1. ADVANCING DETECTION AND DEFENSE AGAINST OUR NATION’S GREATEST THREATS
Military Radar
9th Annual
February 2016
Experts Weigh inA fully autonomous radar; one that learns from mission-to-mission,
from year-to-year, from conflict-to-conflict. Page 02
Radar Roadmap
Taking Radar to the Next
Level.
Page 05
'Swap'ping Antennas
A Plurality of Challenges.
Page 08

2. Guerci Letter
Join us for the 9th annual Military Radar Summit! As the only
event in the United States that focuses exclusively on Military
Radar, we again will bring together experts and thought leaders
responsible for advancing critical discussion on this narrow
and deep subject.
We have put together some of the most thought provoking
articles and interviews about Military Radar all in one
place. Enjoy this years Military Radar Summit Magazine.
Contents
- Pg. 2 Experts Weigh in on Cognitive Radar
- Pg. 5 Radar Roadmap: Taking Radar to the Next Level
Interview with Dr. Joseph R. Guerci, IEEE Fellow
- Pg. 7 Prioritizing Critical Radar Initiatives
- Pg. 8 'Swap'ping Antennas:A Plurality of Challenges
February 29 - March 02, 2016 - Washington, D.C.
Very Respectfully,
Michael Scheno
Online Content
Manager
IQPC
Dear Military Radar Stakeholder:
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3. Welcome to Military Radar 2016! It’s great to be
back chairing this excellent summit after a brief hiatus in
2015.
Keeping with the successful formula of past
conferences, we have an excellent lineup of speakers,
workshops and exhibitors that span the entire spectrum of
the military radar enterprise. From cutting edge research,
to current customer needs and activities, Military Radar
delivers a one-of-a-kind learning and networking
experience.
These are certainly exciting times in radar. The
continued validity of Moore’s Law has ensured that
modern radars can perform ever more sophisticated real-
time processing and exploitation for the same (or less) cost,
size, weight and power (C-SWAP). This is certainly fortuitous
as there is a burgeoning demand for low C-SWAP radars
for unmanned systems, particularly UAVs. Indeed entirely
new architectures such as cognitive radar are now
possible thanks to advances in high performance
embedded computing (HPEC) and highly flexible digital RF
front-ends—the latter has also enabled new multi-function
RF systems that, for example, can combine radar,
communications, passive radar, ELINT and even electronic
warfare (EW) into a single RF solution! Major breakthroughs
in very low C-SWAP electronically scanned antennas (ESAs)
rounds out the lineup of new advances.
So if you are part of the radar enterprise, be sure to
mark your calendars and attend this event! See you there!
Dr. Joseph R. Guerci
Chairman
Chairman’s Letter

4. Experts Weigh in on Cognitive Radar
A fully autonomous radar; one that learns
from mission-to-mission, from year-to-year,
from conflict-to-conflict. By Rory Jackson
A radar that requires only the slightest changes in software and configuration to go from high-altitude
maritime ISR to performing low altitude Electronic Counter-Countermeasures (ECCM).
This emerging technology was what Professor Clayton Stewart and Doctor Stephen Moore came to
speak on at the Park Plaza Victoria hotel in August for Defence IQ’s Military Radar conference. This year
it was the largest ever, with more than double the expected number of guests in attendance from the
academia, industry, and government.
The day began with Professor Stewart's presentation on the advances and future applications of
Cognitive Radar (CR), a subject he has long worked on with his colleagues at University College
London, and one that he shares with Doctor Stephen Moore from the UK’s Defence Science and
Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in Wiltshire.
A way of the future
The academic world has produced significant literature on CR throughout the years, with perhaps the
earliest example being Simon Haykin’s 2006 paper, ‘Cognitive Radar: a way of the future’. Since then, a
number of technological advances have been achieved towards a true autonomous
radar. Professor Stewart spoke to Defence IQ about the most recent of these
achievements: “I think that there are a lot of enabling technologies for cognitive
radar; Active-Electronically-Scanned Arrays (AESA), for example. Digital
technology is continually improving. So all these enabling technologies keep
getting refined, keep getting better. ”Moore concurred. “Yes, I think I would
agree. Obviously radar’s been going for decades and
hardware limitations stopped us going to certain areas.
But now most hardware limitations are slowly being
removed. So, the flexibility, the ability to try and alter lots
of things on transmit-and-receive, and lots of clever
partitioning and processing, has really helped unlock new
things. “So we’re in the process now of trying to figure out
how to exploit those new things which have now been
unlocked. So I think AESA has been a key part of that.
The way AESA technology has been developed -
it gives you that kind of flexibility, a lot more so
than older generation technology. ”Stewart noted
however, that, “Nobody has really wrapped all
those together and built what I would consider
to be a fully cognitive radar. So we’re still
kind of in the research and development phase of that.”
“I think that the most stressing radar
applications would profit the most
from cognitive radar,”
Dangerous skies
A fully cognitive radar, naturally, would be invaluable. I asked
Professor Stewart for his thoughts on where CR needs the
most immediate application.
“I think that the most stressing radar applications would profit
the most from cognitive radar,” said Professor Stewart.2

5. He posed that airborne intercept and multi-modal strike radars “in particular could profit from the
insertion of cognitive technology.” He added that, “Airborne Early Warning and Control (AWACS) radars
would be another class of radar that could probably profit from the use of cognitive technology.”
Dr. Moore provided the following diagram in his presentation, illustrating the complex operating
environment airborne radars must tackle.
The chart illustrates how aircraft radars increasingly experience difficulties as they draw closer to
zones rife with Anti-Access or Area Denial (AA/AD) systems designed to impede movements and force
operations to be conducted at undesirable distances, or into Congested/Contested (CC) environments
that are either lacking in information or overloaded with radio frequencies.
The 'learning' capabilities of CR technology have the potential to re-configure and optimize a Multi-
Function Radar Frequency System (MFRFS) to deliver highly enhanced performance and survivability in
such environments.
During his briefing, Moore touched on current areas of application. But what does he see as the likely
use in the long term – say, ten or fifteen years from now?
“Some of the work I’m involved with is airborne, naval, and ground-based, and we’ve been trying to do
it across all those domains. You look at naval, and the sort of ‘pushback’ on those charts I showed in the
presentation, where threat systems are trying to move us further and further out; the same is happening
with naval systems as well. They’re increasingly getting longer ranges, more complex systems, lots of
congested environments, so they equally have the same challenge of trying to work in these
environments.”
This claim is supported by the evidence. The news from May earlier this year of Russian submarines spying
on Britain’s Trident developments was commiserating enough. But as oil rigs, fisheries, and shipping lanes
become increasingly congested with refugee boats and rescue vessels, not to mention maritime
construction projects and piracy operations, a more advanced radar could easily mean the difference
between a successful mission and a humanitarian disaster.
“And the same is true for ground-based radars as well,” Moore continued. “Their environment is
getting more complex now. For ground-based radars, it always depends on which way you’re looking at
it. We have both defensive radars and forward-deployed radars. Both need to make sense of that
congested environment, with all different kinds of jamming. Generally speaking, ‘cognitive’ should
apply across all those environments. Perhaps less-so from the ground-based domain at the moment, but
there is still a lot of active interest in the ground-based area as well. I know from talking to some of my
Army colleagues, they are very interested in the cognitive radar… mostly long-range efforts there, but
they are interested in the short range efforts as well.”
“I know from talking to some of my Army colleagues,
they are very interested in the cognitive radar.”
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6. Ongoing concerns
The radar still has many limitations standing in its way. “I think if you look at the evolution of sophisticated
software in radar systems," Stewart explained, "a lot of the things that we've wanted to achieve, like
Automatic Target Recognition (ATR), have been very difficult to implement, and even though the
hardware side has progressed very rapidly, so the processing is there to do it, the algorithms have not
matured nearly as fast as the hardware side.
“So that’s typical of what we see. And the cognitive radar is going to be very software-dependent,
and the software inherently lags hardware development.” For a flexible, rapidly-reprogrammable
radar to lack the right programs to operate is a cause for serious concern: a multi-functional
radar cannot lack multiple required functions.
Moore raised an additional concern about the red tape that CR must
go through, partially as a function of its own nature.
“Any software at all that’s out there has to go through appropriate
clearances; has to be appropriately understood; has to have a clear
understanding in the military mind of what it’s actually going to do.
Which means there’s a certain amount of rigor that goes into it. There’s also a
certain amount of not jumping too quickly. So it has to be an incremental
development process. We don’t want to go to a fully-fledged, autonomous
system, because you’ll lose the trust of the military along that sort of path; so you need to be a bit wary
about how you’re progressing to that fully autonomous system, which is the dream.
“We’re going to learn new things as we go along with these systems, we’ll learn things mission-to-
mission, year-to-year, so we’re going to need to change the software to then optimize the system to
then learn from things we’ve learned. So that ability to do rapid software programming is, again,
something that we need to have the right personnel, the right tools to support that. Again, we also need
to have the right clearance processes to pull that through.”
Once an understanding is achieved and clearance is gained, CR might eventually be changed on
a day-to-day basis to fit whatever mission parameters demand of it. So long as bureaucracy causes no
blockages, the engineers can sort through software architecture and interface controls between
different software modules – hopefully without worrying about the content of these modules, or having
to clear entire pieces of software before a mission can be undertaken.
Moore noted that such routines and operations are already common practice in many
environments outside of the defence world. “There’s still a bit of legacy concern about trying to be too
flexible, too adaptive, and worrying about the safety-critical aspects of software in military platforms,
and worrying about the impact if you get something wrong."
"I think, slowly, we’re starting to learn from the commercial world, and apply that to defence, to try to
get over some of those hurdles.”
Visit:
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7. What are the most
groundbreaking
advancements or
improvements upon the
radars outlined in the
FY14 budget?
Radar Roadmap: Taking
Radar to the Next Level
Dr. Joseph R. Guerci, IEEE
Fellow, has more than 30 years
of experience in advanced
technology research and
development in government,
industrial and academic
settings. He spent seven years
with the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) and is a Warren D.
White Award Recipient. Guerci
is the Chairperson of the
upcoming 9th Annual Military
Radar Summit February 29-
March 2, 2016 in Washington,
D.C.
“Active Electronically Scanned
Arrays (AESAs) continue to gain
a larger and larger share of the
DoD budget, from the Air
Force’s Dismount Detection
Radar (DDR) to the Navy’s Air
and Missile Defense Radar
(AMDR). “
Would you explain for us
how recent advances in
radar front-end hardware
have afforded an
opportunity to reexamine
the design of what and
how radar transmits its
spatio-temporal radio
frequency (RF) signals?
What steps need to be
made in order to
develop multi-functional
radars with expanded
capabilities for all
theatres of war?
operation such as bi- and
multi-static operation and
network connectivity. The
aforementioned
“digitization” of radar front-
ends is one enabler in this
regard. Multi-band and
wideband apertures are
another key emerging
enabler. “
“Increasingly, there is an
emphasis on radars to have
much greater flexibility in their
operating frequencies,
bandwidth, polarization, and
even cooperative modes of
“The continued advent of “digital and solid state front
ends” continues to afford new opportunities for operating
radars in entirely new ways.”
“The continued advent of
“digital and solid state front
ends” continues to afford new
opportunities for operating
radars in entirely new ways.
Coupled with ever increasing
onboard embedded
computing, new advanced
radar modes and architectures
are emerging such as MIMO
and cognitive radar.”
What is the basic MIMO
channel formulation? Is
it standard throughout
existing radars, should it
be integrated into future
radars? If so, what
capabilities would we
need? What is MIMO
radar and what are its
potential benefits?
“Similar to MIMO
communications, which is
gaining popularity in the
commercial wireless
communications, MIMO
radar utilizes spatial
diversity to enhance
performance in various
operating scenarios. In
particular, transmit spatial
diversity can be used to
enhance resolution and
provide better radar
channel estimation.”
By Hannah Hager
5

8. “In very general terms, the
cyber threats to radar are the
same as for other advanced
sensor systems. Modern radars
consist of a plurality of
electronics, embedded
computing, and some level of
network connectivity—all of
which have well documented
threat potentials.”
In what way is radar
susceptible to cyber
threats? If so, how can
radar be protected from
such intrusions?
Please explain recent
advancements in real-time
radar signal processing
and embedded computing.
“Real-time radar signal
processing is benefitting from a
number of advancements
including next gen FPGAs, and
general purpose GPUs (GP
GPUs). These are key enablers
for increasing the “intelligence”
of modern radars. “
What are some enablers
for Low SWAP-C AESA’s
for UAS?
“Continued advances in low
SWAP-C RF electronics powered
in large part by the global
wireless industry is playing a key
role in benefitting low SWAP-C
AESA radars. More recently, RF
metamaterials are allowing for
an entirely new generation of
electronic scanned antennas
that utilize printed circuit board
(PCB) technology, vastly
reducing SWAP-C.”
9th Annual Military Radar Summit
6

9. www.MilitaryRadarSummit.com • 1-800-882-8684 • idga@idga.org
PRIORITIZING CRITICAL RADAR INITIATIVES
EXPANDING CAPABILITIES OF
EXISTING RADAR RESOURCES
VIA MODULAR UPGRADES
• Increasing functionality and processing
power while limiting size
• Designing attachments that advance
older systems with modern capabilities
DEVELOPMENTS IN
MULTI INPUT MULTI
OUTPUT RADAR
• Enhancements in dynamic
range and arbitrary wave
form generators
• Feeding data to a smart
phone based system by
UAV, Ground Robotics,
and movement detectors
ARCTIC CIRCLE
DOMAIN AWARENESS
• Incorporation of ground
radar assets and utilization of
corporate maritime resources
• Expanding range, accuracy,
and detection of trespassing
foreign deployment
MANAGING THE
UNPREDICTABILITY OF THE
IONOSPHERE
• Advancements in algorithms and
technologies that account for ionosphere
behavior
• Developments in understanding the
ionosphere’s interaction with radar
MIGRATING FROM
TRADITIONAL
MANNED SYSTEMS TO
UNMANNED SWARMS
• Developments in small target
detection for land, sea, and air
• Improving UAV payload size,
range, and capability
INTER SECTOR
SPECTRUM
INTEROPERABILITY
• Improvements in
waveforms, data
compression, and
frequencies
• Spectrum sharing
across commercial and
government sectors
COMBATING FOREIGN
CAPABILITIES
• Designing a stealth platform that
is impervious to existing detection
capabilities
• Increasing resiliency against
electronic attack
DETECTING THREATS
ALONG THE NATION’S
BORDERS
• Utilization of LYNX AR and
Predator platforms
• Bringing cutting edge radar
and intelligence capabilities
to maturity
EXPANDING PAYLOAD
CAPABILITIES
• Designing high performance radar
assets that are compatible with next
gen platforms
• Achieving simultaneous electronic
warfare and stealth capabilities
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10. 'Swap'ping Antennas:
A Plurality of Challenges
By Chris Archer
These are amazing times for antennas across the entire military enterprise, from
land, sea, air and space. The continuing advancements of wideband military
communications and networking, to include mobile communications on the
move, continues to spur both demand for, and innovation of, new more capable
antenna systems.
Not to be out done, major
advancements and initiatives are
occurring in all other RF
application domains from high
performance radar, to electronic
warfare and signals intelligence.
Next generation antennas face
big challenges considering
competing criteria. In addition to
ever increasing performance
demands on bandwidth, beam
agility, etc., a premium is placed
on cost effectiveness—particularly
given the current economic
climate and pressures on defense
spending. This is especially true for
antenna applications on the ever
increasingly new set of platforms
such unmanned sea, land and
sea systems (UAS). These platforms
often place a premium on size,
weight, power, and cost (SWAP$).
But nowadays is an exciting time
for antenna research. Next
generation AESAs continue to
yield both greater performance,
with ever reducing price points.
Lower cost AESAs are now
available thanks in part to the
continuing proliferation of wireless
RF componentry and the
concurrent economies of scale.
Whole new applications are now
possible thanks to these
advancements.
Advances in lightweight
conformal antennas for
communications, radar, and RF
sensing are opening up entirely
new application areas and
allowing for enhanced8

11. functionality on an ever-increasing array of platforms, including small unmanned systems. It is becoming
possible to perform missions with smaller more cost effective systems that used to require much larger and
dramatically more expensive platforms.
New wideband and multiband antenna research is yielding far more compact and multifunctional
solutions that allows for the reduction in both the number and size of conventional antennas. If you’ve
ever seen the “antenna farms” on modern naval vessels you can appreciate the impact this area of
research is having on solving this problem.
Finally, metamaterials and related materials research are yielding entirely new antenna paradigms for how
to design and fabricate antennas. We’re only beginning to explore new possible applications. Antennas
of the future will be higher performing, lighter weight, smaller volume, and lower cost.
Military Radar 2016
Participating prime contractors
Register
Online, by Email, Phone, Fax or Mail
Web: www.MilitaryRadarSummit.com
Email: idga@idga.org
Phone: 1-800-882-8684
Fax: 646-378-6025
Mail: IQPC
535 5th Avenue, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10017
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