AURORA, Colo.--The teaming of L3Harris Technologies
[LHX] and Shield AI on the software-defined Distributed Spectrum Collaboration and Operations (DiSCO) electronic warfare (EW) battle management system could aid drone initiatives like DoD’s Replicator and the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), as well as traditional platforms and command and control and intelligence systems, according to an L3Harris official.
Late last month, the companies said that they would conduct a DiSCO demonstration with “AI [artificial intelligence]-enabled unmanned systems that will sense, adapt and act while simultaneously executing physical and electromagnetic movements” (Defense Daily, Feb. 26). Such demonstrations may come this year.
L3Harris said that it began company-funded development of DiSCO two years ago to fit into the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) framework and the military services’ individual parts of CJADC2.
“We’re going into this [DiSCO] in response to the Department [of Defense]’s demand that we don’t lock them to a particular platform,” Robert “Trip” Raymond, a business director at L3Harris and a former U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot, said during an interview last week at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium here. “It could be a CCA thing. It could be tied to intel community data bases. It could be tied to command and control platforms. At its core, what it allows is a software-based user interface that is cloud connected. It can ride as an application on any command and control system. It has connectivity to those leading edge effectors.”
For DiSCO, Shield AI has developed mature software algorithms under its Hivemind drone autonomy effort to enable “swarms of effectors,” while L3Harris has been working “with autonomy to optimize a non-kinetic game plan,” Raymond said.
Last summer during U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Valiant Shield exercise, DiSCO “shared real-time radio frequency signal data between Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, and multiple EW payloads operating in Hawaii and in San Diego, California,” according to L3Harris. “Small form-factor payloads operated on two Seasats’ autonomous surface vehicles along with satellite communications links at both locations. L3Harris operators also received real-time information from sensors through the cloud and initiated rapid reprogramming actions over-the-air from Hawaii and a remote company terminal in Clifton, New Jersey.”
In addition to Seasats, L3Harris said that it has also conducted other “DiSCO demonstrations, namely at Silent Swarm and with our B-52 platform partners during customer engagements.”
The company said that DiSCO could significantly improve U.S. EW.
“If you think about how traditional electronic warfare systems have always operated–loaded before flight with some kind of threat library and Mission Data File–that dictates how that system is going to detect the threat and respond to the threat with electronic warfare,” Raymond said during last week’s interview.
“If you think about how we used to fight, every system would be stove-piped and be programmed with that capability to defend itself,” he said. “That’s how I grew up. I would fly. I’d get shot at. I’d get locked up by something. I would have an ECM [electronic countermeasures] capability in a pod. I would turn it on, [but] I really didn’t know if it was having any effect on the person next to me. The data that it was receiving and responding with never was shared. It was always just, ‘Turn it on. Hope that it helps protect me so I can get out of harm’s way.'”
“That works fine when you’re dealing with a legacy enemy integrated air defense system,” Raymond said. “The current environment is an advanced kill web. The threats are connected. They’re dense. They’re exceedingly long-range, and they’re able to change parameters with their systems in ways that render a lot of our pre-loaded threat libraries obsolete.”
Other nations’ EW threats require that the U.S. “approach their kill web with our own offensive kill web,” he said. “I’m confident we could deliver this capability in low numbers of years because we’ve already delivered a lot of it ourselves, and Shield’s done some of the things themselves. When we collaborate together, it could be a game changer.”
An L3Harris engineer had suggested the name “Stayin Alive” but the Bee Gees’ estate owns the trademark to that 1977 disco hit, and the name hence became DiSCO.