Air Force seeks industry input for electronic warfare ECCT

The Air Force today released a request for information seeking industry input on its forthcoming deep-dive into future electronic warfare capabilities.

The service announced in November its third enterprise capability collaboration team would focus on electronic warfare. Previous ECCTs, which are typically yearlong studies that trigger follow-on experiments and analysis, looked at air superiority and multidomain command and control.

The Jan. 5 RFI states the EW ECCT will complement the Defense Department's 2017 EW strategy and will "serve as the focal point" for any efforts related to EW superiority. The RFI will help the team better understand technology needs in support of developmental planning.

The team's work will be forward-looking, focused on threats from today through the 2040s. It will primarily center on EW needs in highly contested environments, but will not exclude considerations for permissive environments, the RFI states.

Its scope will also extend from radio frequency and optical EW to communications to space and cyber EW, and the team will measure any potential solutions based on their associated cost, risk, maturity, prior technical performance, potential for new concepts of operations and tactics, techniques and procedures and their ability to integrate with other systems.

The service will discuss the ECCT in more detail at an upcoming strategic development planning and experimentation interchange meeting slated for Feb. 5-9.