Overcoming EW Threats

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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Welcome everybody to the Overcoming EW Threats panel. Every year, the Director of National Intelligence, with support from the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus, publishes the annual threat assessment of the U.S. intelligence community. And that report outlines the most serious and direct threats to the interests of the United States. In the report from February 2024, it outlines a world that is increasingly uncertain. And it’s defined by a global order that is as fragile as it is nuanced. Defined, and it kind of weaves together an insurmountable web of global threats. According to this assessment, and I quote, it said, “The conversions of these emerging technologies is likely to create breakthroughs, which could lead to rapid development of asymmetric threats.” Unquote. So as the world continues to advance technologies, EW, or electromagnetic warfare, is front and center. And so that’s why today we’re going to talk about overcoming EW threats. So we have three panelists that are going to talk about that today. So our first panelist, James Conroy, who goes by Jim, is the Vice President of the Electronic Warfare and Targeting Business Unit at the Navigation, Targeting, and Survivability Division of Northrop Grumman’s Mission Systems Sector, focusing on EW and targeting capabilities for the DOD, federal agencies, and international partners. Welcome, Jim.

James Conroy:

Thank you, Colonel. So I’m really proud to be here representing Northrop Grumman, as well as with my associates that are also former Northrop Grumman employees. So it’s always great to be up here. I’ve been at Northrop for over 20 years. I’m leading a team of over 1,500 team members at this point in time. You know what? Protecting the warfighter is absolutely critical. And countering EW is essential to making that protection happen. And that’s not something we take lightly at Northrop Grumman.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Thank you very much, Jim. Now on the other end of the panel, we have Pat Creighton. He’s the Vice President and General Manager of Electronic Warfare Airborne Combat Systems at L3Harris. He is responsible for managing and delivering a portfolio of multi-domain EW products for both domestic and international customers, and overseeing investments in next-generation EW. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from Bucknell University, and an MBA from the University of Maryland. Welcome, Pat.

Patrick Creighton:

Thank you, Colonel. Very excited to be here.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

And finally, we have Amanda Whites. She is the Senior Director of Strategic Captures at Parry Labs. She drives innovation in aerospace and defense, with expertise in digital transformation and modular open systems architecture. She was at Northrop Grumman for nearly 11 years before she left to go to Parry. And she excels -and she holds an advanced aerospace engineering degree from NC State and Georgia Tech. Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Whites:

Thank you. I’m honored to be here. I may not be at Northrop anymore, but I do have the perspective from a larger prime. But now I represent a much smaller company, roughly 250 people. So now I focus more on the software integration side of EW as opposed to the hardware.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

And hopefully we’ll get that -we’ll get to that part today. Because while hardware is important, if you don’t have the software that ties it all together, it’s really not going to go anywhere. So hopefully we’ll get to that. But let’s go ahead and start with our first question here. With a renewed emphasis on competition and speed, give me one thing the industry can do and one thing that the government can do to accelerate capabilities to the warfighter. Let’s go ahead and start with you, Jim.

James Conroy:

Well, to me, it’s all about collaboration. And collaboration is critical. And the reason it’s so critical is because collaboration results in efficiency. And efficiency is what results in speed. And what do I mean by that? Collaboration between industry and the government is absolutely essential to make sure everyone’s aligned and has one goal that we’re going after. All right? And once we have that alignment, that gives us the efficiency. And we all know the shortest path between two points is a straight line, and that’s the speed. So it’s all about collaboration.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Amanda, do you have a different perspective on that?

Amanda Whites:

I definitely agree with collaboration. But on a more focused level, I would say it’s paying attention to the joint standards and sticking to them. So one of the things that we run into oftentimes is that companies tend to want to get relief from requirements. But when it comes to integration, when we’re looking at EW or adding capability, you know, OMS UCI has become a huge focus of the Air Force. Space Force is also adopting UCI. The Navy, different forces have adopted it in different ways. But as you’re able to adopt more capability at a rapid pace, as long as you’re aligned at the interface, that ultimately becomes what helps you do it more rapidly. So I would say on both sides, adhering to the standards, understanding the standards, and enforcing them is really what’s going to help you continue to increase that pace.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

And how do you think we should get to those standards? Are those based strictly on government requirements? Are those the state of the industry, the state of the world, is that industry? Can you expand on that a little bit more?

Amanda Whites:

The standards are highly collaborative. So they’re, for example, Open Architecture Collaborative Working Group. Give a shout out to my old team out there. They’re meeting this week in El Segundo. But that is an industry collaborative standard. It may be government led, but it is having input all across the industry from Andorra to Northrop. L3 was a part of it. And so I think it should be joint between both the customer and those that are doing the integration.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Thanks, Amanda. Pat?

Patrick Creighton:

Yeah, so kind of building off what both my colleagues here have talked about, you know, it’s collaboration and jointly defining requirements, right? And figuring out what the requirements that are must-haves versus objectives. And really what I think the government could do a better job of is tailoring those requirements that enable more use of commercial, off-the-shelf technologies. We talk a lot about that, but, you know, many times we find some of those technologies don’t fit within those very unique bespoke requirements, right? So if we embrace that, I do think we will be able to field faster. I think the other opportunity is leveraging partner investments, international partner investments, right? There’s a lot of money being put into defensive systems, defensive products. We are in an environment that’s highly budget constrained. So leveraging that investment to take kind of some of those technologies being developed with other people’s money and ingesting them into our DOD environment I think would go a long way to accelerating capabilities. From an industry perspective, I think we’ve got to embrace as open standards, right? We’ve got to get away from the highly proprietary systems. We have to be able to adopt best of breed. And really we’ve got to design our systems for future capability upgrades, really a PQ die kind of approach. We can’t be constantly relying on brand new systems every five to ten years.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

That is definitely true. I know that we have seen that for our systems that we have at Mission Delta 3, some of our systems, we continually do some upgrades. But as we’re moving forward, as we’re looking at what EW and how it’s evolving and how it’s evolving in the world, we really are looking at, hey, how do we get those systems? How do we meet those threats as quick as we can to bring those onto our systems so that we can help support the joint way farther? Definitely. Thanks for those answers. So I already talked about Mission Delta 3, which is the best Mission Delta, just in case Andy Menchner is in here. Sorry, second best Delta. But because we were both the first two integrated Mission Deltas, and those came about in 2023. And what that did is it brought together acquisitions, operations, intelligence, and cyber for a mission area under one commander. And so, oh, and then also sustainment. So acquisitions, but specifically the sustainment part of acquisitions. And so as we’re doing that, as we’re trying to bring all these different disparate parts together, has industry adapted to this new structure? I think, Pat, we’ll start with you.

Patrick Creighton:

All right, so I think this is all about kind of breaking down silos, at least within the government side, improving communications, really driving towards more holistic contracting, cradle to grave, right? Thinking about the entire life cycle of a program. One of the advantages of this new model is it provides a more instant feedback loop. It provides the operators a voice to the requirement makers. It provides the government a more direct voice to industry. Enables us to quickly tailor requirements in the case of programs that are already being executed. It supports more agile development mindsets where throughout the development process, we might make trades. It might be trading capabilities, it might be trading cost, it might be trading schedule. So I think bringing all those communities together is ultimately really good for the warfighter and really good for industry.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Sounds great. Amanda, do you have some more thoughts on that?

Amanda Whites:

Honestly, I think he summed it up very well. It’s really the feedback loop was gonna be my emphasis there.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Do you have anything else, Jim?

James Conroy:

I guess what I’d just say is, it’s also stakeholder management. So on the stakeholder management side, you always have these different voices, but having one person that’s consistent there to take and manage all of those, I think is critical. Because once you have that stakeholder management, you’re not having to do the reset when you transition from one leader to another leader. In industry, we’re doing the same thing. We’re trying to ensure that we have the same leader that’s really owning something from cradle to grave. Because when you have that, now you can make sure that we’re taking and thinking about all the different aspects of the product lifecycle, and you’re taking and putting that plan in place at the beginning of it.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Yeah, hopefully if we have these open architecture systems, they won’t actually go to grave. We’ll just keep upgrading them, right?

James Conroy:

True, very true.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

There you go, okay. So now we’ve talked a little bit about systems, but I think something that is very neglected in a lot of programs, not just EW, but especially here, is actually testing these EW systems and the components, because it does really require a flexible framework so that you can integrate advanced signal generation, real-time analysis, and seamless synchronization to simulate real-world threats and validate that signal integrity. So how can solving EW challenges in simulation enable mission success? Amanda, do you have some thoughts on that?

Amanda Whites:

This is a meaty question. All right, so I think one of the first steps that we can do is to continue to increase the fidelity of digital twins. So it is somewhat questionable to take a system like EW and trust that it is just going to work when you’re looking at software-based testing. However, the fidelity of testing has significantly improved as the fidelity of the digital twins has continued to improve. So I think it’s getting to a point where we trust our models, and I think we’re starting to get to a point where the fidelity is there so that we can actually go and replicate that in the field.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Jim, do you have something you would like to say?

James Conroy:

To me, EW is not an evolving situation, but EW is really turning into a revolutionary type situation. We need our EW’s test capabilities and our EW systems to be extensible and adaptable, all right, because the environment is going to continuously change. But that’s going to require us to think about the testing at the very beginning in modeling and simulation, as you identified, as well as bringing it all the way through to the very end in the training events. In Northrop, we’re taking and looking at both parts of that, and we see there’s two sides of the same coin. On the test side, with our CSIMs and our joint threat emitters, we’re really taking and making sure we’re keeping pace with the threat, where it is today and where it’s going to be going tomorrow and generations to come, as well as looking at the programs of record and how do we make sure we have that same adaptability and actually designing tests into the systems so that you can get all of the information out of those systems, you can take and do the analyses, and then when you find anomalies, you can actually go off into the digital environment, make the changes, and have the confidence that it’s going to be replicated into deployed systems.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

That sounds great. Pat?

Patrick Creighton:

Yeah, building off that a little bit here, you know, the traditional way we went about testing, you know, at a range with a single threat, I mean, we all know how to do that, but that doesn’t represent a modern battle space. The modern battle space is complex, it’s dense, it’s agile. You know, there’s a lot of limitations to physically testing systems, right? You’ve got range availability, you’ve got the test assets themselves, the threats, you may not be able to replicate, you have environmental factors that you’re kind of rolling the dice with when you go test, you have frequency restrictions, right, from the FCC domestically, non-wartime modes, and then, of course, you have cost, right? I mean, to go replicate a modern battle space would be cost prohibitive. It would be basically impossible. So, you know, really, we do have to rely on these digital models, these digital twins, you know, replicating things in simulations to actually, you know, represent the modern battle space. You know, with it moving so fast, you know, these digital twins enable us to quickly adapt, right? Jim talked about, you know, kind of deploying capabilities to the field. These are things we’re working on in L3Harris, right? We’ve demonstrated them, but basically ingesting unknown signals from the field, you know, beaming it up through the cloud back to some remote operating site, ingesting it into AI/ML models, right, running simulations, adapting mission data files, redeploying that information back through the cloud to keep things relevant and survivable.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Yeah, it sounds great. I’m just thinking about all my operators on how they, when we do, I mean, they are involved in testing in some, to some extent, but then it’s afterward when we have to get them ready to go to the field and to deploy and to actually take those systems downrange and to meet the threat is we want to make it as real as possible. And so I think that is key, that adaptability of being able to change that range and doing it in different ways, right? ‘Cause there is some, there is something to be said about, you know, doing closed-loop testing, doing closed-loop training, but I don’t think anything can really simulate that live range and what that live digital environment looks like so that they can react against what we would consider a thinking adversary, right? So that they can actually, so that we know for sure, we can go, yep, they can do that mission.

James Conroy:

Absolutely, but I think that’s one of the places where that joint threat emitter is so critical for at least the airborne environment where you have a mobile test equipment that you can move around the range, set up different scenarios, and that same test emitter can actually replicate multiple types of threat systems out there. So you can go to the range day one, take and run against one type of a scenario with one type of threat lay down, and day two, be in a completely different environment. So it’s not only, as you said, the testing, the formal testing, prepping through DTOT, but then training, so the training allows the tactics and the comfort factors such that when people are going down range, it’s muscle memory at that point in time. It’s no longer, let me get surprised about what things are gonna look like or how the platform’s gonna react.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Yeah, that sounds fabulous. That’s what we really want as we do that. We have really witnessed an exponential growth of space and cyber technologies that rely on electromagnetic signals, bringing that renewed sense of urgency to the EW field. What has most influenced the modern challenges within the industry? And I think Amanda, we’ll start with you.

Amanda Whites:

So classically, when you look at doing upgrades to systems, this’ll come as no shock to anybody, but they used to be hardware-based, and now we’ve migrated over to doing software-based updates. We’re in a digital age. I think one of the big things that we run into is ensuring that when we’re making updates to our systems, we’re doing them in a way that is certifiable and partitioned in a way that you can verify that any updates you make to that system or any changes in capability don’t affect the rest of the system. So I think part of it is ensuring that we have the trust, that we have that certification in place, that any updates we make may not be affecting other parts of our EW system. And I think that that’s something that our core infrastructure within our software and how we’re architecting is becoming crucial as we’re able to push over-the-air updates.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

That’s great. Jim?

James Conroy:

I would say systems engineering approach is actually at the forefront of where we need to be right now, because there has been exponential growth, and that’s great, but we need to have the systems engineering mindset to make sure that we’re thinking about the requirements up front, we’re decomposing those requirements into the hardware and the software aspects, we’re going all the way down the V diagram, getting it through to design reviews, bringing it all the way back up. And not only when we’re done with that, but then how are we taking it and looking at it from a systems engineering where you have individual capabilities, but those individual capabilities are good, but they don’t support the mission unto themselves. So you need the systems engineering now to look at it from a mission perspective and how we’re gonna tie in all of these capabilities to really enable the missions that we have to go off and do. And we’re seeing that on the airborne platforms, we’re seeing it in space, because not one provider is gonna provide the best of the best capabilities. And ultimately, that’s what our warfare needs, is the best mission capabilities.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

That’s actually a really good point as we look together, ’cause we talk a lot about systems and how the systems are just out in the field and they’re doing their mission, but if we can’t control them, if we can’t deconflict them, if we can’t make sure that we’re doing what we need to do to support those warfighters on the ground, then it’s really for nothing.

James Conroy:

Exactly, I mean, that’s where DT and OT is clearly separate quite often in airborne domain, right? DT says, yeah, I met my spec, which is good, but does it really enable the warfighter to go do the operational things they need to do? And quite often, at Northrop, we’re looking at platforms and really have to remind some of our younger engineers that the platform’s purpose is not just to support an EW system. The EW system has to support the platform. So it has to integrate with all the other subsystems on the platform to make sure the platform is still performing the missions it needs to perform.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

That’s true, I mean, as much as important as we think EW is at Mission Delta III and in other places, it does have to be integrated with everything else, that is true. Pat, do you have some thoughts?

Patrick Creighton:

Yeah, so I’ll say access to some of these high-tech commercial technologies has really changed the landscape. So you look at GPUs, AI, cloud computing, direct RF conversion, these are things that are no longer just available to the US, to the DOD. They’re available to everyone, including our adversaries, right? And all of these technologies have effectively helped them close that capabilities gap, right? And they don’t come, they’re not developing under the same rules, regulations, standards that we are developing. So time to field has become a real challenge here. In order to close that gap, again, we’ve gotta get away from these highly bespoke systems. We have to change the way we develop it. We can’t take five, 10-year development timelines, right? So it goes back to, again, embracing the cost technology, evaluating requirements, conducting those trades between cost, capabilities, schedules, embracing a way, taking best of breed, working with partners, maybe non-traditional partners. All of those things will help cut down our time to field and still give us that competitive edge.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

That is something that we’ve come in, as we are that integrated Mission Delta, and as we are part of both that development, working with people as we’re doing that development, and we’re bringing those systems online, I think sometimes that’s hard for operators or people who are, you’re used to that traditional acquisition model where, hey, the system’s done, here you go, and you get that system. Whereas here, what you’re saying is, hey, you’re only gonna get, hey, what’s the most important capabilities that you need right now? That’s what you’re gonna get first, and then we’ll incrementally upgrade that or make some changes based on what the threat looks like. I think that’s a hard mind shift for some of the operators and some of those people in the Delta, where they’re, especially where they’re used to being the operator in the loop, and some of these technologies are moving to more on the loop sort of technologies as well.

Patrick Creighton:

Yeah, and I go back to, I kind of say, think about all the things industry has developed, that once we get through that development cycle, that sit on the shelf for years before they’re actually fielded. Not because they need more work or more certifications, but there isn’t a plan, the government doesn’t always have a plan to get them pushed out to the war fighters who need them immediately. We’ve gotta close that gap too.

James Conroy:

I also think it loops back to the old adage, better is the enemy of good enough, and that 80/20 rule concept, right? We need to get capabilities out when they’re gonna be operationally relevant, and in order to do that, we can’t wait for perfection. Perfection will come over time, but we need to get the capabilities to the field in supporting the war fighters.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

I think that’s definitely true, and then it goes back to something that Amanda said, where we were talking about standards, that hey, if it meets these certain standards, we can easily deploy it to the field, so we can easily get it to those war fighters. Pat, you talked a little bit about technology, you stole my thunder a little bit on this next question, but we’ll go ahead and go with it anyway. With the advent of 5G, the internet of things, and then emerging technologies like quantum computing, how do you see the role of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and then of course, my favorite, quantum computing? I said it twice in this question, just so you knew it was there. In the development of future EMS capabilities. And we’ll go ahead and start with you now, Pat.

Patrick Creighton:

All right, so I’ll try to answer a little differently here, but generative AI has really changed everything, right? No longer do we need to deploy systems with a prior knowledge of the actual battle space. We talked about how those systems can adapt, whether it’s feedback loops, or thinking on the fly, right? The battle space has expanded, not just in terms of complexity, but also range, right? So now you think about it, and where an operator used to kind of have a much smaller sphere of responsibility to make decisions on, that has expanded vastly, and it’s gotten infinitely more complex. It’s unrealistic to think humans can actually make all those decisions. So warfighters now need to rely on AI. So you talked about in the loop versus on the loop, right? So taking the warfighter out from in the loop, making those decisions, and putting them on the loop to let the AI make the decision, and the warfighter decide if they want to override the decision, is gonna be a far more effective approach. Without AI, we can’t deploy EW capabilities at scale. I mean, there’s just too much happening in the battle space. Now this does come with complexities, and this was briefly hit on earlier, right? How do you build trust in these AI systems, right? So what data models are they using to learn, right? You need to understand that. How do you build in transparency? How are they making decisions, right? What is gonna make that operator comfortable that the AI is gonna choose the best possible outcome based on some subset of probabilities? So having transparency into that decision process is gonna be critical. And then there has to be some sort of moderation or oversight, right? How do you avoid injecting human biases into these models, intentional or unintentional, right? So making sure we keep these models clean, or constantly revisiting them, and can trust them to make the right decisions in the battle space.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

I think that’s something that the industry as a whole is battling with on how to use AI, and how to use that ethically, and make sure that you don’t have those accidental biases in there as well. Something that I do wanna point out is in the military, we also need to make sure that we have ROE in there, so those roles of engagement where we can engage targets or can’t, to make those decisions as well, and be able to program that in, so that we’re not accidentally, if the AI and the machine learning is helping us to make a lot of decisions very quickly, that we can make sure that those adhere to the ROE that has been set from the theater that we’re in. Amanda?

Amanda Whites:

So to kind of build on what he said, I think one of the big parts that we need to understand more is how to properly bound the limits of AI. So maybe more of the ML, machine learning side, where they’re continuing to learn, they kind of pick up, or AI picks up on the different decisions we make, it’ll continue to expand, and grow, and learn, but how do we ensure and certify, as previously mentioned, that the decisions that are made are not being stretched beyond the limits of what they should be? I think that’s a big common concern, whether you’re in the loop or on the loop, and I don’t, obviously we’re not gonna fully understand the limits of AI, it’s something that continues to grow and expand, as we’ve seen, but being able to bound where we allow AI to touch within our systems, I think, is a big hurdle that we still have to kind of overcome for us to fully trust AI.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Yeah, as I think through what AI can do in EW and in other systems, right, it’s really, ’cause what is AI? It’s really your, it’s predictive, it’s rule-based coding, and it’s a hand-engineered solution, right, and so it’s for, which would be easier if you apply it to specific, very specific problems, like, hey, my radio will switch to an unused frequency, because it’s trained on a large dataset of, to develop that spectrum analysis, but that’s a very small problem set, right, but you need a very large dataset to actually train it to be able to do those right things, so that’s where it gets a little tough to do that sometimes, ’cause we don’t always have those large datasets. I know at MD3 for our systems, we collect large amounts of data, but we don’t, it doesn’t always go anywhere to do this, so this is, that’s the next step, is taking that data, trying to make it, that dataset so we can get that AI, as well as, right, when you’re collecting data for EW, I mean, it’s just data, right, it’s not exploited, it’s not anything, so the other part of that, why we’re talking about actually using it for operations, the other part of that is taking that data and being able to use it so that Intel can exploit it, and we can actually get intelligence from it, rather than just it being data.

James Conroy:

I guess I’d like to take a slightly different perspective of it, we’ll all agree, I’m sure, that we need to maintain our technology leadership, we need to continue to advance, to outpace the threats, outpace our adversaries, and a lot of the technologies you just talked about, AI, quantum, IoT, 5G, these are threats as much as they are benefits, they’re tools, like any tool, it could be used either way, we need to think about how we need to use it. When I think about it in terms of EW, however, I’m actually excited if our adversary uses AI, all right? I would love to fight a computer, ’cause computers inherently are rules-bound, even with AI, there are still rules constrained, and there’s ways to inject ghosts, there’s ways to inject other things, that you can actually throw off someone else’s AI. So I think that when we think about these technologies, we gotta think about it from both perspectives. These technologies are gonna be used by our adversaries in their systems, and we need to think about how we would take and counter those within our EW systems.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

I like that, so you’re talking about how it can help them, but it can also hurt them.

James Conroy:

I think that too many people think of AI as this ultimate solution, right? It’s gonna be generative, it’s gonna find all sorts of things. We’ve all probably seen the recent results out there on how people ghosted Google’s AI algorithms, right? And all of a sudden you start looking at dogs, and you start feeding them a couple false images, and all of a sudden all it’s responding with are cats. It’s not that hard, and it’s very fragile. We just need to make sure we can take and utilize it to that extent. Now granted, when we start putting the constraints around it, when we start putting boundaries on it, and where it can learn, you take and protect it a little bit, but as soon as I fight a computer, I’m happy.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Those engineers, they love to fight computers. So we’ve talked a lot about technology and overcoming EW threats, but what I really wanna talk about is the knowledge or attitude do people need to keep up with this technology? I know we’re fighting for a lot of the same data pool here in the military and also contractors as well. So what kind of people are you looking for? What do you think that, what kind of people do you think we need to actually overcome these EW threats? Go ahead, Jim.

James Conroy:

For me, I think that education’s critical, but what’s even more critical is people and the way that people are gonna approach problems, where their drive is, where their ethics are, where their loyalties are. We can train a lot on the job, right? You can get a lot of certificates, but if you have someone with the persistence and the drive, those are the future leaders of our organization. So I’d rather take and find people that wanna come to Northrop that wanna be looking at technology, they wanna advance the state of the art, and they have that perseverance and drive to go forward and do things, those are gonna be the critical gems that we need to take and have as part of the organization and continue to push forward the boundaries of technology.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

That sounds great. Amanda?

Amanda Whites:

So looking at it from a slightly different approach, so I’m at Parry, we’re very small, we’re roughly 250 people. So what’s crucial for us is people who are intrinsically motivated to go out and find those solutions themselves, because my biggest change from going from Northrop, which is massive, to Parry is, I don’t have a person anymore, I don’t have an expert to go to. So I think what we’re specifically looking for is people who are passionate about learning whatever it is they need to know and don’t currently know. So it’s finding the right person to talk to, it’s knowing the right resource to go and look into, and I think at the end of the day, it’s just do you have the passion to go and find whatever that best solution is for the warfighter? Because we are so focused right now on finding ways to get capability to the warfighter faster, because we understand that we are in very tense times. Our country is going through massive changes every day, depending on what executive order has been released that day. And so I think right now, it’s just making sure that we have people in place who are passionate about whatever hurdle may be in front of you, you find a way to move past it and keep going because the safety of our warfighters is really what ultimately matters to us.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Thank you, Amanda. Pat?

Patrick Creighton:

I guess I’d say, again, taking a slightly different way, I think really we gotta drive a culture shift, and the culture shift to really embrace EMSO. While a lot of folks in this room, this community certainly get that, we need that to permeate more broadly, right? It’s not just about traditional kinetic effects. We have to build a deep arsenal of non-kinetic effects. Kinetic effects are costly, they’re limited, and they’re vulnerable, right? It is the non-kinetic effects that we’re developing, these EW capabilities, that are going to enable the kinetic effects to be effective, right? To reach their targets, to reach their destinations. So really shifting that kind of mindset to embrace EMSO, to drive that into all of our future requirements, I think is gonna be critical.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

So I noticed that nobody said anything about engineering degrees. That’s probably good. I just said I’m a biologist chemist, and I’m up here doing EW, so. But what you’re really talking about is attitude, right? That is the biggest thing in how we’re moving forward, and I think that’s important, whether you work for a contractor, whether you work for the government, whether you work for the DOD, as we move forward in the future. So we have just a couple minutes left. I know this panel is coming to a close rapidly, and we’ve had some great discussions. But what I wanna do is I wanna give each of you an opportunity to impart some lasting words of wisdom on all this audience here, and I think, Pat, we’ll start with you.

Patrick Creighton:

Yeah, just kinda, again, building off what I said, we’ve gotta think about the big picture here, focus on some of the non-traditional requirements, such as EMSO, making sure that’s incorporated into all of our capabilities, getting away from bespoke systems, figuring out how we develop at mass, deploy at mass, and provide that instant feedback loop to our operationally deployed assets is gonna be critical to winning the next fight. So really enjoyed being here, being part of this panel, so thank you very much, Colonel.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Thank you very much. Thanks, Pat. Amanda, let’s go ahead and go with you.

Amanda Whites:

So first of all, thank you for having me. I appreciate being here. And my final words, I think if you take a step out beyond just looking at EW, I’m obviously very passionate about our standards. I don’t believe that there is one standard to rule them all. I think we’re at a point where we stop creating standards and have started kind of just adhering to them, and we’re noticing that our kill web is slowly starting to come together. We’re better able to exchange data. We’re really focusing on how we can get information from point A to point B faster, and I think that obviously EW ties into that. And at the end of the day, I think as long as we stay on that path and we continue to focus on maintaining these common interfaces and ensuring that, you know, one thing we didn’t talk about today was Big Iron, which is an EW standard, open standard. So just familiarizing ourselves with all the different things that are out there and embracing what’s already been created and written. Yeah, that’s my thought.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Thank you, Amanda. Jim, we’ll finish up with you here.

James Conroy:

Well, as my colleagues indicated, thank you very much for having us out and having the opportunity to have this important conversation. Thank you to my colleagues. I think we each brought a slightly different perspective, but you see how industry’s looking at things, and we’re not all seeing it the same. But what I really like us all to leave it on is think about where the threat is. Think about how the threat has evolved. You know, you go back a couple of decades ago, EW was something that could be a mission planning event. EW was something that we didn’t need to have on each of our platforms. It was, oh, we know where the threats are, we know how to route around them, we know how to be survivable. We don’t live in that day anymore, all right? We live in an evolving threat environment that changes every single day. We need EW to be in the conversation. We need EW to be in every conversation on every platform. We’re seeing EW in the expendables, the tradables, we’re seeing it in the rotary wings, we’re seeing it in the fast jet, we’re seeing it in the large aircraft, we’re seeing it in the domain above us, and the domains below us. So I just ask everyone to think about that. When we’re going into the conversations, where is EW? How are we gonna address it? Because our adversary’s already thinking about it. We see this in a number of conflicts that are going on every day. So thank you very much.

Col. Nicole M. Petrucci:

Thanks, Jim, and I’d just like to say thank you to all of our panelists for taking the time here today to talk about one of my favorite subjects, EW. So today we talked a little bit about just EW in itself, how it’s growing, how it’s picked up with the advancing technologies going forward, what is a flexible framework so we can actually test our technology moving forward, and then how we’re just gonna keep moving forward, and we’re gonna have the right people to do it. So I do appreciate everyone here with us. Thank you for attending Overcoming EW Threats.