DARPA’s Adaptive Radar Countermeasures (ARC) project

BAE Systems has won a $13.3 million contract modification from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to extend work on the Adaptive Radar Countermeasures (ARC) project. The award brings the company’s total ARC programme value to a cumulative total of $35.5 million.

Under Phase 3 of ARC, BAE Systems will complete algorithm development and advanced readiness testing, achieving key milestones to transition ARC technologies to platforms such as fifth-generation combat aircraft. “[In Phase 2, we] successfully demonstrated the ability to characterise and adaptively counter advanced threats in a closed-loop test environment. We will now continue to mature the technology and test it against the most advanced radars in the US inventory in order to successfully transition this important technology to the warfighter,” said Louis Trebaol, BAE Systems’ ARC Programme Manager.

ARC aims to enable airborne Electronic Warfare (EW) systems to counter new, unknown and adaptive radars in real time. Current EW systems have limited ability to adapt quickly to new and advanced threats, since they rely on a database of known threats and associated predefined countermeasures. To succeed in anti-access/area denial (A2AD) environments, they will have to isolate unknown hostile radar signals in dense electromagnetic environments then rapidly generate effective countermeasures. Cognitive technologies being developed for ARC include advanced signal processing, intelligent algorithms and machine learning techniques.