By Geoff Fein
The Navy has approved Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] preliminary design for the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement (SEWIP) Block 2 upgrade program to defend surface combatants from anti-ship cruise missile threats, the company reported.
With preliminary design review (PDR) under its belt, Lockheed Martin is now moving forward for the next milestone, critical design review (CDR), which will take place in the first quarter of 2011, Joe Ottaviano, program director for Lockheed Martin’s SEWIP program, told Defense Daily recently.
Following CDR, the company will deliver two engineering development models (EDM) in late 2012, which will be used for testing, he added. And then, following successful completion of those tests, the effort would move into Low-Rate Initial Production.
“In 2009, the Navy was talking about 149 systems. Every active combatant has a SLQ-32 and, of course, they are building new ships…CVN-78, -79, DDG-1000, which don’t have SLQ- 32 on them,” Ottaviano said.
And there are also more than 200 of Raytheon‘s [RTN] AN/SLQ-32s worldwide and still active, he added.
Under the program, the Navy is pursuing an evolutionary succession of enhancements to its AN/SLQ-32 electronic warfare (EW) system. A series of block upgrades will allow for the incremental addition of new technologies and functional capabilities, Lockheed Martin said in a July 28 statement.
Lockheed Martin is providing a modular solution for Block 2, based on its Integrated Common Electronics Warfare System, demonstrated at sea in 2008. This approach uses commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) electronics and provides the Navy with the latest surface ship EW capabilities, as well as enhanced flexibility to upgrade the technology to address emerging threats, the company said.
“If you think about it, look at the system we designed. One of the things that’s important, you are really getting to the heart of COTS obsolescence management,” Ottaviano said. “It is a challenge no question.”
For Lockheed Martin’s very complex SEWIP, Ottaviano noted there are only seven unique type of interface protocols in the entire system.
“And they are all industry standard based systems. We are talking Ethernet, high speed serial interfaces, all of those interfaces are industry standard,” he added.
The COTS processors the company used in ’08 had gone obsolete, Ottaviano said.
“As part of our obsolescence management program, we actually upgrade to the new COTS processors that met those same interface requirements. It also allows us to have multiple vendors for those parts,” he added. “You reduce a little bit of the risk and also improve your cost affordability point. I think that’s key, not having proprietary custom interfaces throughout the system is really what allows you to manage that obsolescence in an affordable manner.”
What the Navy has done is an outstanding approach to managing this because again technology readiness is something that is extremely important, Ottaviano said. “They are doing this in an incremental series of upgrades. They have laid it out [and] each phase has to be fully open so that it can integrate with the next phase.”
The Navy has what they call product line architecture (PLA), which is absolutely key for the process going forward for these systems,” he added.
PLA used to be called the objective architecture, Ottaviano noted.
“The way the Navy has laid out is plan and it really revolves around the product line architecture. There are upgrades to the combat system, so the combat system can take advantage of the increased situational awareness that systems like [SEWIP Block 2] bring,” he added. “The Navy has done an outstanding job making it [so] we can bring in a new system that taps into this product line architecture. The data is there for anybody and everybody to [use in] the combat system.”
And SEWIP is tied into the enhancements going into Advanced Capability Build 12 and 14, Ottaviano said.
“We are providing a great amount of increased data that is available to the combat system from the previous system, so those changes are coming online to take advantage of those things,” he said. “[This] includes SSDS (Ship Self-Defense system) as well. It’s all about situational awareness.”