The long-range electronic warfare (EW) helicopter will protect Navy ships from advanced anti-ship missiles / Lockheed Martin. U.S. Navy sur...
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| The long-range electronic warfare (EW) helicopter will protect Navy ships from advanced anti-ship missiles / Lockheed Martin. |
Officials of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington announced a $17.8 million order to the Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems segment in Liverpool, N.Y., to build low-rate initial production units of the AN/ALQ-248 Advanced Off-Board Electronic Warfare (AOEW) Active Mission Payload (AMP) system for the MH-60R and MH-60S ship-based maritime helicopters. Lockheed Martin will deliver as many as 18 AOEW AMP AN/ALQ-248 pods.
AOEW will provide long-endurance, off-board electronic countermeasures against current and future anti-ship missile threats with a long-duration EW active mission payload for the MH-60R and MH-60S ship-based maritime helicopters.
The AOEW AMP AN/ALQ-248 can work independently or together with the ship’s onboard AN/SLQ-32(V)6 Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) Block 2 to detect an incoming missile and then evaluate where it is going, Lockheed Martin officials say. AOEW then uses radio frequency countermeasure techniques to deter the missile.
The AOEW program is intended to devise countermeasures for some of the world's most advanced radar-guided anti-ship missiles, such as the Russian-made SS-N-22 Sunburn and SS-NX-26 Oniks.
One of the goals of the AOEW program is to detect and jam incoming fast anti-ship missiles at standoff ranges to give on-board and off-board missile defenses a fighting chance at staving off the incoming weapon. Lockheed Martin won the industry competition to develop and build the AOEW system in early 2017. The program attracted attention from some of the nation's top-tier EW houses such as Raytheon Co. Northrop Grumman Corp., L3Harris, and BAE Systems.
Although initial AOEW prototypes are to be installed on MH-60R and MH-60S helicopters, future deployable versions may be intended for long-range, long-endurance fixed-wing or helicopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), experts say.
Lockheed Martin will develop a modular open-systems architecture (MOSA) to enable the EW payload to adapt to evolving threats, hasten deployment, reduce development time and costs, and facilitate future system upgrades and technology insertion. The AOEW program capitalizes on Lockheed Martin expertise across the corporation. The Lockheed Martin facility in Owego, N.Y., will integrate the system onto the MH-60 helicopters, which are built by Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company in Stratford, Conn.
On this order Lockheed Martin will do the work in Syracuse, N.Y.; Lansdale, Pa.; Stratford, Conn.; and Orlando, Fla., and should be finished by May 2024. For more information contact Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems online at www.lockheedmartin.com, or Naval Sea Systems Command at www.navsea.navy.mil.