The Army on Wednesday detailed its decision to cancel the next planned award for its Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWPMT), citing “evolving requirements and a strategic realignment within the program.”
After recently concluding the first increment of the EWPMT program, with technology developed by RTX [RTX], the Army has said it no longer plans to award a follow-on task order for the effort and instead will focus on a new pilot effort that will look to transition the EW management tool’s capabilities to the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK) framework.
“Transition to the TAK framework is consistent with ongoing efforts to deliver capability at speed by leveraging common technologies across the services with a similar user experience. The TAK user community collaborates across the EW user space and presents opportunities for technology advancement and integration across the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, Special Operations Command and the Joint Communities of Interest,” the Army’s Program Executive Office-Intelligence, Electronic Warfare, and Sensors (PEO IEW&S) said on Tuesday.
RTX had been working over the last several years on the first increment of the EWPMT effort, delivering new software over four capability drops, with the aim to build a new tool that gives soldiers enhanced situational awareness of the electromagnetic spectrum and the ability to improve management of EW operations (Defense Daily, Oct. 30 2019).
The Army had planned a new task award competition for the next increment of EWPMT to be awarded under the RS3 Enterprise contract.
The new approach to next steps for EWPMT will include continuing to prioritize “service specific EWPMT fielding of current capability,” PEO IEW&S noted, while pivoting to building on the TAK framework for further software architecture modernization, which will include collaboration wit the Marine Corps.
“The initial releases of the modernized architecture, EWPMT-X, will be piloted and demonstrated over the next year to gain EW operator feedback,” PEO IEW&S said. “If the pilot effort proves successful, EWPMT-X will replace the current version of EWPMT in fiscal year 2026, ushering in a new era of joint electronic warfare and spectrum management capabilities.”
“This strategic move aims to ensure that EWPMT is a relevant capability at the forefront of emerging operational requirements. The results of the U.S. Army-USMC collaboration on the TAK-X foundation will provide for microservice-based, modular software architecture satisfying Joint and individual Service requirements. It will enable agile development, integration, and ability to rapidly adjust to evolving operational requirements,” the Army added.