By the end of September, the Army is likely to award the contract for the Common Infrared Countermeasures program (CIRCM), a crowded competitive field where ITT Defense [ITT] believes it has an important discriminator, officials said in an interview.
“We took what we deemed to be a system engineering approach and this company has a long history of solving difficult engineering problems not just building product,” said Robert Ferrante, ITT’s vice president for Airborne Electronic Attack. “We looked at this from the ground up and tried to fill all the holes with our design, invested over $30 million dollars of our own internal research and development funds and then had a number of compatriot programs from the Army and the Navy to help mature our system.”
The company is on the third generation of their countermeasure suite, which has considerably lowered the risk.
Using a systems engineering approach, ITT was not hampered by legacy systems or other hardware and was able to look out into industry for “best of breed” technology, he said. ITT developed its own specifications from the ground up and did a lot of subcontracting to get to a system “that we know, because we’ve tested it,” responds to the current request for proposals, and could bring other functions to the table.
“What we were trying to accomplish was to meet the specifications, deliver at an effective cost, or lower price, and have the flexibility from an engineering standpoint to add additional functions into the system,” Ferrante said.
Those additional functions are not necessarily part of the initial requirements but functions the company believes will be needed later on. The specific functions are based on company interviews with warfighters, Army and government personnel.
Ferrante said ITT’s approach is probably quite different from companies such as BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman [NOC] Raytheon [RTN] and Lockheed Martin [LMT], which are likely part of the competition. The Army has a threshold requirement of 1,000 for the helicopter self-protection jamming systems.
ITT Defense five years ago began looking at the operational environment and talking to all interested parties about what works and what doesn’t work in terms of infrared countermeasures, he said.
ITT Chief CIRCM engineer John Janice said the top down systems engineering perspective was that the company started with a clean sheet of paper, freeing it to search out the best available technology.
“That allowed us to really embrace the new DoD edict for a modular open system approach and architecture,” Janice said. “By doing that we could leverage the latest technologies and also get the flexibility for the Army, as technologies advance down the road, to insert those technologies as they come available at a reduced cost and a greater [effectiveness].”
Examining the mission profile, ITT realized the basic component of the system is something that allows pointing a laser at a target with a high degree of accuracy. Thus, it looked for other capabilities with that requirement.
One potential capability ITT is already involved in: free space laser communication, Janice said. That involves taking a laser beam and modulating it with a data stream and sending it from one platform, either an aircraft or a ground-based platform to another. The advantage of that is it is a very covert means of communications because the laser beam is extremely narrow and only points at the target of interest. It can’t be intercepted by the enemy.
This means platforms can share extremely rich data and find more innovative solutions to service problems. For example, a platform carrying a situational awareness system that allows it to see the entire environment can send the data to other platforms. They gain the advantage of the system without having it on their platform.
Ferrante said ITT provides the tool whereby you can communicate from Point A to Point B and communicate data at a high rate.
“We’re almost changing the paradigm,” he said. “Instead of having the RF node, we now have a laser node…we’re changing the whole concept of how you would communicate.”
Janice said ITT programs account for the cyclical nature of the threat, countermeasure, threat.
“One of the advantages of our countermeasures design is that we can easily upgrade that system or add additional capabilities to meet the ever evolving and changing threat environment.”
A unique aspect of the ITT design is that it consists of two systems, the pointer tracker and the laser.
“We’ve separated those two components and coupled them together via optical fiber,” Janice said. “This allows us to leverage the extensive work that’s been done over the last couple of decades in the telecom industry and give the capability of line replaceability in the laser.”
The system design allows the laser to be replaced with a different one without having to “remove, recalibrate or change” any of the other system hardware, he said.
“That’s something that previous systems and our competitors cannot do, and gives you the ability to stay current as the threat environment evolves,” Janice said.
Ferrante said the CIRCM system pointer tracker has a separate port for fiber optics, for say, adding another laser for communications, or for a counter for hostile fire detection and also, potentially, for rangefinding.
“We’re trying to maximize, once again using the system engineering approach, the systems to be multi-use when not doing its primary and critical mission of countering the IR missile threats,” Ferrante said.
“We’re actually going into the tech demo stage with what we believe to be the final solution to the problem, so I believe we’re a a little bit ahead of the game when it comes to maturity of the system,” he said.