Open System Manufacturing of Large Sensing/Weapons Platforms

In order to maintain our nation’s technological superiority on air, sea and land, we must respond quicker to emerging threats and reduce the cost of major sensing platforms. Every DoD platform developed nowadays contains at least one sensor, whether it be RF, EO/IR, or acoustic. In fact, in a lot of recent developments, the platform is built around the sensor and exists only to support the sensor and possibly a weapon. This is certainly evident in the proliferation of unmanned vehicles. In the conventional defense acquisition paradigm, the entire sensing/weapons platform is developed by a single prime contractor with proprietary interfaces. In order to reduce cost and speed up development to respond to emerging threats, a new defense acquisitions and manufacturing process is needed that is more closely aligned with low-cost commercial processes and practices. We propose an approach that (1) utilizes open architectures for both hardware and software; (2) employs re-usable sub-assembly building blocks; (3) takes advantage of a software-defined architecture to maintain flexibility. This new manufacturing paradigm will be formalized in Phase 1, and demonstrated in a large-scale phased-array radar system platform application in Phase 2.