Air combat experts at Lockheed Martin Corp. are helping U.S. military researchers find sustainable ways of designing and upgrading military aircraft avionics that will maintain U.S. superiority in dangerous airspace where pilots risk having their sensors and communications jammed or their aircraft shot down.
Officials of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, awarded a $36.4 million contract late last month to the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics segment in Fort Worth, Texas, for phase 2 of the System of Systems Integration Technology and Experimentation (SoSITE) program.
The Air Force Research Lab awarded the contract on behalf of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., which is sponsoring the SoSITE program.
This initiative seeks to help U.S. combat aircraft designers overcome the problems of long aircraft design cycles and easy access of enemies to advanced technologies that mitigate global air superiority that U.S. forces have maintained since the end of World War II.
The SoSITE program seeks to show that a system-of-systems (SoS) approach can help maintain U.S. air superiority in contested airspace with high risk of enemy electronic jamming, enemy fighters, and surface-to-air missiles.
