Michael Sheehan was talking about fuzes embedded in the tube-launched, optically tracked, wireless-guided, or TOW, missile used for decades to blow up armor and fortifications.

“We build that here,” he said of the components resembling electronic rounds. “In the room over there.”

Sheehan is the chief executive of Thales Defense and Security Inc., a U.S. offshoot of the French Thales Group. The stateside company’s work spans air, land, and sea, including cockpit technologies, handheld communications gear, and sonar systems.

Its headquarters here in Maryland, some 40 minutes north by car of Washington, has long maintained a manufacturing capability to fulfill orders. Under the same roof where TOW fuzes are crafted are helmet displays for F-16, A-10 and helicopter pilots and the radios lugged around by troops.

A little less than half of the business TD&SI does is in the area of “tactical comms,” according to Sheehan. Standouts are Army leader and combat net radios, the latter of which the company is betting big on.

Where there was once only a single line for a mix of products there are now two, with one dedicated to the CNR endeavor. And portions of the facility are being rearranged or reworked for efficiency. The Army in 2022 tapped Thales and competitor L3Harris Technologies to furnish the radios to help phase out older gear and overhaul battlefield connectivity.

An initial order placed with Thales was valued at $18.2 million. The overarching indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract is worth billions more.

“They’re big numbers, and we were sort of at capacity,” Sheehan told C4ISRNET during an April visit. “We basically doubled our throughput, and we’re making more investments for that line.”

Order up

There was a thrum to the production floor. Pick-and-place machines chewed through reams of tiny components and, nearby, workers tinkered with larger pieces and parts. Headsets, battery packs, radios and more stood at varying levels of assembly. Some were moving through quality checks.

The additional line at the Clarksburg facility was established in late 2023 and has since undergone preparations for a large volume of orders. Combat net radios are slated to replace the older Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or SINCGARS, which Sheehan described as the “backbone for three, four decades of Army communications.”

Thales recently delivered a preliminary batch to the Army for inspection and testing, and the company is working with labs at Aberdeen Proving Ground to make sure “we are meeting the future needs of this program,” according to Gary Kidwell, the vice president of communications systems at TD&SI.

Aberdeen Proving Ground is home to both the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical and the Network Cross-Functional Team. PEO C3T described the CNR effort as supporting cryptographic modernization and the service’s unified network, where the tactical links of frontline troops meld with the larger, less-mobile systems used at headquarters.

“It’s not the SINCGARS radio of yesterday,” Kidwell told C4ISRNET. The new radios are software-defined, meaning updates can be quickly patched in and hardware poses fewer constraints on performance.

Thales has so far received orders for thousands of radios and expects demand for many thousands more in the coming years.

“You have a significant number of radios that, potentially, have to be replaced,” Kidwell said. “Knowing what those annual quantities look like, and even in a split, competitive market between us and L3Harris delivering capabilities, we stood up the second line.”

(An L3Harris executive, Samir Mehta, separately told C4ISRNET the company was moving in-step with the Army. Mehta described their effort as “on track,” “bullish” and considerate of lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine war.)

Radio check

Updated connectivity has for years been a priority for the Army, alongside desires to overhaul long-range precision fires, air and missile defense, and aviation.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George last year declared the network his top priority, publicly elevating what has long been considered the backbone of the service’s modernization goals. Without the ability to talk, few other things work as promised.

“Soldiers need to shoot, move and communicate,” George said at the Association of the U.S. Army convention in October. “Technology should facilitate those fundamentals, not encumber them.”

“Antenna farms and endless server stacks are conspicuous and generate too much electromagnetic signature,” he added. “If we slog around the battlefield with massive operation centers, which are difficult to set up, and often contractor-supported, we will get pounded.”

Radios play a key role in the equation. The gear can range in size and weight and complexity, and demands among different formations can vary dramatically.

Portions of the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii and the 82nd Airborne Division in North Carolina last year received tailored packages of radios, variable height antennas and the like known as the integrated tactical network.

Through in-the-field experiments, the goal was to see what worked and what didn’t, and how fighting styles influenced the answers. Island hopping and watercraft look vastly different than joint forcible entry and seized airfields. And Thales is preparing to satisfy soldiers’ asks, according to Kidwell.

“How can we merge commercial technologies with others to listen to the end user and give them what they’re asking for?” Kidwell said. “As you’ve heard the Army say, not every unit is going to fight the same way.”

Vanderbilt University on May 8 named retired Army Gen. Paul Nakasone as the director of its nascent Institute for National Defense and Global Security, describing him as one of the “nation’s founding cyberwarriors.”

Nakasone is expected to join the university June 1, shortly before the institute officially opens its doors. It will be associated with the engineering school but will welcome input from all disciplines, according to an announcement.

The move by Nakasone follows a six-year stint overseeing elite military hackers and global intelligence collection. The retired general was last year a keynote speaker at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats.

“The security landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace and in unknown directions,” Nakasone said in a statement. “To meet these challenges, it is imperative that we approach them in a highly interdisciplinary way.”

Before stepping down from CYBERCOM and the NSA, Nakasone warned that Chinese cyberattacks on critical infrastructure in Guam or other Indo-Pacific footholds could cripple U.S. military capabilities in the region. He also advocated for a renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a contentious foreign spy program.

The measure allows the U.S. government to collect and review communications like emails and text messages of foreigners abroad, including when they are in touch with Americans. Nakasone in December described it as “the most important authority that we utilize day in, day out.”

The company, which builds and manages synthetic aperture radar satellites, or SAR, this week rolled out its Vessel Classification tool, promising streamlined analysis and an automated ability to track ships across its historical archives.

Governments, outside experts and observers are increasingly tapping overhead imagery to monitor faraway fighting or materiel buildup. Its applications were exemplified in the lead up to Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and, more recently, to assess damage stemming from the Israel-Hamas war.

Unlike traditional electro-optical satellite imagery, which can be hampered by poor weather and lighting, SAR generates images with radar that can penetrate cloud cover and other adverse conditions.

David Hemphill, a senior product manager at Capella, told C4ISRNET the classification capability takes data and turns it into actionable information.

“There might be a lot of different locations you’d be monitoring that you’re not really interested in — until a warship shows up,” he said in a May 7 interview at the GEOINT conference in Florida. “It gets you that much closer to the type of answers that an analyst is looking for, without necessarily having to do as much manual labor.”

The Department of Defense and intelligence community officials have stressed the importance of maritime domain awareness, or a deep understanding of what is happening on, below or near the water’s surface. Such awareness will be critical in the Indo-Pacific, where the U.S. is preparing for potential clashes with China.

Hemphill said ordering Vessel Classification is as easy as checking an additional box on the California-based company’s platform. The tool was made possible by EMSI, a company with years of geospatial intelligence experience.

“We can get more diverse looks at maritime, and it’s consistent,” he said. “We can now tell you if it’s a warship, a submarine, a tanker, those sorts of things. And then if you’re monitoring a certain location, you can start to get trends and graphs.”

The NATO ISR Force, comprising more than 400 people working from Europe, logged 30% more flight hours in 2023 than the year prior, according to Scott Bray, the assistant secretary general for intelligence and security.

The force’s flights covered the alliance’s eastern flank, notable for its proximity to the Russia-Ukraine war; the Baltic and Black seas; and the High North following Finland’s membership, he told GEOINT conference attendees in Florida on May 7.

“The North Atlantic security environment is under threat,” said Bray, who visited Kyiv two weeks ago. “Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine has created the biggest conflict on the European continent since the Second World War, and the Euro-Atlantic is not at peace.”

The ISR Force has five of its own unmanned RQ-4D Phoenixes. The remotely piloted aircraft are based on designs by Northrop Grumman, the third-largest contractor in the world when ranked by defense-related revenue. The company earned $32.5 billion in 2022, according to Defense News Top 100 analysis.

The drones are modified to meet NATO information-sharing and communication requirements and are outfitted with surveillance sensors. Together, the force can cover more than 62,000 square-miles a day.

Bray said “the appetite, the expectations and the centrality of intelligence to NATO is only growing.” Militaries around the world are increasingly turning to unmanned technologies to monitor faraway forces and augment targeting on the front lines.

The NATO ISR Force was previously known as the NATO Alliance Ground Surveillance Force. The name change was motivated by a growing set of missions.

The force recently participated in the Nordic Response exercise, concentrated on northern Norway, Sweden and Finland. It featured more than 20,000 troops from more than a dozen countries.

“In today’s complex environment, decision-ready, actionable intelligence provided at the speed of need is one of our greatest weapons,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Andrew Clark, the ISR Force commander, said in a statement at the time. “As the alliance’s premier ISR unit, NISRF provides the foundation for informed decisions, allowing NATO to anticipate threats and react quickly.”

The Department of Defense and the intelligence community increasingly view a successful fight with Russia and China as requiring teammates: France in a battle for Europe, for example, or Australia in the Indo-Pacific. Hesitancy to share data between countries could translate to disjointed operations and confusion on the front lines.

Space Force Lt. Gen. David Miller on May 6 told attendees at the GEOINT conference in Florida that legacy processes that “stamp NOFORN on everything” are a “recipe for losing.”

The NOFORN designation indicates that information may not be released to foreign governments, organizations and non-U.S. citizens. It is one of many factors that controls who can see what and when.

“The United States does not go into conflict alone. Check your history. It does not happen,” said Miller, who took the helm at Space Operations Command in January.

His comments come as the Defense Department pursues what’s known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

In the CJADC2 vision, forces across land, air, sea, space and cyber are seamlessly connected and firepower can be coordinated over vast distances. That includes international troops, with whom the U.S. military has a history fighting alongside.

“It must be interoperable,” Miller said. “We need to have our coalition partners a part of the formation and their shooters ready to receive this information, and it goes directly to them at the same time it goes to the United States Air Force or whoever the shooter is on our side.”

Secrecy in the space domain has long posed a challenge to the Defense Department and the public looking to know more.

Congress has in the past instructed the department to review its classified space portfolio. A rewrite of space classification policy was announced earlier this year.

“Inside the Beltway, people always ask me, ‘How can I make things unclassified?’ That is not actually a thing I’m all that concerned about,” John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told reporters at the Pentagon earlier this year. “I’m concerned about reducing the classification of things where they are overclassified to the point that it hampers our ability to get work done or hampers the ability of the warfighter to do their mission.”

The anticipated deliveries follow the company’s selection to the Organic Precision Fires-Light initiative, which seeks to arm Marines with easy-to-use, explosives-laden unmanned aerial systems. Teledyne is one of three companies competing for orders on the potential $249 million OPF-L arrangement; the two others are AeroVironment and Anduril Industries. AeroVironment said an initial order was valued at nearly $9 million.

Rogue 1 weighs about 10 pounds and can be retrieved from a carrying tube. Its quadcopter features fold out, and it is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, or VTOL, meaning no additional launching gear is required.

Its interchangeable warhead — for training, for taking out troops on foot, and for blasting through armor — sits on a gimbal and is coupled with sensors. Should the drone not explode or be recalled, it can be disarmed and reused thanks to a mechanical disconnect.

Brian Bills, the company’s director of UAS products, told C4ISRNET what makes Rogue 1 stand out is its VTOL design as well as the accuracy with which troops can hit a target.

“While we only have a roughly 1 pound warhead, we’re able to put that entire 1 pound to incredible use, due to that precision that’s offered by that gimbal,” Bills said in an interview. “One of them is designed to be kind of an anti-armor, so it’ll poke a hole through steel. The other one is forward-fragmenting, think of a really advanced shotgun effect with tungsten cubes, designed for anti-personnel and soft-skinned vehicles.”

The Marine Corps has since at least 2018 sought to put armed drones in the hands of infantry squads, Marine Corps Times reported.

The popularity of such systems has only ballooned since. Footage from the Russia-Ukraine war and across the Greater Middle East showcases their deadly effect.

Rogue 1 was first supplied to U.S. Special Operations Command in 2022 for its Ground Organic Precision Strike Systems program, or GOPSS. An initial batch was also provided to the Marine Corps Warfigthing Laboratory for testing as part of the IBX-30 exercise, according to David Viens, Teledyne’s vice president of U.S. business development.

“I think the Marine Corps is going to have to do some experimentation because the capability is so novel,” he said in an interview.

“You see Ukraine videos of Javelins hitting a T-90 tank and the turret going off the tank. We don’t believe that’s necessary,” he said. “Because of the precision of this, I can actually create a firepower- or a mobility-kill on the tank without a catastrophic explosion.”

The agency, tasked with analyzing overhead imagery, monitoring buildup of foreign materiel and mapping the Earth for military purposes, on May 6 published a commercial solutions opening asking companies to pitch their products for Project Aegir, meant to deepen U.S. understanding of what’s happening around the world.

Ballooning demand for commercial analytics and unclassified intelligence tied to the Indo-Pacific is motivating the move, according to NGA leadership. The region is home to some of the world’s largest militaries, ports and economies, with China increasingly making its presence known. Washington considers Beijing its top threat and has warned of consequences should its global ambitions go uncontested.

Improved maritime domain awareness — a deep understanding of what’s happening on, below, or near the water — is needed, and the private sector holds answers, according to NGA boss Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth. The appetite for imagery and analysis is growing, as showcased by the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.

The Project Aegir solicitation “underscores our commitment to staying ahead of evolving threats and supporting frontline efforts against [illegal, unreported and unregulated] fishing, illicit trafficking, and other activities that pose threats to global security,” Whitworth said in a May 6 speech at the GEOINT conference in Florida.

He later told reporters much of the push came from Adm. John Aquilino, the former head of INDOPACOM. Adm. Samuel Paparo now holds the job.

Outcomes of the project, he added, could prove useful in hot spots such as the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Houthi rebels based in Yemen have for months targeted commercial and military vessels with drone and missile attacks. U.S warships Carney, Gravely, Laboon, Mason and Thomas Hudner have destroyed dozens of overhead threats since October.

Companies interested in the opening have until May 24 to submit responses, after which some will be selected for review by the Defense Innovation Unit. A $1.5 million pilot program could then follow, documents show.

Washington and other governments have committed billions of dollars of security aid to Ukraine, including long-range missiles, armored vehicles and secure communication devices. The jamming and spoofing that blankets fighting in Eastern Europe offers a trial against Russian tools rarely seen in action.

Michael Monteleone, the director of the Army’s Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space Cross-Functional Team, on May 5 told reporters the conflict is a “huge learning experience for us.”

“The global community has shared a lot of our technology, our weapons systems, our command-and-control systems and others, with the Ukrainians,” he said on the sidelines of the GEOINT conference in Florida. “You’re seeing that being used in real time, and it is a source of feedback.”

Monteleone’s cross-functional team, expected to shift its focus to so-called all-domain sensing in the coming months, is tasked with improving soldier access to critical sources of situational awareness, including where they are, where they are headed and when they will arrive.

Digital harassment can render such information useless.

“Even early in the war, we learned what happened when GPS just didn’t exist, and how the Ukrainian soldiers dealt with that, and how the Russian soldiers dealt with that,” Monteleone said.

The Defense Department’s spending is increasingly motivated by potential battles with Russia in Europe or China in the Indo-Pacific. Russian electronic warfare has hamstrung Excalibur precision artillery as well as an undisclosed ground-launched version of an air-to-ground armament, according to experts.

The lessons gleaned from Ukraine’s fight are making “everybody think about the problem space,” Monteleone said, “including where our investments truly need to be.”

The Army in recent years earmarked millions of dollars for sophisticated electronic warfare equipment as well as jam-resistant navigation gear.

The service inked a $318 million deal with BAE Systems for M-code GPS cards and tapped TRX Systems to produce second-generation Dismounted Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Systems, which soldiers can carry in the field. That deal was worth $402 million.

Maxar Intelligence and Lockheed Martin announced their growing partnership May 6, saying it will improve the F-35 Full Mission Simulator. The FMS, as it’s known, puts people inside a copycat cockpit with displays and other devices that replicate software, sensors and weapons used on the actual aircraft.

The simulator is a major step in training and is useful for mission rehearsal. More than 2,400 people have been schooled using the FMS, according to Lockheed.

At its core are lifelike visuals and environments that Maxar makes possible. The new agreement standardizes pricing, licensing and other requirements for its products, including Dynamic and Precision3D, which generate high-resolution images and three-dimensional models of the Earth. The joint announcement did not mention a dollar figure.

“Maxar’s geospatial products, particularly Precision3D, are critical to the success of this system,” Susanne Hake, general manager for U.S. government at Maxar, said in a statement. “They enable the highly accurate, precise simulated real-world environments that are brought to life in the FMS, creating an immersive experience that helps improve pilot safety and enhance mission success.”

The Department of Defense is increasingly interested in computerized worlds: The Army has mulled the metaverse as a recruiting tool, thinking it may appeal to younger generations, and Navy leaders have advocated for improved virtual testing techniques for information warfare and other sensitive disciplines.

Doing things digitally can save real-world materiel from wear and tear while also boosting the amount of hours one can practice. Hake described the FMS as an “industry gold standard for immersive training and mission readiness support.”

Lockheed is the world’s largest defense contractor when ranked by defense-related revenue, according to Defense News Top 100 analysis. The company earned $63 billion in 2022.

Maxar stood at No. 77, reaping $952 million. The company was tapped earlier this year for additional work on One World Terrain, considered a critical component of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment.

The defense tech company on May 6 made public its Pulsar products, which it said are capable of countering drones, geolocating forces and neutering improvised explosive devices. The equipment comes in variants for fixed use, mounting aboard ground vehicles, and integration on aircraft. A version that can be slung onto troops’ backs is also being eyed.

Electronic warfare represents a battle over the electromagnetic spectrum, which militaries rely on to communicate, discern friend from foe and guide munitions to targets. Pentagon investment in sophisticated EW atrophied in the years following the Cold War, but fighting in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East reignited interest.

“There’s a realization that the United States military is not where it needs to be, in terms of operating in this kind of high-EW threat environment, and then having the types of agile capabilities to defend our forces and fight back offensively,” Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told reporters at a briefing.

“We’re not going to go talk about ideas that we have, share glossy renderings of what they might look like in the world, and then go seek to build them and deliver them years later,” he added. “We tend to do the opposite.”

The Pulsar line has been in development since 2020 and was funded internally. It is software-defined, meaning updates can be dished out quickly and constraints imposed by hardware are lessened, and leans on advanced computing to retool for novel threats.

A war with Russia in Europe or China in the Indo-Pacific, for example, might introduce previously unseen technologies and electronic signatures. The time it takes to counter them could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

“Each system can process the data where it is, and then many systems that are networked together can learn from each other, just using small metadata,” said Sam El-Akkad, the general manager of radio frequency and EW systems at Anduril. “If one system sees something new, all the other systems are trained to see that new thing and recognize it in the future.”

While Anduril declined to specify where Pulsar has been used, deployment was described as happening across “multiple continents.”

The company in 2022 mentioned the EW equipment after winning a nearly $1 billion counter-unmanned aerial systems contract from U.S. Special Operations Command. A memo obtained by Defense News that same year described it helping to “mitigate incoming threats.”

“Pulsar is not just a figment of our imagination,” El-Akkad said. “At a high level, we’re in production of these systems, so we’re pumping them out and they are being used.”