Army to develop new modular, interoperable EW kit amid Army Transformation Initiative 

TECHNET AUGUSTA 2025 — The Army is planning to tinker with prototypes of a new electronic warfare kit in the next fiscal year that, if all goes well, eventually will be interoperable with just about any platform across the service, officials said this week.

The idea behind the Modular Mission Payload is that as the Army pursues a dramatic shake-up in the weapons, platforms and software it buys as part of the wider Army Transformation Initiative, the service could use a single capability that can plug-and-play with just about anything.

Col. Scott Shaffer, project manager for EW and cyber within the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, told Breaking Defense that it is still in the early days of development.

“I probably don’t have a lot of information on the production quantities and demand, because part of the prototyping process, which we’re going to dig really deep into next fiscal year, is understanding, how many do we need? And then where do they fit in the formations?” he said during an interview earlier this week.

The Army is expanding the number of soldiers devoted to EW operations, after deciding to establish 18 EW companies across the service’s divisions, said David May, the senior cyber intelligence advisor at the Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence. That could change the calculous on how many EW kits the Army eventually needs.

But one aspect about the MMP that is known, according to Shaffer, is that it needs to be a commercial off the shelf (COTS) or government off the shelf (GOTS) product.

“A heavy lift going into next year is more COTS- or GOTS-based systems, where the challenge is really built into the integration thereof,” Shaffer said. “If we’re only hitting 60 percent of the requirements, that’s okay because we’re at least, we’re getting something out there and and it can be fielded very soon.

“Another thing really good about COTs and GOTS is some of those systems, as long as they conform to some kind of standard in that system, we can easily swap them out with a better and new kit in the future,” he added. 

Despite some similarities, the officials said that the MMP will differ from the Army’s C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS) architecture, which uses a “plug-and-play” model with software cards that are swapped out between platforms depending on the threat environment. Even though the plug-and-play aspect of CMOSS is in line with MMP’s goal, CMOSS isn’t modular enough for this particular program, Gorman said. It’s also just too large for what the Army is looking to do, she added.

“CMOSS has been that primary chassis and [size, weight and power] consideration, [but] we recognize that CMOSS may be too heavy for your lighter weight UAS. It may be too cumbersome, or the power requirements on that AFV [armored fighting vehicle] may be too cumbersome for that CMOSS chassis to be able to integrate,” Gorman said during a panel discussion. “With the modular EW systems, we’re looking at lighter weight chassis, in some cases, dual-use EW sensors. You can do a lot with SDRs [software defined radios], and then what can we modify on software on some of these sensors and effectors on the battlefield to get that modularity that can be integrated in multiple fighting platforms.”

Though the ATI served as somewhat of a catalyst for creating the MMP, Gorman said that the service had already been thinking of ways to stray away from vehicles devoted to EW due to their clunky nature. 

“I think we’re past that point of where you’re going to have a dedicated EW vehicle trying to move across a battlefield, antennas looking like a porcupine,” Gorman said. “We’re really trying to get to a more mission modular payload, because we recognize that electromagnetic warfare is a critical enabler across all warfighting functions.”