The Army will host an industry event this month for its pursuit of short range launched effects (LE) capabilities, with plans to detail its acquisition strategy and requirements.
The event is scheduled for Jan. 17-19 in Huntsville, Alabama and will include the opportunity for industry to hold one-on-one meetings with Army officials to detail their relevant platforms and payloads, with the service noting its interest in both ground and air-launched solutions.
“Specifically, the Army is interested in currently available Short Range LE system solutions as an initial capability and system solutions projected to meet the full requirements of Short Range LE,” the Army wrote in a notice announcing the industry event.
Launched Effects (LE) is the Army’s program to field new autonomous air vehicles that can be launched from aircraft or ground platforms with a variety of payloads and mission system applications to provide a range of effects for reconnaissance, extended communications links and eventually lethal capabilities.
The upcoming industry event for Short Range LE follows the Army’s announcement in late November it has selected Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] for a multi-phased competitive prototyping effort to develop sensing and electronic warfare payloads for the larger LE program (Defense Daily, Nov. 29).
The Army said payload configurations for potential Short Range LE systems may include Electro-Optical/Infra-Red (EO/IR), Radio Frequency Detect, Identify, Locate, Report (RF DILR), lethal/kinetic, communications relay, and RF Decoy systems, noting it would utilize a Modular Open System Architecture approach for the effort.
Interested firms that look to set up one-on-one briefings with the Army to detail their Short Range LE solutions are expected to provide detailed descriptions of their air vehicle and payload solutions, the service noted, “to include independent assessment reports and relative data supporting system performance.”
Industry must also detail proposed command-and-control solutions and navigation capabilities, technical specifications for data links and radios as well as information on cost details and projected production capacities.