The U.S. Navy has awarded BAE Systems a $95 million engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract for electronic-warfare (EW) pods to protect P-8A Poseidon aircraft. Packed with subsystems, the pods detect and counter the actions of inbound threats, such as missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), to protect the aircraft and its crew and contribute to an expanded operating range for Poseidon aircraft.
Don Davidson, director of Advanced Compact Electronic Warfare Solutions at BAE Systems, noted, “We’re working closely with the U.S. Navy to deliver innovative solutions to protect this critical, high-value aircraft... We quickly prototyped a very capable system using proven technology to defend against air-to-air and surface-to-air guided threats.”
The EW pod features a flexible, open architecture that enables rapid updates and modernization of the pod’s capabilities. The open system is compatible with emerging threat-detection and decoy electronic-countermeasures (ECM) capabilities and can host third-party EW techniques and technologies.
The EMD contract follows a rapid-response contract from the U.S. Navy to BAE Systems in 2021 to demonstrate the feasibility of the system. For that initial system, the BAE Systems engineering team drew upon rapid prototyping capabilities and strong military industry collaboration with partners.
The self-protection pod for the P-8A Poseidon is part of BAE Systems's Intrepid Shield layered approach to detecting, exploiting, and countering advanced threats. Work on the pod and its components will be performed at BAE Systems's facilities in Nashua, N.H. and Austin, Texas.