Lockheed Martin [LMT] beat out General Dynamics Mission Systems
[GD] to continue on the Army’s program to develop a new long-range electronic warfare (EW) capability, the service said on Tuesday.
The Army awarded Lockheed Martin a $36.7 million deal to work for the next 21 months on the second phase of the Terrestrial Layer System–Echelons Above Brigade (TLS-EAB) program, which will include building physical prototypes of the system.
“Phase 2 advances the prototype from design and lab-based demonstrations to a tangible form factor able to be tested in a relevant environment,” Lt. Col. Kris Haley, the Army’s product manager for terrestrial spectrum warfare, said in a statement.
Last August, the Army awarded a pair of deals to Lockheed Martin and GD Mission Systems for the competitive first phase of TLS-EAB to work on concept design, system design review and a software architecture demonstration (Defense Daily, Aug. 18 2022).
“Moving into this next phase, we are going to continue to embrace soldier touchpoints to drive the design while leveraging a proven DevSecOps pipeline and an open architecture that will enable a highly interoperable, configurable 21st century security solution that can be easily tailored for specific mission requirements,” Deon Viergutz, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for spectrum convergence, said in a statement.
Lockheed Martin said TLS-EAB is intended to “provide critical long-range situational awareness through detection, identification, location, exploitation, and disruption of adversary signals of interest.”
TLS-EAB is likely to be integrated on heavier Army platforms, such as Family of Medium Tactical Vehicle trucks, to provide advanced ground-based jamming capabilities from longer distances, the Army has noted previously.
“The TLS EAB is an extended-range, terrestrial sensing, collection, and electronic attack system providing integrated SIGINT, EW and cyber capabilities for situational awareness, situational understanding, Intelligence & Warning, command post survivability, critical asset protection operations, and supports the delivery of lethal and non-lethal effects in a holistic, synchronized manner for Multi-Domain Operations,” the Army’s program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors said in a statement.
The Army said it plans to use an Other Transaction Authority agreement to eventually transition TLS-EAB from prototyping to fielding, with an aim to begin fielding in fiscal year 2025.