NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Air Force has received its first EC-37B Compass Call electronic warfare aircraft from contractors BAE Systems and L3Harris, industry officials announced Tuesday.
BAE Systems said in a release that the Air Force will next start combined developmental and operational testing for this Compass Call, the primary of 10 aircraft planned for the Air Force.
The brand new EC-37B fleet will replace Air Combat Command’s decades-old EC-130 aircraft, which the service is now retiring. BAE builds the electronic attack components of the brand new Compass Call in Hudson, Latest Hampshire, and L3Harris integrates that mission-specific hardware right into a Gulfstream G550 business jet at its facility in Waco, Texas.
The Compass Call will conduct quite a lot of electronic warfare missions to jam enemy signals, including communications, radar and navigation systems. BAE said it will include suppressing enemy air defenses by blocking their ability to transmit information between weapon systems and command-and-control networks.
In a roundtable on the Air and Space Force Association’s Air Space and Cyber conference here, ACC Commander Gen. Mark Kelly said the EC-37B’s jamming capabilities will protect friendly ships and aircraft from enemy attack, and permit them to catch up with to their targets.
The EC-37B’s mission and capabilities won’t be wildly different from the EC-130, Kelly said, especially because the Air Force updated the older Compass Call’s capabilities.
However the altitude and speed improvements that can include the EC-37B will make it a substantial step up from its predecessor, Kelly said. The EC-130 has a ceiling of 25,000 feet and may fly at as much as 300 miles per hour. G550s can fly past 40,000 feet and nearly twice that speed, which an L3Harris executive in 2021 said would allow the EC-37B to have the opportunity to focus on a greater range of enemy activities.
The EC-130 is also worn out, Kelly said, and the Air Force needs the EC-37 “yesterday.”
“There comes some extent of every bit of apparatus’s lifespan, we’ve squeezed every last drop of combat capability out of it,” Kelly said.
BAE wouldn’t say exactly what day, and where, the primary latest Compass Call was delivered. The Air Force didn’t immediately reply to a request for more information on the delivery.
Kelly said the EC-37B testing will primarily deal with ensuring the combination of its mission systems is working appropriately, because the Gulfstream air frame it’s built from is understood to be a solid aircraft.
That may include ensuring the brand new Compass Call’s systems are talking to one another at the fitting time, and that its jamming capabilities are functioning and never straining the plane’s environmental systems, Kelly said.
“After we dial up the jamming power, or ask for a particular waveform, that waveform needs to come back out in precisely the quantity of ramp and power and frequency we asked for,” Kelly said.
Kelly said he doesn’t see the Air Force’s planned drone wingmen, or collaborative combat aircraft — a few of which could have the opportunity to conduct electronic warfare operations — as something that might eventually replace the Compass Call.
As an alternative, he said, CCAs will complement the Compass Call fleet, together with the F-35 and F-15EX’s own EW capabilities.
Nonetheless, he warned that the Air Force must be certain that that as these different platforms operate in the identical airspace, that they don’t inadvertently interfere with each other.
“It’s all got to merge together, and so they should operate — and oh, by the way in which, [let’s] make certain they don’t [commit] electronic fratricide on one another,” Kelly said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.