RTX business Raytheon has received a $39 million contract from the U.S. Air Force that calls for the development of the service’s battle management command and control software.
Raytheon said Tuesday that, under the contract, it will also integrate the BMC2 software into a prototype air defense capability for U.S. air bases.
The company demonstrated a comparable capability during a 2022 experiment carried out in collaboration with Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
The air defense capability involved the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System defeating cruise missile threats using appropriate countermeasures. A command and control capability called the Battle Space Command and Control Center fed key data from radars to a fire distribution center, which evaluated the threat and assigned the appropriate weapon.
Lessons learned from that experiment will be incorporated into the forthcoming work for the Air Force.
Paul Ferraro, Raytheon’s president of air power, said the prototype will be “ready to meet current threats and has the ability to easily integrate with the best sensors, effectors and algorithms as technology advances”.
