Air Warrior Col. John W. Thompson - KMI Media Group

Special Sction: Countermeasures
That protection is critical, literally
a matter of life and death
for crew members on SOF
and other U.S. military aircraft.
Consider, for example,
an incident involving
an MV-22 Osprey flown by a
Marine Corps pilot in Iraq,
where enemies mounted
an intense missile attack
directed at the aircraft.
Bill Kasting, ATK vice
president and general manager
for defense electronic
systems, explained how, a
few months ago, that Marine Corps pilot
spoke to ATK employees who work on the
AAR-47 sensor system that is mounted on
aircraft such as the Marine pilot’s Osprey
to detect incoming missiles. The Marine
pilot described how his Osprey was fired
upon by multiple missiles.
Fortunately, the pilot’s MV-22 was
equipped with the ATK AAR-47 sensor
system, which immediately detected the
incoming missiles. “The AAR-47 actually
alerted them to the situation, and they
were allowed to perform their evasive
maneuvers and deploy the countermeasures,
and they really felt that the [AAR-
]47 was the primary reason they were able
to survive that engagement,” Kasting said
in an interview with SOTECH.
ATK makes the sensor that swiftly
detects incoming threats, while others
make the system that deploys countermeasures
to confuse an incoming missile,
neutralizing the enemy weapon. The
AAR-47 sensor is designed to work with
the ALE-47 chaff dispenser provided by
Symetrics Industries.
AAR-47 sensor units, which are small
and light so they don’t hog aircraft space
and payload capacity, utilize dual sensor
capabilities. “One is the UV sensor,”
Kasting explained. “It’s non-imaging UV,
which is the primary sensor to detect
a missile firing. And then there’s also a
laser warning sensor integrated into that
[system unit] as well, that detects laser
threats. [The AAR-47] is actually the only
system out there today that integrates
laser warning and missile warning into a
single sensor.”
The AAR-47 system currently is
mounted on Navy and Marine Corps rotary
wing aircraft including “the UH-60s, the
8 | SOTECH 8.9
Bill Kasting
CH-53s, the UH-1 and the MV-22,” Kasting
said. “It’s also deployed
on several fixed wing aircraft:
the C-17, the C-130s
and also some of the
smaller aircraft.” The Navy
recently awarded ATK a $67
million indefinite delivery/
indefinite quantity contract
to produce AAR-47s.
Improvements in the
AAR-47 include enhanced
capabilities to pick out and
identify incoming enemy
missiles, even when they
are flying in airspace cluttered with a
confusion of other traffic, Kasting said.
ATK also is working on improvements
to the AAR-47 so it will tell the ALE-47
countermeasures dispenser the direction
from which the enemy missile is arriving,
allowing countermeasures to be dispensed
just in that direction.
ATK is now working on the nextgeneration
sensor system, which would
so precisely track the exact location of an
incoming enemy missile that the sensor
could guide a different type of countermeasures
system, such as a directional
infrared countermeasures system that
can defeat the heat-seeking infrared homing
guidance systems on man-portable
air defense missiles, Kasting said.
Another advancement will be sensors
identifying smaller, but still potentially
lethal, threats short of enemy missiles,
such as small-arms fire up to unguided
rocket propelled grenades, Kasting said.
These are major advancements from
the primitive countermeasures systems
of years ago.
In the not-so-distant past, these systems
were analog-based designs. Today,
everything is a micro-processor based
digital solution. Hardware is still important,
but more off-the-shelf hardware is
being used to take advantage of the high
level of processing available in today’s
commercial marketplace, such as multicore
processors and graphical processing
units, said Michael Maas, technology
director of survivability and protection
solutions for BAE Systems, a global
defense, security and aerospace company.
“Just like your home personal computer,
the capabilities and function of future
solutions will be determined as much
by the software as by the hardware,” he
says. “Our military customers are looking
for product solutions that reduce the
overall weight of the self protection suite
and have higher reliability, resulting in
lower life cycle cost and higher mission
availability.”
BAE has recently unveiled the Boldstroke,
an integrated aircraft survivability
system for the U.S. Army’s Common
Infrared Countermeasures program. The
Boldstroke is a modular, lightweight and
directable infrared countermeasure suite
designed to protect the Army’s helicopter
fleet from current and evolving threats,
as well as multiple, simultaneous ones.
It features a pointer-tracker system to
support direct or fiber-coupled lasers,
and a single rigid optical bench for easy
assembly, alignment and stability in a
flight environment. BAE Systems has
more than 15,000 infrared and electronic
countermeasures systems fielded
worldwide on both fixed and rotary wing
aircraft. The company’s AN/AAR-57 Common
Missile Warning System (CMWS)
has logged more than 1.4 million combat
flight hours in protecting aircrews, for
example, providing missile warning for
rotary and fixed wing aircraft with a low
false-alarm rate and the ability to detect
and declare prior to missile burnout. It
also features stabilized imagery during
high-speed maneuvers to permit rapid
threat detection and notification, ensuring
the highest probability of successful
threat countermeasures. The CMWS is
compatible with existing chaff/flare/RF
decoy dispensers and directional IR countermeasure
systems.
The current challenge for the vendor,
Maas said, is to develop and field
systems faster so that they’re not one or
two generations behind the commercial
market, which doubles capability every 18
months, as the popular Moore’s Law has
proven out. They need to work in extreme
temperatures, with state-of-the-art processors
that have high-power densities
so they can “run hot.” Getting that kind
of heat performance when “operating
in the high ambient temperatures seen
in the desert during the summertime is
very challenging,” Maas said. “It’s hard
to believe, but available packaging volume
and its associated thermal cooling
limitation is one of most difficult factors
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