The Threat – Past, Present, and Future (From a Warfighter’s Perspective)

en Miller (00:09): Welcome to from the Crows Nest and our inaugural CTO series, powered by L three Harris. I'm your host, Ken Miller, director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of All Crows. Thank you for listening. The CTO series is a deep dive into the technologies and innovations that are changing the way that we fight in the 21st century. It is curated with a senior or chief technology officer in mind, but we try to make it accessible for all of our listeners. In this inaugural series, we are taking a closer look at emerging and future threats challenging US air superiority. Now, in our first episode, I had the pleasure of traveling to L three Harris in Clifton, NEW Jersey, and I had the opportunity to talk with Patrick Creighton, vice President and general Manager of Electronic Warfare. I was also joined by Trip Raymond and Paul Delia, who will join me throughout the series. Ken Miller (00:56): In this episode, episode two, we are pleased to be coming to you from the Air Force Association's Annual Airspace Cyber Conference taking place at the Gaylord Resort in National Harbor, Maryland. In this episode, we take a closer look at the evolving threat and the technology investments that the US Air Force especially is making to ensure mission success. I am pleased to welcome back as my co-host Trip Raymond, who in addition to being the strategy and business development lead at L three Harris is also a retired F-16 fighter pilot. So he has firsthand experience against present day threats, both surface to air and air to air. Before I welcome trip back to the show, however, I had the opportunity to sit down with John Knowles, editor in chief of AOCs Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance or the jed. There are a fEW experts who have been tracking EEW technology development over the past 30 years, more so than John. So Tripp and I wanted to have him on the show to offer his perspective. So at this time, I want to bring you some of my conversation with John Knowles. Now due to the challenging audio environment of the exhibit hall, we had to make some adjustments to the recording for the best listening quality. Let's listen in. Alright, John, well thank you for joining me. There is a lot to see and attend to here at AFA this year. Can you start by telling us or giving us your first impressions from the 30,000 foot level? John Knowles (02:17): I'm impressed by the array of technologies that are here and really I think that the way I see it at that high level is the Air Force has a nEW war fighting concept that they're pushing, which is the agile combat employment and the way that industry has responded to that. So you're seeing a lot more focus on expeditionary, and I'm seeing that here. So you're seeing a lot more just the agile combat employment idea is to disperse your air bases or air power so that they're not easily targetable in fixed bases. And so you're seeing a lot more shelters. You're just seeing things that you would normally see a lot more focus on, again, deployable flight line technology, things like that that you would see again in an agile combat employment environment. And so what I'm looking at and what they show is a lot on the exhibit floor at least, is the tools for those concepts. And a lot of that has to do with EW. So you're seeing a very expanded EW sort of mission set here. I think that's the thing I've really taken away. There's actually more navigation warfare stuff that I would normally not expect to see here, space, electronic warfare, even things like high power microwave for air defense because the army isn't really providing the air defense for the bases anymore. So the Air Force has to pick that mission up itself. So base security and things like that. Ken Miller (03:49): Now in the past, AFA has been focused mainly on rather narrow concepts of how the Air Force should respond to modern threats. This often begged the question, where does EW fit in their plans? Now this year, the EW conversation is everywhere. So what are some of your thoughts on how the Air Force's approach has been changing as it relates to EW? John Knowles (04:12): Yeah, I think so. I think in the past the EW content of the show was very narrow, really because partly because the Air Force wasn't doing much in EW until they got the three 50th wing going, three 50th spectrum warfare wing. But now again, when you're going back to that agile combat employment concept, they're much more exposed in the spectrum, right? They're much more exposed to jamming interference. So it's not the Air Force, I don't want to oversimplify it, but they typically didn't worry about spectrum monitoring and spectrum management because they just flEW away from each other. John Knowles (04:50): They didn't have to worry about being in a congested environment. But now they're operating from so many bases on the ground and places like that that they really have to worry about things that you would normally see. Like companies with spectrum analyzers out there for spectrum monitoring around a deployed base, knowing where a signal is inside or outside your base, your perimeter. So if it's inside you want somebody, you want to practice submissions control, you better shut down that emitter that you have control of. Conversely, if it's outside your perimeter, you want to know what that emitter is doing and if it's a bad guy or if it's something that you just want to know about. So that have to think about things like that that they wouldn't have had to worry about in the past. They would've been at their fixed installations. So they're thinking, again, they're thinking more like the Army and the Marine Corps in that expeditionary mindset. And that's something the Air Force hasn't really thought about since the nineties. Ken Miller (05:42): So what are some of the conversations you've had here at AFA that represents some of the innovation that's showcased here on the exhibit floor? John Knowles (05:49): One of the big ones, I think epes is here and they have their leitis system in that technology, so that high power microwaves, HPM technology. But what I like about Epes is what they're interesting is you have your traditionally W where you jam in through the antenna and you are using signal modulation to disrupt a receiver or stop a targeting process. It's a radar. And then you have HPM, traditionally high power, very short, but wide band. And Epes has the technology that kind of goes in between them and it spans traditionally W and directed energy or HPM. And in that their ability to control the effect of PM basically. So it is going in on an unshielded circuit or some other backdoor way into a system and disrupting it. But they can control that disruption a lot more. They can make it temporary. So if it's a drone, and that's where leonis their system is, it can obviously shut down a drone and it will fall out of the sky crash and it's out of service. But if it's, for example, in a scenario like a Red Sea John Knowles (07:00): Where there's a drone, an unmanned surface vessel coming at them or they're not sure about it, they can shut it down and determine what it is. And then if it's just a commercial vessel or something like a rib or something that's just for some reason not in another Red Sea, they can take the effect away and it'll resume its operation. And so that ability to be more agile about how they, and more specific to that threat. And the cool thing about what they do is traditionally we think about HPM, we think, oh, it's kind of indiscriminate. So you want to keep it away from your own systems, but their system, you can actually notch out blue, you can protect your blue systems. So that's an effect that EW also is pretty Ken Miller (07:40): Good at. The threat today is so dynamic, it seems to be highlighting all the gaps that we talk about routinely here on from the Crow's Nest. How do you see the threat driving Air Force investment in next generation solutions? John Knowles (07:52): Yes, I think again, on the show floor and certainly in the program here in the symposium, you've got space, you've got penetrating an enemy's air defense system. You've got protecting your own assets. Now you really are in the cross areas of an adversary or some of our adversaries have the ability, they're creating their own sort of what Russia would call a reconnaissance strike complex that we just call an offensive battlefield network. But the idea that that you're using your sensors to find targets and communicating that rapidly to the shooters and be able to attack on the attack surface is so large because it includes space, it includes your ships and then in the ocean and pretty far out. And it includes obviously your air assets and even ground bases and things like that. So that idea that the thing that connects all of that is the electromagnetic spectrum. Ken Miller (08:53): Now switching gears a little bit, can you talk about how space domain is being addressed here at AFA and particularly what technology you see that are game changers in terms of how we fight in space? John Knowles (09:05): I think one of the things in the space world, we've been obviously very focused in the last fEW years on space command Delta three and some of the activities that they're doing, especially on the training side, that's going to be, I think a big thing going forward. And then we have those companies out there that are doing RF emitter mapping and things like that that are commercial companies, but they're selling that emitter mapping is kind of a service. But one of the companies I ran into today I thought was really interesting. There's a lot of dod, especially Air Force dependence on commercial space communications platforms. So things like spacing it now, starlink one web, things like that. And because those commercial satellites, commercial services have never really, the DOD has never had to think about an adversary attacking those signals, attacking those satellites with jamming or anything like that. Ken Miller (10:14): Well, thank you John for joining us here for episode two of our CTO series. And now I'd like to bring in my co-host Trip Raymond to discuss a little bit more about the evolving threats facing our war fighters today Trip. Great to be back here with you today and it's great to see you here at AFA. How's everything going? Trip Raymond (10:32): Great to be with you again. Awesome to be here, Ken. Ken Miller (10:36): Alright, so at the top of the episode we aired an interviEW with John Knowles, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance. I want to get to some of his remarks first, but to begin, tell us a little bit about your first impressions here. It's been a very busy week for you here at AFA lot of meetings, a lot of demonstrations taking place. What are some of your early impressions here at AFA in 2024? Trip Raymond (11:05): I would say this AFA compared to others. We first off always, it's very well attended. It's always great to give back to AFA and see old colleagues from when I wore the uniform and other industry partners and folks from across the community. So really it's a good blue for folks like me who used to wear the uniform and serving in different ways. But I really think that this year we're starting to see an emphasis on non-kinetic effects and electromagnetic spectrum that is actually giving me confidence that we're kind of on the right track as a defense industrial base. And then with our partners in DOD, we're pointing that in the right. Ken Miller (11:55): So during my conversation with John Knowles, he's here on the walking the exhibit floor as well and going to some of the sessions, he raised a lot of interesting ideas that he's talked about and heard about in his meetings and from his remarks that our listeners just heard. He mentioned a lot about the prevalence of or the move toward agile combat employment ideas or concepts and how that's kind of changing the way that the Air Force is looking to fight. He also talked about how with the evolving threat, it's really led to greater investment in multifunction systems, better integration with EW and radar and sort of bridging the gaps that have been out there that have gone unaddressed because quite frankly, air superiority hasn't been as challenged as it is today based on what he said. What are some of your thoughts about his impressions here at AFA Trip Raymond (12:59): Agile combat Employment is really interesting to me as an electronic warfare professional on the industry side because a lot of what we count on for electronic warfare systems to work is an accurate threat library and the ability to connect to the right databases that can keep our systems relevant and agile. So reprogramming those systems when you are in a distributed location potentially without connectivity to those databases and those higher echelon reprogramming centers at all times is definitely going to be a challenge when you're talking about agile combat employment for sure. And I think that that is a really good move on the Air Force part as we face the threat that pacing threat in the Endo paycom region. Because the thing not only air superiority, that's certainly something that we've been used to. We've been relatively used to spectrum superiority or the ability to operate within the spectrum. Trip Raymond (14:07): That's going to be a challenge. And then feeding that entire conflict is our ability to execute logistics, which relies on the same kind of networks and the same kind of connectivity. And that will be logistics at risk to a degree that we haven't seen in a very long time as a country. All that comes together when you're trying to achieve effects, certainly in the airborne domain and obviously in the other domains when you're trying to achieve those effects with electronic warfare or electromagnetic spectrum operations, you're still relying on those same logistics chains, the same connectivity data movement pipelines that will be limited and will require us to push more decision making and compute forward across the battle space. Ken Miller (14:58): And so the focus of this episode, of course is the threat. And I want to get into a little bit, and you bring this to unique perspective, being an operator, being a former F-16 pilot, you faced the threat and rather relatively recently too. So I want to talk a little bit about what you see as how the threat has evolved and how that is challenging the US and allied our ability to defeat that threat. What are some of the challenges? What are some of the nEW challenges we're facing that kind of bring a lot of what you're seeing here at a FFA to the forefront? Trip Raymond (15:39): I would tell you that throughout my career, flying F-16 when I began, we were still doing some pretty antiquated tactics with very a lot of unguided and laser-guided weapons. And throughout my career that became GPS guided weapons and more long range weapons. Nowadays, I would say the threat has pushed our forces fairly far away from where we need to go, and that includes all of our assets are at higher risk, at longer ranges away from the areas they need to operate. And that's because of primarily our F threats surface air missile threats that are very long range or air-to-air threats that are very long range. All of those threats rely on the spectrum to do their job and to close their kill chains. So our ability to break those kill chains is uniquely going to exist in the electromagnetic spectrum at the opening conflicts, but the opening days of any conflict, and that's what I see here at AFA, if you walk the floor, you see the types of exquisite and next generation capabilities that a lot of companies are trying to advance. These are designed to counter those long range kill chains of the enemy and those kill webs of the enemy with very capable, distributed and capable mass type of platforms and long range weapons. Ken Miller (17:10): And so today it seems that there's greater awareness or maybe even understanding that our systems, our systems, our warfighters, they're more exposed to the spectrum and activities in the spectrum today than they were decades ago, particularly when it comes to air superiority. Could you talk a little bit about, from your perspective as an F-16 pilot, what that looks like or what that encounter is like as you become more exposed in the spectrum to being seen or tracked or, and you mentioned that we're further being pushed further away, but how does that, you can't always be that we realize now that we have to get closer to the threat to defeat it. So how does that exposure to the spectrum play out from your perspective as a pilot? Trip Raymond (18:14): So it's a good question. I think that when I talk about the threat, that anti access area denial environment that we have to face pushing a lot of our assets far away, that's not something that we can't counter. Of course we can and we do. The way that we have to counter it is with electromagnetic spectrum effects of our own, largely certainly at the opening phases of any kind of conflict to be able to get to a position where the kinetic effects will actually work. I can compare that to most of my career where if I was flying Myo 16 and I'm in a wild weasel kind of suppression of enemy air defenses type of mission, one of the jobs that I had was to get targeted by enemy radars and to get shot at and to defend myself and shoot back so that the assets that I am escorting can get to their targets. Trip Raymond (19:11): I think conceptually that is still going to be the case. The big differences in the modern era are it's probably not going to be a manned asset at these ranges that is doing, being the missile sponge, if you will. We're going to send a distributed network of really collaborative and distributed platforms and payloads to do a lot of that function to stimulate the threat to potentially decoy and to put non-kinetic effects down so that our kinetic effects can actually get to their target. And those kinetic effects might also be delivered by a mix of crude and uncured platforms. All of that needs to be synchronized in a level that we have never had to synchronize past. I'd say that's probably the biggest challenge we have as we move forward into managing the spectrum and doing the battle management of electromagnetic effects or EMBM. You've got a lot of distributed assets, all of them are collecting data. We need to be able to share that data and we need to be able to synchronize the offensive EA effects so that we can orchestrate them across a battle space at these long ranges where we may not have the ability for direct line of sight to all of those assets based on those distances. Ken Miller (20:30): So can you tell us from your perspective how decision-making responsibilities have changed for our pilots? It seems as you're explaining some of the vulnerabilities, some of the challenges, it seems like it would be very easy to oversaturate with data or situational awareness asking the pilot to do too much. Is that a concern or how do we give the war fighter what they need to defeat the threat without overwhelming them? Trip Raymond (21:03): Well, any good fighter pilot will tell you they've never been overwhelmed. So that's not a thing for me. No, I'm just kidding. It's a very real problem in the F-16 that I flEW, which is obviously not the same as the current F sixteens that the block 70, block 72, the nEW block 70, block 72, that has situational awareness tools and pilot vehicle interface displays that are probably better than what I flEW. A lot of that kind of fusion of the battle space happens between your ears when you're flying and some of the older aircraft and some of the nEWer aircraft. A lot of that kind of battlefield fusion happens on the displays on your aircraft, but it is a lot of data. And from talking to a lot of my former colleagues who fly fifth gen aircraft and even the more modern fourth gen aircraft, that is a big challenge because if you have too much data, then you're relying on the pilot who might be upside down at night, pulling Gs, defending themselves to make some decisions that require a lot of analysis. We need to be better, I think, as a community, and we're moving toward that at delegating to the machines what the machines can do uniquely well and reserving the more difficult and creative decision-making and authority at the human level that's going to come with trust, that's going to come with tactics, training procedures, and working those kinks out. As we get more familiar with AI informed course of action development and collaborative effects of a bunch of distributed assets, some of them are being flown by robots. Ken Miller (22:51): Alright, so I want to shift our attention a little bit to talking about investment in the upgrades necessary to defeat emerging threats. We talk a lot about fourth gen, fifth gen, and of course sixth gen is on the horizon. How do you see the Air Force and DOD more generally balancing investment between fifth gen, sixth gen also, but also realizing that fourth generation systems have to remain relevant for decades against these threats. And so it requires a lot of investment across a number of different platforms, both next generation as well as legacy? Trip Raymond (23:38): Yeah, it's a really good question and a tough problem. I know that the budgets continue to be constrained in the midst of some evolving threats and near peer and peer adversaries that we have to be prepared to face. And because of that, the Department of Defense has had to make some really difficult choices and based on priorities, limited budget. So currently a lot of the investment is going toward next generation systems, CCA, that kind of tactical capability. And of course, fifth gen F 35 is still in production. That is really important because you're going to need those capabilities. But to your point, the backbone of the Air Force and the US side, the backbone of our international partner Air Forces remains platforms like the F-16 and they need to remain relevant, not just because of the first fEW days of a conflict, not necessarily because we think that they're going to be at the leading edge on the first fEW days of the near peer conflict, but because we're going to need iron, we're going to need assets for the follow on campaign, we're going to have changes to the battlefield that require these assets to be survivable and lethal. Trip Raymond (25:03): A lot of the capability that's being put into platforms like the F-16 that gets after that, things like the e radar and long range weapons and individual kind of capabilities and subsystems and the F 15, F-16 on the US side, one of the things that is very promising from our perspective is that we have international partners that are investing in electromagnetic spectrum capabilities. EW systems like our Viper shield system that is going to be proliferated all over the world to our partners in their F sixteens, the F-16 block, 70 72 in partnership with Lockheed. It's a very exquisite capability. It's next generation type of electronic warfare that has quite a bit of capability. Something that I wish I would've had when I flEW to the F-16 to really get after those modern threats and to be survivable in a number of different AORs. Ken Miller (26:01): Well, and I know that we're going to be discussing a little bit more in depth, well, you mentioned a lot of emerging technologies, and I know we're going to cover a lot of those in our next episode, which is Technologies to Combat Threat episode three. So we'll wait till then to unpack some of that. But I think it's really important from our perspective here at the A OC, is that we want, we are well aware that we need to continue to push the envelope in terms of advocacy for greater investment in this because it's very easy to take a look at some of the high profile technologies upgrades out there that you see and think that everything is taken care of. But once you start to drill down, you tend to see a lot more gaps that you need to address. And especially in the EW, you're seeing much greater vulnerability in the spectrum. And so that has to translate at some point into greater investment for our own systems as well as systems overseas. Trip Raymond (27:09): And it's a really difficult math problem, right? They have a limited amount of budget and more capability needs than they potentially can fund. So they have to make decisions and push off certain capabilities down the road. And to your first question about this particular conference at AFAI am confident and actually feeling optimistic that we're starting to push some of the investment to these. We're starting to push some of the investment to these electromagnetic spectrum capabilities forward in the budget so that we can meet the demands of the war fighter. They've told us what they need. We on the industry side are putting in our own investment quite a bit to get after some of those technologies. We're leveraging commercial off the shelf technologies, we're leveraging existing programs, and we're putting that into a number of systems that we think will be very relevant. Some of that is ahead of the refined and fully published requirement that we're hearing from DOD, and that's okay, but we're just eager to get after it and to provide the capability to the war fighter. Ken Miller (28:19): Great. Well, thank you Trip. I know, like I said, this has been a very busy week for everyone and you especially, so I will not take up any more of your time. I really do appreciate you taking some time to join me here for episode two of our CTO series. Looking forward to sitting down with you again real soon here for episode three on Technologies of Combat the Threat. But until then, enjoy the rest of your week here at AFA and talk to you soon. Trip Raymond (28:44): Alright, Ken, thanks again. Great to see you. See you next time. Ken Miller (28:47): Thank you. That will conclude this episode, episode two of our nEW CTO series as part of our from the Crow's Nest Family of podcast. This series is powered by L three Harris. Our next episode, episode three, we will be back in our studio to discuss next generation technologies to combat the threat. If you have any questions or feedback for this episode or the CTO series in general, please take a moment to email me at host at from the crows nest.org. That's it for today. Thanks for listening. Trip Raymond (29:25): It's topic.