Page 49 - Williams Foundation Future of Electronic Warfare Seminar

A New Approach and Attitude to Electronic Warfare in Australia

It supports the rapid application change process without itself needing to change.

It's sitting there underneath, and interfacing into the hardware, and when you tell it to do something, it does it.
So if you tell it to point a beam in a given direction, then all of the distributed functionality that is across the
array will do that, without needing to be ‘hard programmed’ to achieve new outcomes.

FIGURE 12 HMAS PERTH OFF THE COAST OF UAE. THIS AIR WARFARE SHIP CARRIES ADVANCED CEA RADARS
The radar personality, the application specific functionality is built into a small dataset that informs the system
how it should operate under a given circumstance.

All of the software/firmware functions are just waiting to be organized in different directions and different
sequences and with different parameters to be able to do their desired functions.

It is that small dataset running in an organizational set of boards that tell the system what to do, when to do it,
how to do it, without changing the software and firmware.

Question: This provides for inherent transferability across radars operating in air, sea or land and can
allow for enhanced efficiency in joint capabilities and joint investment.

How would you describe this process or approach?

Ian Croser: The objective is to reduce the number of software baselines being maintained across multiple
platforms and operating domains.

This approach frees up a lot of development capability, and it means that the commonality and the
interoperability is inherent and enhanced.

Even if you haven't brought forward a particular function in a particular application and platform, if it's in the
common software base, then it's a really simple thing to bring forward and use.

It’s more about integration with the rest of the platform capability than it is about the radar itself.

Implementation of a ‘Task Based Interface’ and control methodology has effectively insulated the Combat
Management System from major change cycles in response to new applications.

This software baseline, when combined with the modularity of the hardware, allows the design and build of
scalable radar, which can readily fit into different platforms across land, sea and air domains.

There is not a lot of work to bring a new application online.

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