Ken Miller (00:09):
Welcome to from the Crow's Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations or EMSO. And this is our Special Chief Technology Officer or CTO series, powered by L three Harris. I'm your host, Ken Miller, director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. The CTO series is a deep dive into key technology areas that are driving innovation and the development of cutting edge capabilities in EMSO. In this first season, we look at next generation EW systems to counter evolving threats with speed, agility, and resilience across the electromagnetic spectrum. Over the course of the next six episodes, I will sit down with developers, former operators, and subject matter experts as we try to understand from a more technical perspective than we are able to on our regular show, the role that EMSO plays to ensure mission success in tomorrow's fight. So here in episode one, we are coming to you from L three Harris here in Clifton, New Jersey, and I am pleased to be here with three guests to help us set the stage for the CTO series and discuss the various technical areas that will feature in future episodes. I'd like to jump in and introduce my guests for this episode. I am very pleased to be here with Patrick Creighton, vice President and general Manager of Electronic Warfare at L three Harris. Patrick, thanks for taking time to step into our makeshift podcast studio here at L three. It's great to have you on the show and here to kick off the CTO series.
Patrick Creighton (01:35):
Thanks, Ken. Happy to be here and join the podcast.
Ken Miller (01:38):
I'm also here with Robert Tripp, Raymond Strategy and Business Development lead, and Mr. Paul DeLia, director of Electronic Warfare Strategy and Development, Tripp and Paul, great to meet you in person and thanks for joining me.
Robert "Trip" Raymond (01:51):
Great,
Paul DeLia (01:51):
Thanks Ken. Great to see
Robert "Trip" Raymond (01:53):
You and appreciate you being here. Same here, Ken. Appreciate you having us join the podcast
Ken Miller (01:58):
Now for our listeners trip. And Paul will be regulars with us throughout the series. In each of the episodes, they bring years of experience, firsthand knowledge and subject matter expertise that will be useful as we dive into some very technical topics. They will essentially help me co-host in many of these episodes. As my listeners will attest, I am not a technical expert, so I'm not going to try to play the role of A CTO. So I brought Trip and Paul here to join me and looking forward to their insights. To begin the conversation though, Patrick, again, thanks for joining me. We wanted to have you on the show to kind of help us set the stage for this CTO series and talking about next generation. ew, really appreciate L three Harris supporting this endeavor as we take a deep dive and using the podcast to dive into it. A technical subject area that oftentimes gets missed when we have our regular episodes because we have to keep things at such a high level. So I really appreciate you coming on. Could you help our listeners understand a little bit more about you and where you, because we're coming into the organization, we're here at Clifton, New Jersey, which is the Electronic Warfare Center of Excellence for L three Harris. Tell us a little bit about your journey that brought you here to L three and a little bit about the center of excellence here in Clifton.
Patrick Creighton (03:13):
Sure, absolutely. I've been in the DOD industry on the contractor side for over 21 years. The last two and a half years I've been with L three Harris running our electronic warfare division based out of Clifton, New Jersey. It is our EW center of excellence for the company here. We've been providing electronic warfare products to our customers for over 60 years as a trusted provider of solutions here we provide the knowledge, the technology, the techniques needed to ensure mission success against threats across all domains. Land C air, we have a wide variety of customers across the DOD. Our customers include both domestic and international customers. So really a ton of different products we offer here. We're developing the next generation of electronic warfare solutions to counter threats with speed, agility, and resilience across electronic magnetic spectrum to ensure relevance in tomorrow's fight.
Ken Miller (04:12):
As director of advocacy for Associable Crows, we obviously have been coming at EM SSO from the position that the role that EM SSO plays in mission success. You cannot win the next fight unless you control or dominate the electromagnetic spectrum at a time, place and duration of your choosing when you need to. For decades we've been saying, Hey, EW is essential. It is a centerpiece to everything we do. Can you talk a little bit from a corporate perspective, from an industry perspective, how EW has really come to this forefront and a lot of discussions about innovation and next generation capabilities for the warfighter?
Patrick Creighton (04:48):
Certainly. So in modern warfare, the ability to control or influence the electromagnetic spectrum will really shape the outcome of an event. No longer can we rely on conventional weapons to get the job done. It's becoming increasingly difficult for platforms. The weapons themselves to actually penetrate enemy territory and electronic warfare is going to become the enabler or is really the enabler to allow that to happen. It will provide, the person who can dominate the electronic magnetic spectrum is really going to have both tactical and strategic advantage in shaping the outcome of the event or future near pure conflict. It is important that our systems are agile. We can get capabilities fielded fast, we can adapt. The threats are smart. Now they're changing very rapidly. I think the war on Ukraine is a perfect example of that. What you initially deployed to the battlefield may become less relevant weeks into the conflict and the ability to field, I'll say new threat libraries or modify the weapons capabilities to be effective is critical and the person who can do that faster is going to win.
Ken Miller (06:02):
I want to bring in trip into the conversation here because I know Trip we're set to sit down in the near future here for episode two at afa, which is coming up the annual airspace and cyber conference taking place in National Harbor. So we're going to both be there. We're going to have episode two, which is going to talk a little bit about the threat. So I wanted to kind of focus a little bit on the threat conversation just for a minute because that's going to be coming up in the next episode. And how you mentioned Patrick, the rapidly changing, evolving threat, what you put into the field might be obsolete within six months a year. How do we need to adapt our ability to develop next generation eew to keep pace with this evolving threat?
Paul DeLia (06:44):
Thanks, Ken. Yeah, it's a good question. And first off, I'll fully agree with what Pat said. That the way I kind of look at it based on my career and based on my experience as an operator, it's changed significantly since when I began flying the F 1620 something years ago, where now spectrum dominance really is a prerequisite for dominance in any other domain. And I didn't appreciate that early in my career because I didn't need to, the words that I was involved in spectrum dominance was not, at least in the air side, was not a prerequisite, right? It wasn't a criteria to win against the modern threat that evolves day to day with software-defined capability. They're digital, they're networked. You have to be able to evolve and turn inside of the adversary. So our OODA loop needs to be faster than theirs in the electromagnetic spectrum. So when we bring that to industry and we figure out how do we innovate and build our systems such that they can rapidly evolve and update to be relevant to the battlefield, that's a really interesting balance and a challenge for an industry, not just in L three Harris, but across the industrial base that has for decades built hardware enabled by software. But now as a company, we're having to shift and we are putting a lot of investment in that to be more agile software defined and capable to address that evolving threat.
Ken Miller (08:14):
Yes. So Patrick, talk to us a little bit about that shift that's happening from the hardware box more to the software focus and what that means as we look to develop more multifunction systems, the one box or system that can do multiple things where 20 years ago that wasn't the model we followed. So talk a little bit about your perspective on that shift.
Patrick Creighton (08:38):
Sure. I mean, technology has evolved significantly. I mean it's constantly evolving. So right now all of our electronic warfare systems are going all digital. We have tons of increased processing capability, the ability to add new techniques, new algorithms, new capabilities to our existing boxes in the field rapidly without changing hardware. The question is how do you get those techniques into the boxes quickly? And really you've got to push, I'll say the decision-making further out to the field. I mean, you've got to ingest information from the battle space, pull it back in, make use of tools like AI ML to make quick updates to code and then deploy that back out into the systems within the operational field.
Ken Miller (09:28):
And Paul, I'd like to bring you in on this. Could you talk from a technology perspective, your decades of experience in this field? What are your thoughts on this shift from hardware to software?
Robert "Trip" Raymond (09:40):
Yeah, thanks Ken. I like to make things analogous to what we use in our everyday life. If we look at our iPhones or Android phones that we have, they are essentially software-defined platforms that we continually improve by loading applications on to make them do different things, whether it's a banking application or Waze or some other GPS type of application. And we see that happening within our industry presently. There's a good amount of commercially available hardware that is out there, and that hardware has been influenced largely by the land, mobile, radio or cellular industry. We get to advantage those tens of billions of dollars that is put in by commercial companies and research and development. We get to advantage that hardware and enable it in electromagnetic spectrum operations with our six decades of software capabilities. I mean, at the end of the day, what we are trying to do here is we need to improve our technologies to enable systems to sense, assess, share, and maneuver in a very complex electromagnetic environment.
Ken Miller (10:56):
You mentioned a couple really important technology areas and so here in episode one we want to provide an overview of where we're going to be going. And so I had already mentioned next episode is going to be from a ffa, Tripp and I are going to talk a little bit more about an operator perspective on ew, but we're going to focus on the threat kind of the past present where it's going. So we'll dive into the threat a little bit more, and then we're going to get into the more technology deep dive to talk about what technology we need to combat that threat. And then we're going to be looking at the role that data is playing and then kind of going from there how that's shaping various innovative technologies coming out here that we're trying to get into the field for the war fighter. That's the path that we're going to be going down. But trip I wanted to bring you in
Paul DeLia (11:48):
From my perspective, and I'll just start by saying when I was in uniform and flying with a lot of these systems, I had no appreciation for the complexity and the innovation that goes into the things that we just expect to work when we flip the switch on. That's because I have a really old engineering degree and I never used it, so I just accepted the fact that these things should work and when they didn't work or they weren't upgraded at a rapid enough pace, of course we would all get frustrated. We say, how can we do this? We know what the threat is doing, we need this capability. How come our systems aren't operating at the level that they need that is getting better? And I truly believe that because I think the Department of Defense has messaged the need for rapid software-defined capability pretty well. The question I have really for Pat is how do we navigate that as a company that for 60 years we've been industry leading experts, building the systems that sense and jam, but now as we have to shift to more software defined capability, how do you weigh that sort of innovation with the existing programs that are imperative that we continue to execute?
Patrick Creighton (13:00):
Yeah, so I think really what you're driving at is the speed to deploy capabilities is a big part of that. And I think making sure we understand some requirements upfront and getting something fielded fast is going to be really important. So get that minimum viable product out to the field that provides the war fighter some initial set of capabilities is critical. And then adopting an agile or a type of spiral approach where you can deploy incremental capabilities over time, that's far better than waiting 10 years for the perfect solution to get deployed. I mean, get something out there quick, get something out there in the next few years and then add capabilities as those threats evolve. Nobody has a crystal ball. So it is important we design our solutions to be upgradable capable and supportable over the next 20 years or beyond. And I think Paul also hit on some of that with talking about making use of COTS hardware.
Patrick Creighton (13:59):
The value of COTS hardware here is we are taking advantage of investments that I'll say less traditional players are making in their technology. They have things readily available on the shelf. This drives down overall costs, it drives down time to field. It improves the lifecycle costs by improving our ability to support the product over time, finding alternate solutions in the event of obsolescence. And right now what we've been doing a lot is partnering with industry to develop some of those technologies we need. We're getting involved with helping to shape roadmaps for some of the chip makers five, 10 years out in the future that we plan to ingest into our systems.
Paul DeLia (14:41):
What I think is interesting about a lot of that speed to innovation is part of it is a conversation and an education that goes two ways between industry and the Department of Defense. So on our side, I think at times we could do better at engaging with the war fighter and explaining what the state-of-the-art is what is actually feasible in the near term to rapidly field capability. And then on our side, we need to do a really good job at listening at what is the actual requirement that we need so that we're meeting those demands. Again, going back to my operator perspective, I had a misconception that industry was just sitting on all sorts of innovative capability and they could just create something in their basement like the guy from Iron Man, and it just comes out and it just works. And there are people in this company and other companies that can do that sort of thing, but it requires a really open dialogue and it requires an investment on both sides to make sure that we can meet those milestones and we're going after the right problems together.
Ken Miller (15:48):
We talk a lot about the evolving threat out there, and you mentioned the war in Ukraine, obviously it's Middle East, things are changing rapidly and it's not just simply a matter of, okay, there's a threat, so let's put a response out there. There's the time element and of course there's the cost element. You can't always do things fast and cheap and get them effectively into the field. And I think as the global defense industrial base is facing some challenges of how do you address the notion of cost and time in developing new technologies, next generation capabilities against an evolving threat that is changing every six months a year. So you can't put something out in the field that's obsolete. So what does that mean from an industry perspective in terms of addressing time and cost and how has that pressure changed? What trends has that pressure put onto industry? What industry trends are we following now in response to the cost and time pressures?
Patrick Creighton (16:56):
Yeah, so definitely a lot of cost and time pressures here. I mean, the DOD has tightening budgets. There are less platforms available, so competition's also getting fiercer, which puts more cost pressures on the defense industry. Threats are rapidly evolving, so we generally can't wait until the time of an effort being contracted to readily develop and then deploy a capability to be effective in the battle space. So what that's driving is strategic investment on the company part, anticipating where the business is going, where the threats are going, and then focusing our investments on developing key algorithms that can be deployed across a variety of products, whether it's our biggest and most strategic systems, all the way down to our very small low cost decoys. These techniques, this development is taking place not just within electronic warfare, it's taking place throughout the company and we're able to leverage these technologies, this investment from other groups, other divisions, other segments, other sectors, and ingest that into our product.
Patrick Creighton (18:07):
And likewise, the rest of the business is also able to leverage our investment, our development activities and ingest it into their products as well. This is enabling us to drive down some of the costs of our ecosystem of EW products. It's enabling us to, I'll say, offer off the shelf techniques ready to field, provided there's hardware in place. And then from a hardware perspective, as we start developing or as we have been developing modern hardware, we're very much focused on open architecture, right? Making sure that hardware can support not only our future capabilities, software capabilities, but also some of our competitors, recognizing that the government's looking for best of breed, so we need to make sure we're putting out hardware that's going to be as effective as possible for the future fight.
Paul DeLia (19:02):
One thing I'll maybe tie into what Pat said is we certainly have to invest and be prepared for the future, but we also have to acknowledge that for the next couple of decades we're going to be fighting with some of the hardware and the iron that we have. And as a proud fourth gen fighter pilot, I'll never say it's legacy or old, it's seasoned and proven. And I would say that keeping those older platforms relevant is just as important as being prepared for the threats that evolve and the future hardware and software solutions that are coming up.
Ken Miller (19:39):
Well, and Patrick, I can imagine that's a huge challenge you have. We're not just talking the latest technology out on the field, we're talking about integrating it with, we won't use the word legacy, but obviously you have four, you have previous generations, you have some platforms that have been in the field for decades and they're going to continue to be in the field for decades. How do you continue to upgrade those systems, integrate that with new technologies, software driven systems that have to work effectively and seamlessly? What kind of pressure does that put on the defense industrial base and the innovation coming out of the private sector?
Patrick Creighton (20:20):
Yeah, it's very tricky to do that and requires a very close partnership with our customers. In many cases, we're taking older analog systems and trying to apply digital technologies to them. The customers typically don't have the budget to go fully replace their existing systems, so they're doing that in a pre-planned product improvement kind of fashion. And we need to both deploy, I'll say the new advanced capabilities, but make sure those digital components are also backward compatible to the legacy hardware. I know we said we weren't going to say legacy, but that's the reality. I mean, we have to mix and match modern and pass technologies, which is extremely challenging. It's a lot easier to design from a clean sheet or a clean bill of materials, but that's just not the world we're living in. We talk about keeping platforms relevant for the future, particularly some of the gen four platforms.
Patrick Creighton (21:19):
You look at the F 16 deployed worldwide, we're working a really important program right now for the next generation suite of electronic warfare equipment called Viper Shield for that F 16. Currently, we are a few years into development, crossed a few major milestones just recently and getting ready to conduct some flight testing later this year. We're actually in active production with that program, so we're actually building in parallel with development to reduce the time to field and get that capability out there. It's a lot of challenges. I mean, we're supporting platforms like the B-52 60 ish year old platform, right, with a number of modernization programs taking place in parallel.
Ken Miller (21:59):
That's a really important point about the international collaboration too, because it's when we're talking thread and response, not just A versus B, we have to work with our partners and our partners oftentimes are using the systems, the same systems or the same legacy systems that we're using. So when we're talking upgrading and getting that solution out to the field, that solution has to go to our partners as well because we have to be interoperable with them. And so from an interoperability standpoint, how does interoperability factor into the priorities here at L three Harris in terms of getting the right solution out to the field and working with our partners? Can you talk to us a little bit about that piece of the puzzle of collaborating with our partners overseas, particularly in NATO and other allied partner countries?
Paul DeLia (22:48):
In the end, we are going to fight as a coalition regardless, regardless of what location we have to fight. So it's imperative that we have systems that we understand on both sides and whether or not we in the United States employ the same exact platforms as our partners. Having an understanding of the underlying technology and the capabilities on both sides is really important because that's how you can really coordinate your tactical execution, and that's how you can make decisions as a coalition on where to field certain capabilities. From the industry perspective, I'll hand that off to Pat or to Paul, but I think understanding those requirements from international partners and in coordination with the US government is hugely important because it allows us to make relevant capability that can be upgraded for particular regions and for particular partners to meet their needs.
Robert "Trip" Raymond (23:43):
I just want to jump in on what Tripti just talked about there because with respect to our international partners, we are going to be fighting as a coalition and we're going to be facing essentially the same breadth. And you heard Pat mention earlier, Viper Shield and what we're doing with the B-52 and the continuing developments going on there. Some of the things that we need to pay attention to from the industry side in order to enable those capabilities across the coalition is sort of what we started this podcast with a little bit earlier, is that adaptation of commercial technologies within those systems to enable them and then enabled those commercial technologies with the software. But separately, we also have to keep an eye on the cost knob and what we pay a lot of attention to in the industry is having very little impact to the group A or the wiring in the installation on those platforms. So as you don't impart additional cost and you don't impact logistics adversely for our international partners
Ken Miller (24:46):
In the time we have remaining for our listeners. So throughout the series, as we said, we're going to be addressing a lot of different topics from a lot of different perspectives. I'll be sitting down with Trip at a FA for episode two. We're going to look at specific technology to combat the evolving threat. In episode three, we're going to deep dive into the technical aspects of some of the next generation technologies coming out for the war fighter, and so we'll be looking at it from different perspectives. So Patrick, as kind of the last question here, what are some of the topics, technologies, or perspectives that we really need to be addressing throughout these next five episodes that you think are important if we're going to be successful in making sure that our war fighters have the EW solutions in the field for tomorrow's fight?
Patrick Creighton (25:36):
I think one of the topics that would be really good to discuss is the decoy market and how do we deploy low cost, low swap electronic warfare solutions, decoy solutions to our customers and support a realistic business model around that. Because the way the government procures hardware, it becomes very hard to sell low dollar solutions to them without really having that scale of procurement around it.
Paul DeLia (26:09):
I think that's a good point, and one of the challenges we face is as the department shifts away from platform specific self-protect systems into a more enterprise approach to fielding capability at scale, we need the acquisitions community and the strategies behind those acquisitions to evolve in the same way so that an industry, we know who we can talk to to help develop those requirements at scale. And we understand how they're going to procure that capability and that their budgets and their strategies are informed by what can we actually drive down a cost to for the capability that they really need.
Ken Miller (26:49):
Well, Patrick, it's great to be here in Clifton, New Jersey. Really great to be able to sit down and talk with you about this Chief Technology Officer series that we're embarking on. I really appreciate you taking your time, and I look forward to continuing to engage you throughout in the coming months as we work on this project. So thank you for taking time to join us.
Patrick Creighton (27:08):
Great, Ken, thank you. Enjoyed the conversation
Ken Miller (27:11):
Trip. And Paul, thank you for joining this episode as well. I always appreciate hearing your perspectives and you're going to be here in the next episodes coming up, so I do appreciate you taking time to join us for episode one here today.
Robert "Trip" Raymond (27:24):
Thanks, Ken. Thanks, Ken. My pleasure. Looking forward to finishing out the podcast with you.
Ken Miller (27:29):
Well, that will conclude this episode, episode one of our new Chief Technology Officer series as part of our from the Crows Nest Family of podcast. The CTO series is powered by L three Harris, we appreciate their support. Our next episode will be coming to you from the Air Force Association's Airspace Cyber Conference from National Harbor, Maryland. If you have any questions or feedback for this episode or the CTO series in general, please take a moment to email me at host at from the crows nest.org. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.