U.S. Department of Defense launches first shot of future war and takes the lead in introducing AI into electronic warfare

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Modern radar communication systems have the ability to quickly change signal characteristics and are difficult to intercept by airplane reconnaissance systems or other system platforms .

This reality prompted the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to personally lead the industry team to apply artificial intelligence to electronic warfare (EW) to form a new combat style called "cognitive electronic warfare."

The difference between the technology of today and the 1970s is the adoption of easily accessible digital processing. This approach allows operators to effectively change the waveforms used by radar and communication systems. Tilghman said: "The problem now is that if we continue to rely on the old methods, the radar waveforms we expect will be rapidly changed, and the development of cognitive electronic warfare is to deal with such unexpected situations."

DARPA's new approach is to use machine learning algorithms to detect and mark radar transmissions in real time. It can instantly learn to analyze its characteristics and then produce a countermeasure. This does not mean that the system will invent a new countermeasure. On the contrary, Tilghman said that Cognitive EW â€œcan deduce the correct countermeasures that should be adopted.â€ Of course, the security department did not disclose how fast the AI â€‹â€‹detected, evaluated and responded. It only stated that â€œthe time is sufficient to meet the needs of radar countermeasures.â€ ".

The EW cognitive work began in 2010 and is divided into two parts: Adaptive Radar Countermeasures (ARC) and Adaptive EW Learning (BLADE). These two methods have different properties in blocking enemy radar and communication.

The debut of the cognitive EW may be within ten years, observers speculate that it may be used in modern systems, such as the US Navy's next-generation jamming machine (ie, for the EA-18G Growler EW aircraft) or as an F-35 An additional interference capability of active electronic scanning array (AESA) . DARPA ambiguously stated: "We focus on algorithms and artificial intelligence." Tilghman said: "The actual EW system we use may mean anything."

DARPA began the spectrum collaboration challenge earlier this year and challenged competitors to develop collaborative automated spectroscopic systems that work together to optimize bandwidth in a dense communications environment.

Via NextBigFuture