

Unique chamber saves military in repair cycle costs

migration — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 18:27:13 +0000

Tobyhanna Army Depot, the Defense Department’s leading C4ISR support provider, is home to a one-of-a-kind chamber capable of simulating a range of munitions to test radars undergoing repairs.

The depot, located in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, is charged with reconstituting C4ISR equipment after it is damaged in the field. Upon repair, these systems must be tested to ensure they will work once shipped back to front lines. Previously, certain systems, such as lightweight counter-mortar radars that include the TPQ-50 and TPQ-49, had to be sent to the outdoor test range in Yuma, Arizona, in which live mortars would be fired to test the system.

But that process is expensive and can take vital sensors out of commission for too long.

Tobyhanna’s test chamber is capable of simulating a large variety of munitions — rockets, artillery and mortar — allowing for repair and testing to be conducted at the same facility.

“We don’t put it in any simulated mode. [The radar] thinks it is in a certain area being tested. We simulate fire towards it, artillery and rockets,” Constantine Georgiades, a production engineering technician, told C4ISRNET in an exclusive tour of Tobyhanna Army Depot. “We use that test to qualify the radar at the end once it is repaired. Once it is tested here it goes back to theater or back to our unit that sent it in for repair.”

In eight months, the chamber paid for itself, Georgiades said, adding that during the surge of troops overseas, they were pushing radars through the facility very rapidly. “It was amazing how quick the savings added up,” he said.

“The initial cost of this room is $7-8 billion. Through testing we recoup that money in about eight months,” he said. “It costs roughly around $35,000 back then to test these. We test at a fraction of that cost. … [R]ange time [and] frequency restrictions aren’t a problem here.”

Additionally, without having to send these radars to Yuma, they can get them back to the force much faster. “The turnaround time is fairly quick. Once the radar is repaired we test it. We can have it turned around and shipped out either to theater or back to the unit that sent the radar in,” he added.

Foam cones surround the entire chamber, which creates a clean radio frequency area and simulates a large, outdoor environment that tricks the radar into thinking it’s outside.

“Because we’re in such a compact space, if this was exposed to any metal, the radar pulse would be reflected back to the receiver and blind it or cause the radar damage,” Georgiades said. “The nice thing about that is the radar becomes very sensitized to the clean environment and we can tell if there are any issues with the receive path on the lower end because if you put it in a cluttered environment and there was a problem already in a clean environment, the radar wouldn’t track properly.”

The TPQ-49 radar is man-packable, allowing war fighters to carry it where needed and mount it on a tripod or vehicle. The larger TPQ-50 is heavier but still packable and can be mounted to the back of a Humvee for quick response. Georgiades said these radars use an electronically scanned beam that does a 360-degree scan so many times per second and looks for targets in the air. Every time a target is in the air it starts to trace where the target came from and collect that data; it can track up to 20 targets in the air at one time.

The nice thing about this radar, he said, is it can be deployed quickly and in small, urban areas where indirect fire is an immediate threat to the soldier. The radar will help find where that fire is coming from and help the user eliminate it, he said.

These systems are being provided to Ukrainian forces, who are battling Russian-backed separatists in the eastern portion of the country. “Two years ago under a presidential order, the older version of the 49s, which are no longer in service anywhere, were going to be demilled,” said Georgiades, adding that the U.S. gave 20 to the Ukrainian army. A few months ago the Marine Corps — which is the primary U.S. military service that uses this system — deployed 10 of the newer 49s to Ukraine.

These systems are “extremely useful in the environment they are fighting, especially in the urban area,” Georgiades said, as forces can deploy these in a perimeter and create a wall from which they can watch indirect fire. The older versions only had a range of 5 kilometers, which can be a little close for comfort. The newer versions, by contrast, double this range, allowing for a safer distance.

The Ukrainians are finding these systems very useful and want a lot more, Georgiades said. While these systems can be used for other functions, C4ISRNET is not disclosing them at the request of military personal for operational security reasons.