Carley Welch
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.
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