Tuesday's Symposium Spotlight Session

At Tuesday’s spotlight session, panelists David Tremper, Director, Electronic Warfare (EW), Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (OUSD) for Acquisition and Sustainment; Logan Harr, Principal Director Integrated Sensing and Cyber, OUSD R&E; and Dr. Ken Plaks, Director, Adaptive Capabilities Office (ACO), DARPA, discussed the significance, challenges and opportunities with EMSO and EW across DOD operations, acquisition, advanced capabilities and S&T. Among the topics discussed, were:

Creating interoperability: Military services are independently responsible for the acquisition of programs that fall below the acquisition category 1C. If there’s a common threat or joint capability need, each of the services will address it independently because there is no real system in place for them to easily exchange data, Tremper says.

“Everything we tend to talk about in terms of spectrum capabilities is ambiguous to service,” he explained. “If a Service is going to acquire a capability, it’s in our best interest to figure out how we migrate the capability from one Service to the other so that all the services can benefit from the dollars invested.”

Plaks added, “The fact that the Navy and the Air Force frequently can’t talk to each other is bad. We can fix it.”

Practice vs play: Another challenge, Plaks says, is in testing vs real-world application. “There’s a huge leap from doing things in a lab and doing it in open air,” he says. “Being able to [test a system] indoors better than a lab but something less than the real world is something folks have gone after, I just think we need to crank it up to 11 and actually bring it to a much higher level.”

Democratization of EW: “We’re past that inflection point, where commercial, off-the-shelf technology when it comes to digitizing the spectrum, being able to understand signals in the environment and what they mean — we’re now past the point where the DOD is driving that,” Harr says. The big challenge, Plaks says, is adapting to a world where, “for a couple thousand dollars, anybody can have a jammer.” Later, in the audience Q&A, he said, “…modern electronics is democratizing electronic warfare, for good or for bad.”