Northrop Grumman is contributing its expertise in ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) by increasing the fidelity of its modeling, simulation, and analysis to this year’s Empire Challenge exercise. The ability to share timely, relevant information among aircraft will enhance warfighters’ situational awareness and increase their chances of success. Northrop Grumman built the virtual, human-in-the-loop wargaming environment used in Empire Challenge. That work was developed with Northrop Grumman’s Cyber Warfare Integration Network (CWIN), which can generate operationally-based, virtual battlefield environments. Empire Challenge 09 is being executed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) under the sponsorship of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Northrop Grumman aircraft represented in EC 09 include the Air Force’s RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft reconnaissance system and E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS), and the Navy’s E-2C Hawkeye early warning and battle management aircraft and MQ-8B Fire Scout vertical takeoff and landing unmanned system. Empire Challenge 09 is hosted by the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division. The exercise began July 6 and continues through July 31 at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, California, with distributed locations in the Joint Intelligence Lab in Suffolk, Virginia, the Combined Air Operations Center-Experimental at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, military service labs, coalition sites in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency in the Netherlands. The virtual environment developed by Northrop Grumman is located at the Suffolk Joint Intelligence Lab and operates on two government networks connected to all of the locations in the exercise.
Lessons learned from the exercise will be used in ongoing work under a three-year cooperative research agreement between USJFCOM and Northrop Grumman. The goal of the agreement, signed in 2007, is to identify ways to shorten the military commander’s cycle of tasking sensors to collect intelligence, analyzing the information and disseminating it to warfighters. The USJFCOM/Northrop Grumman research team will use data from Empire Challenge 09 to develop new concepts of operation and tactics, techniques and procedures to improve the use of ISR assets in irregular warfare.
