Emerging Trends in EW
September 23, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
Okay so I guess we’ll go ahead and get started. I’m the deputy commander for mission Delta 3. United States space forces premier electromagnetic warfare Delta. We have over 50 Guardians deployed across the globe integrating synchronizing and executing fires for the U.S. allied and coalition partners. What I like to tell our Guardians is that we are the digital spear. And so we are the first ones that are going to poke somebody’s eye out and make them bleed. But it’s good. Today we have assembled a panel of leading experts to explore key considerations, challenges and potential solutions for adapting our suit capabilities to this rapidly evolving space-based environment. With me today I have Clayton Spakes, an experienced electronic warfare operator and U.S. Air Force veteran with a career spanning tactical operational and strategic levels of EW. In his last assignment on active duty he helped stand up the wavelength software factory now the 563rd EWS where he was the senior enlisted leader and led product development of EW focused software solutions. He now serves as the growth manager for Rise 8 where he brings together his operational background and software expertise to drive digital transformation initiatives for the Department of War. All right. Next is Eric Fischer is the chief engineer of non-kinetic effects at Applied Intuition where he oversees the portfolio of cognitive EW, resilient communications and dynamic spectrum sharing. Most recently he served as the deputy director for joint integration at OUSD ANS where he managed a multibillion-dollar portfolio for EW and Counter 5 ISRT. He was also the chief engineer at the systems analysis section at Naval Research Lab where he executed applied research programs. Eric received his master’s degree in double E electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. And lastly we have Scott Bailie is the director at Advanced Electronic Warfare Solutions at BAE Systems where he’s focused on developing the company’s next generation EW offerings. Scott has 20 years of EW experience including leading technical teams focused on development, rapid quick reaction capability efforts and strategic program capture. Prior to joining BAE Systems Scott worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the National Security Agency. Scott obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern, Northeastern University. All right. So we’re going to leave this. I’m going to give them how we view the problem from mission Delta 3 and then ask them some questions. So today we see the global proliferation of space-based capabilities undeniable. We’re witnessing a surge in resilient and cutting-edge technologies designed to support both military and civil uses. The growth in global space-based capabilities fueled by high performance computing and software programmable functionality creates a significant challenge for our space electromagnetic warfare Guardians and our Airmen. Our adversaries are actively launching mega constellations and building new hybrid networks that include a mixed and integrated satellite communications network. These efforts are all aimed at building resilience in their networked capabilities. Looking ahead we anticipate a dynamic and increasingly dense signal environment demanding that we possess the ability to dynamically target and effectively neutralize adversary signals. This reality necessitates a fundamental evolution and rethinking of our own architecture to maintain and outpace our adversaries in the electromagnetic spectrum. So gentlemen, first question, where do you see opportunities for innovation and or the incorporation of commercial and dual use technology to help address the electromagnetic environment? Clayton off to you.
Clayton Spakes:
Yeah, I think I’ll start by calling out my own bias, right? So like the colonel mentioned I spent 20 years as a second analyst and that’s certainly the lens that I see this problem through. So to me, while the hardware matters and there’s certainly a lot of innovation that could happen there, the most valuable change that we can make is to enable our Airmen and Guardian analysts and our operators, excuse me. We spent, like we all know, we spent a ton of time in GWAD over the last like 20 or so years and that meant that a lot of us were kind of farmed out to other career fields or other specialties because that was what was needed at the time. But that came at the sacrifice of technical competency in my opinion. And so we need to start by focusing on training, make sure that we have technically excellent analysts in their career field and in terms of the Airmen and Guardians and then where the dual use and industry can come along beside them is in giving them tools to help enable them to be more efficient, right? We talked about how much data that they’re going to have to sift through. It’s just not possible for our analysts to be able to go through all that. So we need to give them the tools that allow them to only look at the data that they absolutely need to look at in order to help our warfighters be successful.
Eric Fischer:
All right, I guess I’m up. Yeah, we’re talking the high-end fight here, right? This is the fight that we’re gearing up for is going to be very different as we all know than the fight we’ve had for the last 20, 25 years. EMSO, EW is not going to be about jamming cell phones, counter IED. It’s going to be against a much more worthy adversary. Our technological advantage, right, is dwindling and diminishing, right? And we’ve got that challenge. Layered effects, I think is going to be the name of the game, right? So as we go into the high end fight against these adversaries, it’s going to be a combination of kinetic and non-kinetic effects that we bring to the game. I will say from a policy perspective, right, you can be on either side of the fence of this, but there’s a very decent chance, right, that non-kinetic effects are going to be the key response that we have, right, going into this future fight. So having those capabilities, you know, armed and ready to go is going to be important. From an innovation perspective, I’ll approach this kind of from a Silicon Valley bias, right? So I left government to go join a Silicon Valley, you know, software company and autonomy company. Certainly I believe that that is kind of the future for this particular mission area. Bringing that Silicon Valley mentality to this mission area, to this mission space, that pedigree of very refined, very fine-tuned software engineering and best practices I think is going to be key. From an innovation story here, I’ll throw out kind of a big idea with a couple tactical ideas sprinkled in. I look at all of the existing spectrum-dependent systems that are out there in the U.S. military today, and I see vast potential. You plug into Chat GPT how many spectrum-dependent systems does the U.S. military own today? And it rightfully hedges and says that’s not published information, but the estimate is something like on the order of millions, perhaps tens of millions. Each one of those devices, right, represents something that interacts with the electromagnetic spectrum, right, and to me represents untapped potential. I’m with Clayton, right, that there’s lots of investment today in kind of exquisite hardware, chasing, you know, high-power AESAs, chasing wide bandwidths. Certainly that’s going to be a need. Getting to a point where we can leverage what we already have and kind of gain that investment efficiency. Most of the people in this room, if you track EW and the Department of Defense, know that it will almost always play second fiddle to the things that go bang, right, the hard kill kind of weapons and platforms kinds of communities. So the Department of War needs to be very smart about how it invests in that. I’m a big believer in the innovation to kind of tap into what exists today, albeit, you know, we’re going to have to recognize that new things need to be built. I look to areas like computer vision on the commercial and dual-use side. Not so much just the obvious, say, when you’ve got EOIR sensors out there you can apply computer vision to, but I think many of us know you can take an RF signal and you can turn it into a two-dimensional image, essentially from a time frequency perspective, you know, range Doppler map kind of idea, and you can apply very cutting-edge computer vision things coming out of the commercial industry. AI/ML for decision autonomy and workflows, right, we’ll talk about this a little bit more later, but the innovation that we are all seeing in our everyday lives, right, you open any media article today, it talks about the fear that jobs are going to be lost to AI/ML. I think we need to tap into that to make sure that we’re helping our warfighters and our operators, right, whether that’s from simple aids to actually automating workflows, it doesn’t have to be pure full autonomy, right. Assisting those operators, as many of you know, is a key element to that, and I think there’s some ripe areas for innovation there. I think some more to follow later.
Scott Bailie:
Yeah, so I guess I’ll start by throwing it back to how you kicked us off, back to the threat. So I think the threat’s advancing at a pace we have never seen before. I think a lot of that is driven by their access to high-performance computing, commercial computing, as well as their ability to build systems that are software-upgradable in the field. So I think we need to, as an industry, be comfortable with not having all of the answers up front when a program starts. We need to be able to feel the capability, a base capability, and then have the ability to get out there and upgrade it over time as we learn more. So I’ll say at BAE Systems, we are laser-focused on combating that threat, and we’re going after it with, I think, two major areas that are really helpful, that enable us, are software-defined radios and open architectures. So really let us have the standards set such that we can spend our time developing the high-end algorithms and applications that the warfighter needs and not reintegrating hardware over and over again. We’re involved in a number of consortiums, both developing open architecture standards as well as the hardware, things from the government reference architectures down to Big Iron software framework. An example I’ll give you, too, BAE Systems is the mission systems prime for the Compass Call aircraft, so the electronic attack aircraft for the Air Force, originally on the EC-130, now being cross-decked to the EA-37B. And in that role, we are developing a software infrastructure that reaches out to over 20 different software providers in the industry to provide best-of-breed software capability onto this hardware. And that’s an area that I think the industry has done a really good job with coming together and bringing capability rapidly to the field. Lastly, I guess I’ll touch on the commerciality part. I think finding ways to build commercial items into — or COTS items into our systems is incredibly important, especially with the rate at which commercial and COTS processing is increasing. The area I guess I’ll caution us on is some of the most exquisite capabilities that we’re bringing to the warfighter rely on really low latency, tight coupling to hardware and firmware. And I think you touched on this a little bit, right? There’s a time and a place, and I think there’s a balance. And I think it’s just something we need to keep in mind as we look to build up these systems. If we’re building purely COTS systems, we are pretty much at parity with our adversary, and I think that’s an area we need to be really careful about.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
Okay. Thank you. Just one question, though. Sorry, I’m going to ad lib here to you guys. Open architecture. So we talk about that a lot. What does it mean to you versus what maybe it means to me when I say, hey, I need an open architecture system?
Clayton Spakes:
So an area I have a lot of experience in coming from OSD in the last five years, I think many people in this room probably know my old boss, Dave Tremper, right? Float around the Navy EW community and was the director of EW at OSD ANS that I worked for for a number of years. He and our office were champions for open architecture. Open architecture’s long sordid history, right? Everyone knows that open architectures are a dime a dozen, right? The old joke of, hey, if you don’t like an open architecture, just go pick another one. There’s plenty of them out there. From the industry side, to me, I think what I kind of boil that down to of what we really mean about open architecture is accessibility, right? I mean, I’m speaking from a company that’s kind of a nontraditional, right? Not one of the classic primes. We want to try to have our software hosted that is finding success in a lot of other application areas, being able to host that on existing systems, the accessibility of it, right? That can mean hardware form factor that we’re getting commercial solutions in that Scott was mentioning. It can mean things like Big Iron software frameworks where you’ve got an operating system, that you’ve got an app that’s built in kind of a containerized, modularized form factor that you can rehost. To me, it’s all about the accessibility. When we say MOSA, right, I think a lot of people will turn that A into modular open system approach instead of architecture. It’s because you want the approach to be open. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a standard, a government reference architecture that’s documented, written, VEAP 1.0. It’s a mentality and a culture. That’s my personal view.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
Okay. Thank you. That actually leads into our next question pretty nicely. So our adversaries are quickly adapting and bringing online new capabilities. What can the department do better in order to rapidly develop and feel that scale new capabilities to address the threat?
Clayton Spakes:
Yeah. I think the cop-out answer is probably just a scream acquisition reform and then run off the stage. I don’t think that that’s actually the answer. I think we have the tools that we need to be able to move quickly and deliver now. We’ve seen a renewed focus on IDIQs and OTAs and CSOs and all of the like. I think a little bit of a culture shift in understanding how those things work and then a belief that you can move faster. Just because things have always taken years to deliver, doesn’t mean that they have to take years to deliver. I would argue that anything that we build that takes years to deliver is obsolete by the time you deliver it. You’ve already failed. If we’re building off of a list of requirements from five years ago, you’re not keeping pace with the EW fight. It is rapidly evolving and there’s no way you’re going to get there. This is frankly not a new problem. I saw time and time again over my career where we were supposed to have a new tool delivered. It would get delayed one year, then delayed two years, then delayed three years. Then we would finally get it. Oh, by the way, now we can’t do the analysis on this new type of wideband signal because that wasn’t in the requirements document from eight years ago when it was originally palmed for. The tools are there to move faster. I think the first step there is to start thinking about the mission outcomes that you want to achieve and working those into your PWS, your statement of work, and focus on that rather than a list of features. Then have industry come alongside you or whatever contractor is helping you build this and stay connected to the operators. Build quickly to get towards those objectives and those mission outcomes. Then talk to your users, get feedback, iterate, and then you’re not having to worry about delivering an outdated product because rather than delivering a list of features, I’m just trying to achieve an outcome. When EW changes and the threat changes, then the contractor can change as well and that flexibility is built into the contract. I think that’s probably the easiest way that we can do this. We’ve got to be able to deliver capability far more quickly than we’ve been doing it in the past, especially in EW.
Eric Fischer:
I think that’s exactly right. I’ll pick up off on my last question. Hopefully I didn’t empty my chamber with all the material I had armed on that one. Hardware as a commodity, I guess is how I think about that. We talked a little bit earlier, I think all the panelists, about needing to get this towards software-defined, software-driven upgrades, software-driven capabilities. I pick that language specifically, hardware as a commodity. For those of you that track the adaptive acquisition framework, and I’ll be at a lot of reform going on right now, the software acquisition pathway talks about using commodity hardware to enable and streamline a lot of these capability developments. When that was written, what it generally refers to is think workstations and think servers, right? You’re going to host an app on some workstation. We need to figure out how to get there in the EW space, right? Both my degrees are electrical engineering. I completely appreciate the complexities of RF apertures and RF front ends and tied to ADCs and multiple channels on the back end. There’s some coupling there. But if we can’t get to RF as a service, right, or spectrum as a service, we’re never going to realize that software-defined set of capabilities. As far as getting things out faster, I’m a big believer in snapping a chalk line, right? No one will ever say, and I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t be investing in chasing those leading-edge requirements that the threat is driving, right? Larger bandwidth, higher power, more channels, lower latency. We always want to chase that, but we don’t want to be perpetually chasing it that we’re not getting capabilities out the door. So snapping that chalk line on commodity hardware versions of that today that then a whole army of industry software developers can design capabilities for, I think is the way we get to those capabilities out the door faster. Otherwise, I think we’re just always going to be in that death spiral of, okay, it takes three, five, seven, sometimes 10 years to get an acquisition program out the door. Unfortunately, the threat is evolving at the timeline of six to 12 months, and so we’re never going to catch up there. I don’t think we should be chasing that 100% solution. I think we should snap a chalk line on something open interface, open architecture, 70, 80% requirement solution today, define how the software can be integrated, and let that army of software developers get after it from that perspective. Last comment here. In my time in the Pentagon, I think the most common kind of analogy I would hear is people always want to chase the Apple iPhone app store model. We want to download apps. Imagine if every app developer in the Apple app store had to build a new iPhone for every app that they want to deliver. It’s not a sustainable model. We need to get to a point where the folks, the industry players that know how to build that hardware, build it, again, snapping that chalk line to be good enough, and then we’re having capabilities come in on software in the back end.
Scott Bailie:
I’ll start with, Clayton, your comment about acquisition reform. Obviously important. I guess my comment there is that I actually feel like I’ve seen a difference over the past couple of years. I feel like we as an industry have done a better job. The government has done a good job. You talk about OTAs and IDIQs. I’m seeing competitions move faster, funding move faster, and I’m seeing us flex when requirements change to be able to change requirements, change statements of works, and have us continue to make forward progress. I think that’s a good thing. Obviously a lot of progress still to be made, but I think it’s something to recognize as some real good forward momentum. On the more technical side, I guess I’ll give you a real specific example. I think specific to EW, if we’re looking to get applications and get capability out to the warfighter faster, I think one real area for improvement is decoupling electronic warfare capability, the software, from the broader platform mission OFP or platform OFP. Why is that? When you look at the timelines it takes to test, so six-month, one-year DTOT cycles to get things out to the field, it’s just too slow. The threat is evolving at a really rapid pace and we need to get that EW iterating much quicker. There’s a number of programs in my portfolio where we have, whether it’s direct to the government or with the primes, kind of technique development contracts. At the beginning of the year we’ll set our kind of one-end list for what are the priorities that we need to go after and get after, and we’ll start marching to a plan to release capability maybe twice a year on a six-month cadence. And the important thing there, we talk about contract flexibility. If we’re into that and something’s not ready, it’s not going to make the bus, we kick it to the next one, right? That’s okay. You talk about snapping a chalk line, you’ve got to do that for the software as well, and we just can’t hold up getting releases to the field and capability to the warfighter because one capability is not ready. So I think decoupling that EW OFP from the broader platform is really going to let us speed things up and get capability out to the field faster.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
That’s great. Yeah, so if you guys want to come work with Mission Delta 3, that’s kind of my spiel. So if anybody comes and talks to me, I’ll — I’m aperture-agnostic. So I have plenty of apertures. What I don’t have is enough of what we like to call RF payloads to get after the fight. And so those are definitely some things that we even recognize on our side is that we’re trying to speed that up from our end also and give those requirements kind of some real-time meat in it. And I think that’s just something that the Mission Delta construct will help out. When you come and talk to us, right, I have my operator, Colonel Fernandez is Mission Delta 3 Colonel. He’s the requirements guy. He’s a missionary owner charged by SPOC. And how do we get after the current threat is, you know, we see it in our operators. They come and say, “Okay, you got a requirement.” They write it down on a sticky note. He signs it, he gives it to me, and then we go figure out how we get after it. And so that’s what the Mission Delta construct can help out with that the CSO’s vision is there. And we’re trying to execute on it every day. But you guys talk about acquisition reform. I think I was born into acquisition reform. It hasn’t stopped yet. But with the recent changes to like J-CIDS being rescinded, which was a good thing, didn’t really care for that, and then acquisition policies that we have seen with the rise. Have you seen an improvement? So you guys are saying, “Hey, this is what we’ve done on the industry side, but the commiserate government side who are the ones who seem to be sometimes always holding up the process flow.” So have you seen any improvement from us?
Clayton Spakes:
Yeah, I think like overall over the last, you know, well, several years, even before I left government, but on the industry side, there’s definitely been an improvement and like an appetite for these more like bespoke acquisitions strategies, I guess. I think a lot of it is just an education piece, right? Like, okay, how do I use this? How do I move quickly? How am I doing this in a way that is still not introducing like too much risk into the process? So I think as we see that kind of progress along, it’s getting a lot better. I think some of that is on the industry side for us to like be the ones to help educate. Like, “Hey, this is why it’s okay. This is how you can do it. This is how we’ve done it before.” And then also making introductions like from government to government so that they can see like how it’s been done before. But I think overall it’s moving in the right direction. It’s just like anything else. I think we could push harder to move faster.
Eric Fischer:
Yeah, I think that’s spot on. I think my answer would be yes. We’re seeing that ship turn in the right direction. I suppose this is where my previous life bias maybe comes in because I was literally in the office that wrote the March memo for Secretary Hegseth to make the software acquisition pathway the default pathway and CSOs and OTAs kind of the default on that side of things. Many of us I think hear the phrase, “Big A acquisition.” I think it’s always a reminder. You talked about the disestablishment of JASIDs. I think big picture that will likely be a benefit, but it is the acquisition system requirements and then budgeting or PPBE. Another area I think we’re seeing success, the reconciliation scale, the four-year money nature of that funding line I think is very important. We can hammer on the acquisition system and its faults for all we want, but if there’s either no money or it takes through the POM and PBR process two plus years to identify money, we’re not going to keep up with an agile threat. We like to talk about a requirement can be discovered of an emerging threat space. We need to get to a new frequency or hey, we need to come up with some whiz-bang feature. If it takes 18 months to 24 months from the time that that idea is made to the time that money actually shows up to get after that requirement, we’re already behind the eight ball. Again, I’ll come back to yes, I think we’re seeing that ship start to turn. I think it will be very interesting to see the new incarnation of JASIDs and the structure that’s going to be in the Pentagon. I think the budgeting process is turning in the right direction. I think through the software acquisition pathway there are some opportunities. I think I’ll come back to access from my perspective, making sure that we have the non-traditional Silicon Valley spent several decade hiatus from really working closely with the Pentagon. I think that’s also starting to change. We need to make sure there are mechanisms in place that we have a broader ecosystem and a more diverse ecosystem.
Scott Bailie:
I’ll say I agree with both of you. I’ll bring a different example. An area that I’m excited about that I think we’re making progress in is around commerciality. When I say that, I’m not talking necessarily just the COTS hardware we started with, but from the acquisition perspective, using FAR Part 12 instead of FAR Part 15 that we’re all so used to. If you look back this past year, President Trump signed a number of bills that had reinforced or executive orders that had reinforced the importance of purchasing through commercial means and modernizing the acquisition process. We ask ourselves, so what? What’s the goal there? I think it’s a win-win both for industry and for government. It lets us go faster. It drives down prices. It should drive competition as well. I think a huge benefit to both industry and to government. On the industry side, it gives us more flexibility, the way in which we plan programs, the way in which we procure parts, the ability to build on forecasts, change our production based on demand, to have products sitting on the shelf so when someone comes knocking on the door and needs it, we don’t have a long 18-month, two-year NRE bill and then start building the product. We’ve got something on the shelf today that we can get out to the warfighter as fast as possible. I’m excited about the FAR Part 12 commerciality. I think it’s, again, a win-win.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
I’m throwing another curveball. I’m going to ask you guys something. In Mission Delta 3, we’ve been exploring an ability to bring our commercial industry partners, startups, to come sit with us and do some mission planning and actually seeing what we’re doing in order to prosecute the fight that maybe would help drive some of the solutions maybe you’re working on to get after it. Do you see any impediments out there if I brought you in to our planners and we said, “Hey, we’re going to go and prosecute some war game,” and say, “What can you bring to the fight so that maybe I can use a product?” We’ve been kicking around what we call EW as a service, where I come in and I can buy something in order to prosecute the fight, give the tool to the operators when they need the tool, but I don’t always have to have the tool available to me. How would you feel about doing something like that?
Clayton Spakes:
Yeah, preach. Like, please, let’s do it. I think that’s absolutely necessary in the way that we should be approaching these problems. It has to be a true partnership, and that doesn’t mean that requirements get thrown over the wall and then we throw a product back at you sometime later. I think that goes both ways. I think the people that are developing the tools or the capabilities on the industry side should be tied at the hip to the end user. If you don’t understand the problem, then there’s absolutely no way that you’re going to be able to make a backlog that is effective at building a tool that is going to serve their needs. I think the flip side of that is we should do the opposite. Industry should be able to invite the government into their processes, see how we’re working, what are we seeing, what are we doing differently, how are we approaching these problems. I think more of that collaboration should happen and would be truly effective. I think you have to be tied to your end user in order to be effective there.
Eric Fischer:
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think anyone who’s ever worked with the DOD or Department of War now, I think, knows that’s the important piece. You’ve got to be well integrated early on. I think, yes, that is absolutely what we’re after. Colonel, you asked about impediments. I hope I’m not sounding like a broken record. I’m providing the non-traditional perspective here, frankly, on the panel. We’re not tapping into a whole bunch of talent that is in this country and elsewhere that are not cleared individuals but have incredible skill sets. Think of software engineers coming out of the tech schools and the Ivy League schools that are not fundamentally geared towards defense. They either don’t have clearances or they don’t ever want clearances. I think that is a huge impediment for us. I’m living that today. It’s been eye-opening for me to come over to this side of the world and the culture there. I think we have to be, I say we, I think the department needs to be a little more clever about how to tap into that. I think, yes, ideally, you’d be inviting folks like that in to sit at the screen. My gut tells me you’d run into, “Oh, well, there’s no contract vehicle. There’s no DD-254. You don’t have the right accesses.” Those kinds of paperwork challenges. I think if you can structure problem statements to get after what you want but do it in a way that’s a little more broad and accessible to a wider community, that’s one way of getting after that. Of course, that risks that then you’re not actually hitting on the true problem. When you ask about impediments, that’s something I’m observing firsthand today. I thought I would plug that.
Scott Bailie:
I think the short answer is absolutely yes. I think when you look at the way we currently do things, we write a set of requirements. We digest those. We build a product and then we get it out to the user. A lot of times, it doesn’t exactly work the way they had intended. There’s something lost in translation in that process. I think getting out with an end user, seeing it face to face, understanding the gaps, understanding the real challenge of how the user is going to interact with it on a daily basis, I think is just hugely valuable to industry to better understand what products you need, what gaps you’re trying to fill. I think increasing collaboration from the beginning is absolutely something that we’d be willing to do.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
- As I mentioned earlier during the threat time where we talk about a dynamic and increasingly dense signal environment that will require dynamic targeting and firing, how do you think AI and software solutions can help reduce the cognitive workload of our Guardians?
Clayton Spakes:
I think I talked about it a little bit in the first question. We have the training piece which helps, but the other side is giving them the tools to make them more efficient. By way of an example, when I was a tech analyst at NASIC years ago, I don’t have to date myself too much, I guess, we spent hours upon hours looking at the exact same signal over and over and over again from the same exact location. Then they would go fly more sorties and we would do the same thing again, ultimately meaning that we weren’t getting to all of the data that we were receiving because by the time we got near the end of that data, the new data had already come in and we needed to look at that. Stuff just ends up on the cutting room floor as it were. I think that’s the biggest place where from an analyst perspective AI and ML can help. It’s like, all right, how do we find a way to take all of this data, categorize it, and then spit out what exactly the analyst needs to look at and what they truly need to work at. I think that problem gets even more complex when you talk about EW because of how quickly things move and how much we don’t know about what we don’t know. We need to be able to incorporate Title 10 and Title 50 data into that. The only way that you’re going to get through that amount of data, talking about finished Intel and data from all sensors, is going to have to be leveraged AI and ML so that we can see all of that data and then tell the analyst what’s most important. Ultimately, in order to win the EW fight, we need to be able to update our mission data files sortie to sortie at the slowest and likely even faster than that. The only way to do that is to use AI models and modern software techniques in order to make our analysts more efficient.
Eric Fischer:
I would start with what may be the most obvious. You heard in my intro, I talk about a manager portfolio of cognitive EW. Certainly not a new or novel idea. It’s been around almost a decade and maybe even more than a decade, if you want to call that that. On the machine learning side, I think applying those kind of technologies to the EW problem space directly are certainly in order. I think we all know the reprogramming challenge, the lookup table, database problem that the Department of War now has had for quite some time. Even though cognitive EW has been an idea for almost a decade, I think we collectively have this challenge of some DARPA program, some government lab programs go out and address something and then we kind of move on. Often there’s a success declarative of transition that an algorithm has been brought from an S&T program over to a program of record. Those are successes. There’s no doubt. I don’t want to minimize those. But we’re certainly not living cognitive or autonomous RF on a day-to-day experience, on a program by program, system by system program today. Getting those kind of capabilities more proliferated into those systems that are out there and then in the acquisition system, I think is a very key element. Even just on the ES side, if we can get away from that classic years-long reprogramming and updating the lookup table to an actual trained AI/ML algorithm that gets pushed back to the edge, I think that’s a huge win. I talked about workflow earlier. That’s kind of the less flashy version of that. Whether you’re talking about a pilot or a backseater in a cockpit or someone sitting in the back of a wide body or someone on a Navy ship, we all know that swivel chair problem. We all know that multiple panes of glass and not operating from a single pane of glass. Simple workflow pieces like that, like I mentioned earlier, I think is ripe for AI/ML to go and address. We have generative AI. We have large language models that we’re all using every day to ask fundamental questions. Studies have been done over and over again. The number one concern about AI and ML in EW within the department is operator trust. I think that’s going to parallel the open source community. We’re all living every day. Are we going to trust these things to do our day-to-day jobs? I think the operator trust will build over time. But adding those decision aids, what we call decision autonomy, that can be at the edge, like I just mentioned, or it can be in a command center, an AOC or a mock that you’re actually figuring out how to allocate resources or maneuver platforms to address the EMSO in EW space. I think the areas that this could be applied are nearly endless, but I think directly from an RF and workflow perspective, that’s probably where I would start.
Scott Bailie:
I’ll carry on with what both of you guys talked about, mission data files. That’s an area that really resonates with me. I think we really need to decrease our dependence and eliminate our dependence on mission data files. You talk about the time it takes to upgrade that file, get it back out for the next sortie. My belief is we need to get away from MDFs as much as we can altogether and build systems that can operate in that dense environment. When you look at the threat now between the density of environment, the threat pop-ups, when you look at a maritime environment, threats are moving around, surface vessels, we don’t know where things are going to be. We don’t know the wave forms we’re going to encounter. We think we might know some of them. We’re not going to know all of them. So getting systems that can operate without pre-programmed data that has been maybe set up six months ahead of time is extremely important. There’s a technique and an application software skill that we use at BA Systems called rapid response. The idea there is to go after these highly agile modern wave forms in a dense environment. What it allows us to do is take a really flexible software framework and couple that with local function firmware. I go back to what I talked about earlier where there are applications that absolutely drive the need for high performance computing. This is a case where we’re trying to push that compute to the edge. Again, low latency hardware interfaces, firmware interfaces to turn those signals around and respond to threats really rapidly in a real-time manner without a priority knowledge. To me, super important to get away from the MDFs, to build software that isn’t necessarily we will get to that eventually, the AI eventually, but you talk about trust. This is logic that is built on physics-based algorithms with the understanding that we have about how the threat wave forms operate. I think that’s a step in the right direction.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
Along with that, we talk about all this. We talk about the threat. We’re trying to address the threat. One area that maybe we need some help in is simulating this threat in an environment that we can practice against. What is industry doing in order for us to be able to simulate and test in this high-end type environment?
Clayton Spakes:
I think you definitely need to be able to simulate, but it just needs to be as accurate as possible. We need to be able to do that in a way, obviously, that’s cost-effective and time-efficient and can also model the threat. I think the big thing there is we’ve got to be able to model the threats as accurately as possible. I think some of that starts with making sure that we’re all collaborating as partners sharing information. We can’t keep that information to ourselves about asserting data rights or whatever the case may be. Finding ways to share that so that we can have that simulation across platforms and across sensors and across teams, I think, is a move in the right direction.
Eric Fischer:
I completely agree. For me, this is nothing new or rocket science kind of answer here. The LVC, live virtual constructive, has been a phrase for quite some time. To me, that is still the answer. I think it’s just a question of how it’s executed. Layered from purely virtual and digital simulation and multi-fidelity M&S tools that you can then do mimic and anechoic chamber testing. Then you’re taken out to the field and doing an exercise and eventually real operations. I think tight integration between those is what we’re lacking. Many of us are familiar with the phrases digital twin or virtual twin. Being able to have something that you can take out to the field, but then you come back to your laboratory environment, to your development environment, run either software in the loop or hardware in the loop with your multi-fidelity tools is a must. My last piece on this, I think there needs to be a little more tolerance for risk, quite frankly. I know we don’t want to reveal too much to our adversaries of what we’re doing, but I think we put a little too much in the, hey, totally locking that down 100%. I’d rather have well-tested capabilities that we can bring to the fight with confidence than rely on purely like, hey, we squirreled these away for 10 years and we don’t think our adversaries know about them, but we don’t actually know how they work. Final thoughts from me.
Scott Bailie:
An area I think we can improve on OA and modeling is the data inputs that we drive our systems with. We have a lot of opportunities, whether we’re hardware in the loop in a lab, whether we’re at one of our test ranges or we even have an opportunity to potentially be OCONUS collecting. I think taking that data home, ensuring that the systems we build have the record capability so we can take that data back with us, share it across industry, rerun it through our systems and then improve our algorithms is really important. Building plugins for our emulators, plugins for our operational analysis that can take that real-world data and allow us to churn, fix an algorithm, and get it back out in the field is really important to me.
Col. Eddie Gutierrez:
Okay, great. Well, we are coming up on three seconds left, so we are out of time with this wonderful panel. I’d like to say thank you, gentlemen, for joining me today, my first moderated one, so hopefully I did okay by you guys and been able to answer it. Thanks, everybody, for coming and joining us. I’d just like to say Mission Delta 3, people said we’re running with scissors, and I said we are running with scissors, but it’s to cut through the BS on the other side and make other people do what we need done in order to get after the threat. Thanks to everybody coming and have a good rest of your conference.