Weapons and radars built with modular design are relevant and flexible as threats evolve

Delivering new sensing and weaponry capability at the “speed of relevance” is the idea behind quickly countering adversarial threats in the battlespace. Too often, though, ideas stay just that, concepts that do not effectively lead to solutions. The lost possibilities are sensors and weapons that have little commonality between them so they take longer and cost more to produce and can’t share data across warfighting and security domains.

There are, however, major new systems in production now for both the U.S. Navy and Army that have gone from conception to becoming the cornerstone of air and missile defense in just a handful of years due to engineering principals built around “composable” weapons and software-defined apertures.

One of those systems is the Navy’s AN/SPY-6 (V) active electronically scanned array radar now undergoing sea trials. The Navy is integrating SPY-6 into its surface fleet beginning with the USS Jack H. Lucas (DDG 125), first of the Arleigh Burke-class Flight III destroyers, and the USS Richard M. McCool Jr. (LPD 29), an amphibious landing ship that introduced the (V)2 variant.

Another is the Army’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS. The program has advanced through multiple live-fire tests of the 360-degree radar, demonstrating the radar’s performance.

Both programs are the centerpieces of their respective services air and missile defense modernization strategies, and both were architected in the Advanced Technology (AT) business of Raytheon.

Building atop foundational blocks

Raytheon’s Advanced Technology team is bringing ideas to fruition through the use of foundational building-blocks that enable technical innovations like software-defined apertures for radars and composable weapon architectures for missiles and other weaponry.

Through the lens of new weapons development, composability is a catalyst for speed. Over the last decade, AT has architected the use of common, scalable, modular hardware and software building blocks, allowing the company to deliver faster and streamline its factories.

“It’s absolutely central to all of our new weapon developments and pursuits,” said John C. Otto, Raytheon AT’s technology director. “It’s a toolbox of subsystems that we can pull together and use again and again with common interfaces without having to recreate the wheel from the beginning on each of them.”

In missile development, for example, one of the core but common subsystems is guidance electronics. What Raytheon AT has done is partition the functionality across the guidance unit so that if more processing is desired, cards can be easily added to support that. Or vice versa; processing can be dialed back for less complex missions where the additional capability and subsequent cost is not needed.

With commonality of hardware, customers can bundle buys at lower cost and take advantage of common factories and test equipment.

From the standpoint of the engineering workforce, different programs look much the same so that personnel can move between programs and only have to learn the particulars of that one program as opposed to an entirely new system. They experience the same look and feel of a program down to the fundamental software level. The result is higher efficiency, faster development, and quicker upgrades to combat adversarial challenges.

Software-defined apertures for system updates

Radar structures built with modular blocks can be scaled larger for massive sensing capability for advanced warships like Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, or – using the exact same blocks – scaled down for the needs of an LPD.

The Navy’s SPY-6 radar is a perfect example of how Raytheon AT used this approach to develop and scale radar systems for different customers, missions, and vessels. Each building block for the SPY-6 family of radars is a 2’x2’x2’ box called the radar modular assembly, or RMA.

Each RMA is a self-contained radar antenna and arrays of different sizes for different uses can be made by stacking RMAs together. 37 RMAs make up each of the four faces of the SPY-6(V)1 radar on the DDG 51. The SPY-6(V)2 rotating array on the Nimitz class has nine RMAs, and the three faces of the SPY-6(V)3 on Ford-class carriers and the FFG(X) frigates also have nine RMAs. The four faces of the SPY-6(V)4 radar on the DDG 51 Flight IIA destroyers have 24 RMAs. Modular radar technology is also used in the GhostEye family of radars, including the Army’s LTAMDS radar.

“Think of your hardware as a capability that is unlocked with software commands,” explained Matt Tyhach, mission area director for next generation sensors and microelectronics at Raytheon AT. “You may have a radar that is capable of detecting slow low-flying drones and then with software commands you can reoptimize its configuration to detect fast high-flying ballistic missiles. Very different target sets, but we can leverage the power and flexibility of our radar hardware baseline to stay ahead of the threat by upgrading performance through safe, secure software only upgrades.”

From a radar development perspective, AT uses such building blocks to create a software-defined aperture architecture, rather than a conventional radar approach, to create flexible hardware solutions that serve multiple missions. Software apps like those on cell phones make it simpler to control and update the radars and other weapon systems.

This modular approach to radar development, coupled with robotic assembly of each system, allows Raytheon to rapidly field radars for different missions. As new capabilities via software upgrades are developed, they’re added to the company’s common radar software product line, which is shared and re-used across multiple radar programs.

“This is a common library of radar software that was first developed for SPY-6 and as we learn more from sea trials and first deployment, that learning is all fed back into the common baseline for future radar franchises, including LTAMDS.” said Tyhach.

“Likewise, LTMADS is fielding its first units now at WSMR (White Sands Missile Range) and that learning is fed into the common radar baseline to benefit SPY-6 and expand our trusted and tried software without the larger non-recurring engineering build of most heritage non-software defined systems.”

Matching weapons system capabilities to the mission

Raytheon Advanced Technology has found the pathway to addressing complexity through the simplicity wrought by modularity and reuse of components that match weapon system capabilities to the mission – no more, no less – while software-defined apertures let those same systems modernize remotely as threats evolve.