The U.S. Air Force expects its F-35, F-22 and other fighter jets to potentially home in on hostile air and ground targets without the need to rely on land-based command-and-control platforms as adversaries develop new technologies designed to attack C2 systems, Warrior Maven reported Monday.
“Airmen of the future will need to get after the mission orders, take their skills and abilities and operate without a lot communication back to central command and control,†Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said at the Air Force Association’s Air War Symposium.
“It is about the Air Force being prepared to fight in the future of warfare,†added Wilson, a 2018 Wash100 recipient.
The service has begun to accelerate work on the Link 16 platform to speed up sharing of threat intelligence, navigational and target data between air-attack systems and reduce dependence on radio communications tools that are vulnerable to jamming.
The Air Force Research Laboratory has collaborated with industry to further develop and test a force-tracking radio frequency technology that works to identify the location of warfighters on the ground without using GPS signals, the report noted.
