Current airborne electronic warfare (EW) systems must first identify a threat radar to determine the appropriate preprogrammed electronic countermeasure (ECM) technique. This approach loses effectiveness as radars evolve from fixed analog systems to programmable digital variants with unknown behaviors and agile waveforms. Future radars will likely present an even greater challenge as they will be capable of sensing the environment and adapting transmissions and signal processing to maximize performance and mitigate interference effects.

The goal of the Adaptive Radar Countermeasures (ARC) program is to enable U.S. airborne EW systems to automatically generate effective countermeasures against new, unknown and adaptive radars in real-time in the field. ARC technology will:

Isolate unknown radar signals in the presence of other hostile, friendly and neutral signals.

Deduce the threat posed by that radar.

Synthesize and transmit countermeasure signals to achieve a desired effect on the threat radar.

Assess the effectiveness of countermeasures based on over-the-air observable threat behaviors.

ARC technologies will be developed using an open architecture to allow for insertion, modification and removal of software modules with minimal effect on other elements of the system. ARC algorithms and signal processing software will be suitable both for new EW systems and for retrofitting into existing EW systems without extensive rework of front-end radio frequency hardware.