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AESAs Playing a Greater ERole in Intelligence Gathering
Targeting pods and high-resolution active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars are playing a greater role than ever in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), according to Raytheon.
“Non-traditional ISR is our over-arching concept,” says Jerry Perryman, vp for Raytheon’s ISR strategic business area. “We want to take every sensor in the battlespace and feed the information back,” he notes.
One key to non-traditional ISR is the greater capability of new sensors, according to Raytheon officials. For example, the ASQ-228 Advanced Technology FLIR (ATFLIR), with better stabilization and a third-generation IR detector, can operate at a much greater range than earlier pods. With a laser rangefinder and GPS, it can also geo-locate targets. “It has ten times the sensitivity and four times the resolution of older systems,” says Wes Motooka, vp of Raytheon’s tactical aircraft systems business unit. Key features, says Motooka, include the fact that the laser and the sensor use a common optical chain, so they are literally impossible to misalign.
The ability to geolocate targets is the difference between targeting imagery that can be used in real time, and intelligence that can be used by other platforms. Raytheon is ready to announce plans to put a datalink directly on the ATFLIR pod, allowing it to send real-time imagery to a ground station or to another platform.
Similarly, the AESA has far greater potential as an ISR sensor than earlier fighter radars. Its resolution is much greater – the APG-79’s third-highest resolution level is equivalent to the highest resolution of the F-15E’s radar – and, critically, the radar can obtain ground imagery and search for airborne targets simultaneously, so that the fighter crew are not blind to air threats.
Non-traditional ISR is also linked to Raytheon’s concept of a “system of elements”. Dean Cash, director for the company’s net-centric operations enterprise, comments: “Take any platform – commercial, a wheeled military vehicle or an air-breather like Global Hawk – and it is made from five elements: command and control, communications a sensor, an effector and the platform itself.” Raytheon’s concept is to give each of these its own IP address: “You have a network of elements with an unlimited number of decision chains.” One example: ATFLIR can geolocate a target that can’t be hit by a JDAM on the carrier aircraft, but can pass its coordinates to a JDAM on another aircraft that is in a launch position. —Bill Sweetman
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