JATAS is to be the core of a system that can grow -- as technology and funding allow -- to detect and later retaliate against small arms fire and shoulder-fired rockets as well as surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles.
Digital integration among operational forces in the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force – after generations of talk, but little success – is showing surprisingly vibrant signs of life. A key concept behind JATAS is to better network the information that is collected by a growing package of advanced sensors.
Demand for the missile-detection capability is being accelerated by the heavy volume of automatic small arms fire often encountered in Afghanistan and by the availability on the black market of Russian-built SA-16 Gimlet, SA-18 Grouse and SA-24 Grinch man-portable, air defense missiles.
Because of that changing threat, JATAS has designed-in flexibility that offers a portal for eventual integration of electronic attack and warfare capabilities.
"We really need to work the whole [electro-magnetic] spectrum now, not just because of manpads [man-portable air defense systems]," said Burt Keirstead, BAE Systems' director of Navy programs for survivability solutions.
For the early phases of development, JATAS is to be compatible with the Army's self-defense sensor package -- the ALE-47 countermeasures (chaff and flares) dispensing system. In addition, those expendable countermeasures would be augmented with a device to disable the sensors of attacking guided missiles.
"As a requirement for the program, the Navy would like to evolve to a directable infrared countermeasure [DIRCM] -- a jammer -- which is part of the JATAS interface requirement," Keirstead said. The Army already uses the advanced threat infrared countermeasures (ATIRCM) jamming laser.
The Marine Corps MV-22 tilt rotor troop transport is the lead platform for the JATAS program's engineering and manufacturing development phase that is to start after the final selection of a prime contractor next spring. It is not yet clear when and how the final choice of lead contractor will be made.
The ATK/BAE/Goodrich team's core offering includes a BAE Systems broad-bandwidth, large-memory Common Processor (CP) with open architecture and memory, bandwidth and processing speed reserves for adding future functions to the system.
The Common Processor and IR sensor package are expected to provide the skeleton to hang future advanced capabilities on. "JATAS is a program for demonstrating open architecture," Keirstead says. "You want to add incremental capability without having to go back and rebuild key pieces of core operational software. You want to be able to drop in a new module."