December 11, 200718 yr From Jane's USN announces SIGINT aircraft replacement programme By Martin Streetly 11 December 2007 As part of its post-Aerial Common Sensor intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting (ISRT) recapitalisation effort, the US Navy (USN) published a broad agency announcement (BAA) in November 2007, regarding an Electronics Patrol Experiment (EPX) programme intended to find a replacement for the service's existing EP-3E signals intelligence (SIGINT) aircraft after Fiscal Year 2017 (FY17). The BAA document states that the programme is intended to "recapitalise the EP-3 aircraft to provide tactical, theatre and national level ISRT support to carrier strike groups and to theatre, combatant and national commanders". As such, the EPX architecture is to be "a flexible, responsive, manned, multimission, multi-intelligence [M-INT], ISRT aircraft capable of carrying expendables". Onboard intelligence and sensor capabilities are to include "SIGINT, imagery intelligence [iMINT] and radar intelligence [RADINT]", with the IMINT capability being built around electro-optic (EO) and infrared (IR) sensors and the RADINT package including synthetic aperture radar (SAR), inverse SAR and maritime moving target indicator operating modes. The ability to perform onboard or offboard processing and M-INT data fusion (or a combination of the two) will enable the EPX to "operate successfully in either communications-permissive or communications-constrained environments". Other requirements include the ability to self-deploy worldwide.
Create an account or sign in to comment