Electronic Warfare Summit Aimed at Increasing Warfighting Readiness

CRANE, Ind (NNS) -- Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), a Naval Sea Systems Command field activity, hosted its first Electronic Warfare (EW) Technical Exchange Summit in spring 2009.

The summit offered an opportunity to unite cross-disciplinary teams of experts and seek innovative solutions to current threats in EW across air, ground and maritime domains.

"We wanted the summit to focus on fleet threats and merge expertise from a variety of disciplines to develop innovative solutions to those threats," said Tony Haag, director of operations for NSWC Crane's Electronic Warfare/Information Operations (EW/IO) Center.

The summit united more than 70 professionals from NSWC Crane and industry partners. Although NSWC Crane's EW/IO Center hosted the event, experts from NSWC Crane's strategic missions and special missions centers also participated.

Attendees focused their expertise to leverage fresh and relevant intelligence to better understand and defeat current threats.

"Experts teamed up to focus on threats and technologies in every domain," said science and technology intelligence lead for NSWC Crane's EW/IO Center Bill Taylor, who co-coordinated the event. "From improvised explosive devices to threats confronting surface ships, we looked at threats our warfighters face from every angle."

Experts from the Office of Naval Intelligence and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center presented threat briefings related to air-to-air, air-to-surface, anti-ship and airborne threats. Attendees then used the Simplex process, a systematic creative problem solving approach that allows users to approach broad problems in a structured way, to generate more than 300 possible solutions to the threats presented.

"Our experts were able to take broad threats and really look at them in a logical, structured way," said Taylor. "Learning the Simplex process provided a new tool in our tool kit to tackle complex problems."

Several of the solution ideas generated at the Summit will be submitted to various research and pursuit pathways, including the EW functional solutions analysis, to potentially develop ground-breaking technology for the warfighter. Solutions also could be pursued within NSWC Crane's EW/IO Center or the Navy Electronic Warfare Technology Integration Center (NEWTIC), an organization being stood up at the command that will connect professionals from the naval EW enterprise to merge expertise and fund new projects.

"NEWTIC will gather promising ideas generated from these summits and transition them quickly into future projects," said NEWTIC Director Erika White.

The EW Technical Exchange Summit was so successful that both NSWC Crane and NEWTIC plan to periodically host future summits with the intent to expand participation to include other EW experts from other U.S. Navy organizations.

For more news from Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane), visit www.navy.mil/local/crane/.