The Air Force remains interested in establishing a program of record in its FY ’10 program objective memorandum (POM) for a standoff jamming capability on the B-52H bomber aircraft, according to service officials.
This concept is known as the Core Component Jammer (CCJ).
“But before we proceed,” the Secretary of the Air Force (SECAF) public affairs office told sister publication Defense Daily in a statement, “we must complete the necessary technical maturation to determine if the envisioned solution and employment are realistic, achievable and affordable.”
For example, the Air Force Research Laboratory has been maturing low-band phased-arrays applicable to the standoff jamming mission.
Last month the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)-led Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC) met to discuss issues related with the U.S. military’s future airborne electronic attack (AEA) architecture.
During the Oct. 30 meeting, the CCJ concept, which calls for installing powerful jamming devices in wingtip pods of B-52 aircraft, was discussed.
“The meeting confirmed the Air Force position to continue with ongoing tech[nical] mat[urity] development/efforts to formally establishing the CCJ as a funded program in its FY ’10 budget and to ensure an informed AEA investment/program strategy for the future,” the SECAF statement reads. “The Air Force looks forward to working with our sister services and OSD in finding the right mix of AEA using the system-of-systems approach.”
The U.S. military has a standing requirement for an airborne capability to disrupt the functioning of an enemy’s long-range surveillance radars from afar so that strike aircraft can enter hostile airspace safely. This would be one piece in the Department of Defense’s next-generation AEA architecture, which will also consist of escort fighter jets carrying jamming pods, air-launched decoys and perhaps penetrating unmanned aircraft with jamming payloads.
To meet the standoff need, the Air Force was pursuing a program called the B-52 Stand Off Jammer (SOJ) that, like the CCJ, would have fitted jamming pods on a portion of the B- 52 fleet. These B-52s would retain their capacity to carry ordance and serve in a strike role.
However, the SOJ program was cancelled in 2005 after its projected costs rose from about $2 billion to $7 billion (Defense Daily, Sept. 27, 2006). The CCJ was then conceived as a streamlined derivative, but the Air Force was unable to win approval from OSD to begin programming for the CCJ in its FY ’09 budget. Instead, the Air Force was instructed to re-examine, together with the Army, Marine Corps and Navy, how best to fill the standoff jamming requirement (Defense Daily, Nov. 9, 2006 and Nov. 16, 2006).
To support the Air Force, Boeing [BA] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] announced last month that they are teaming to offer a low- risk and affordable solution for the CCJ, if the concept moves forward (Defense Daily, Oct. 31).