Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), the co-chairman of the House Electronic Warfare Working Group and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on July 18 that he is disappointed that the House’s version of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill did not make progress on electronic warfare (EW).
“We did not get much done…when it comes to electromagnetic spectrum operations,” Bacon, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and EC-130H commander, told a Hudson Institute virtual forum on July 18th. “Most of the work was done last year when we were able to procure four more Compass Call aircraft, and we were doing stuff on the EF-18 [Growler]. This year, we had a more restricted budget. It’s under inflation. We didn’t get as much done, and it concerns me because we had an opportunity to expand more Compass Call aircraft, maybe more Navy EW. We saw very little in the actual budgeting that came out in the electronic warfare realm.”
Last year, Congress provided nearly $554 million for four BAE Systems EC-37B Compass Call aircraft.
Another hot topic for the EW community and DoD has been whether and how to share the S-band.
A DoD sharing or abandonment of the S-band portion of the electromagnetic spectrum could harm military forces and entail significant workaround costs, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) last week during his nomination hearing to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Defense Daily, July 12).
Since August 2020, Brown has served as the Air Force’s 22nd chief of staff.
“Proposals for DoD to share or vacate the S-band may result in setting the DoD back several decades compared to near peer adversary nations and result in significant financial costs,” according to written answers Brown provided in response to advance policy questions by SASC before the July 11 hearing. “Vacating this band is not an option, and no decision should be made prior to the current study is completed and reviewed.”
By September, DoD may finish a study that may shed insight on whether commercial spectrum use will conflict with military use of the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band (Defense Daily, March 15).
In May, Brown said that it would cost about $2 billion to redesign just one DoD system–C-130 Station Keeping–to move it off of S-band, if required.
Sierra Research, Inc.–now part of Leonardo DRS [DRS], a U.S. based subsidiary of Italy’s Leonardo–built the APN-169 and APN-243 Station-Keeping Equipment (SKE) radars. SKE is to enable the Lockheed Martin [LMT] C-130 to fly in close formation in low-visibility conditions and to locate downed aircrew with a location beacon.
Bacon and other lawmakers held EW discussions at the Pentagon on July 17, including on the issue of spectrum sharing.
“Our S-band area–we were talking at the four-star level [on July 17]–is very important to a lot of our radar missions, and you don’t want to degrade that, yet 5G is critical to our economy” Bacon said during the July 18 Hudson Institute forum. “I think if we could find a technical solution, that’s optimal, but nobody thinks that could happen. We have to prove that it’s gonna work because we need 5G, and we have to have [the] important radar missions that the DoD operates. But, if we can’t prove it, you can’t just vacate the radar missions that are already out there so they’re gonna have to prove that this 5G can operate in that space.”