AFRL pursues multispectral threat warning under EOS-DEW

The US Air Force has launched an effort to develop and demonstrate prototype advanced integrated threat warning system technologies to address multispectral guided missiles, hostile fire, and directed energy weapon systems.

Led by the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL's) Sensors Directorate, the Electro-Optic Sensing Defensive Electronic Warfare (EOS-DEW) programme is intended to mature integrated multispectral threat warning solutions combining missile sensing, laser sensing, and hostile fire sensing, while also advancing test and developmental risk reduction methodologies. The latter includes exploring new techniques for multispectrum simulation, multithreat simulation, and sensing technology evaluation, together with enhanced testing and evaluation techniques to support research and development.

According to a EOS-DEW call released on 30 November, the diverse nature of the missile threat requires exploiting various sensing techniques and early launch detection, requiring “continual improvements in missile warning sensor architectures, exploiting different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum”.

It continued, “Directed energy threat detection, on the other hand, requires laser detection schemes containing multiple discriminants. The relative fidelity of coherence, wavelength, direction-of-arrival, geolocation, fluence, and pulse processing discriminants is dictated by the threat spaces of interest and drives the complexity of warning sensor architectures to satisfy hand-off requirements for protection countermeasures.”

The EOS-DEW project will focus on five technical areas/objectives: multispectral threat sensor development, including component hardware, algorithm development/evaluation, and evaluation of emerging technologies; multispectral threat simulation development to support evaluation of sensors/systems in hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) laboratory and field settings; modelling and simulation supporting sensor development/evaluation and multispectral threat simulation in HITL laboratory and field settings; experiments, characterisations, and infrastructure operations to support risk reduction experiments of threat warning systems using HITL techniques; and test and demonstration events as part of multispectral threat sensor development and evaluation.